Spooks: Ros goes to extremes

Ros is suffering badly from the aftermath of Jo’s death. She’s normally hard as nails and cold as ice, but recently she’s been more emotional and extreme, and this culminated last night in a terrifying scene where she extracted information from someone by stringing him up in a disused warehouse and hanging him ever so gently by the neck until he squealed. She was like Bob Hoskins in leather, and I imagine this was the “violent scene” that the BBC were careful to warn us about before the episode began.

Extreme situations call for extreme measures, though, and Ros was acting to save the life of a bank insider who possessed such incendiary information that the world’s best hitmen had been despatched to get him. And if MI5 didn’t get him first, it could all lead to an economic meltdown. “Britain could be a third world country by the weekend,” the Home Secretary told Harry. Well, thanks to Ros that’s not going to happen, so our Christmas shopping plans are safe for now. Sadly the Home Secretary has been set up by some unspecified baddies so that it looks as though he’s been consorting with the Mafia (I bet you were wondering how long it would take for the Mafia to appear), and he’s been forced to resign.

All roads are currently leading to Basel, where something Very Big and Dangerous is brewing. And all roads lead to CIA Sarah, who until the very end of the episode was still Lucas’s girlfriend (this was before she pretended to shoot him and escaped, after admitting that she had been in Basel herself). She isn’t anywhere near as ruthless as Ros, though. She had Lucas on his knees, with a gun at his head, and what did she do? Run away. No imagination, some people.

Waterloo Road: Whore on the door

Waterloo Road has never shied away from the tricky topics (as anyone who remembers Maxine’s baby, Maxine’s drug taking, Maxine’s death and indeed Maxine generally will testify), and last night’s episode dealt with mental illness. Cassie was being bullied – or was she? Pious Kim Campbell thought so, and aided and abetted by Slimy Max Tyler she summoned all the girls for a “no-blame confrontation.” Later on the girls took it upon themselves to have a full-blame confrontation in the playground, which is more the Waterloo Road way. Meanwhile, Cassie was behaving more and more strangely, but Pious Kim failed to notice, until Cassie was discovered cowering in the boiler room in terror trying to get away from the voices in her head. “We should have been on top of mental illness!” Kim raged to Max and Rachel and anyone who would listen.

It’s not as though Kim didn’t have problems of her own, though. Full of happiness because she’s in love with Slimy Max Tyler, she just had to tell someone. So who’s the last person that you’d confide a secret in? Steph Haydock, that’s who. Steph wasted no time in bleating the news to the rest of the staffroom, which of course included Drippy Helen Hopewell, who has history with Max herself. Drippy Helen is so drippy that when she wrote “whore” on Kim’s door, she immediately changed her mind and tried to rub it off – but she’d used permanent marker. Oh, Drippy Helen. Kim thought one of the kids must have done it, but that was the least of her worries anyway, as Rachel had just told her that Max was still married to the lady from the LEA. He tried to worm out of it but Kim wasn’t convinced. Later, Max paid Rachel a visit at her home, and revealed just what a nasty piece of work he really is.

Elsewhere, Tom Clarkson couldn’t look his biological son Josh Stevenson in the eye since he found out that Josh’s mother had conceived via a turkey baster. Rose told Tom that he ought to explain to Josh what was going on, so he turned up at Josh’s home to deliver the line of the night: “You weren’t an accident, Josh – your mother stole my sperm!”