Oh dear. I did wonder whether Strike Back was going to be my cup of tea, but I really wanted to like it. Admittedly this is mainly because I’ve been missing my regular dose of Richard Armitage since Spooks and Robin Hood finished.
It started promisingly enough, with an Iraq-based sequence which the Radio Times warned “wasn’t for the squeamish.” I don’t know whether they gave their preview DVD to Bambi, but there wasn’t anything particularly squeamish-making about it. It was very tense, however. Porter and his army buddies were faced with a young man with a bomb strapped to him and his finger on the trigger. Apparently the standard procedure in this situation is to shoot the person in the head, which will disable the trigger reflex. Porter, however, took hold of the detonator in the man’s hand and calmly cut the wire to the bomb. The bomber told Porter he owed him his life.
So far so good – there’s obviously more to Porter than your standard macho hero. It was all looking good for the character to be a conflicted type like (by some mysterious coincidence) Lucas in Spooks, or Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood.
Unfortunately as we leapt forward to the present day to find Porter now wearing a comedy wig and with his life in ruins because of his earlier experiences, it all started to get silly. I liked the scenes in MI6 because it was like Spooks (I’m sorry to keep banging on about it, but Strike Back kept reminding me at every turn about what a superior series Spooks is), but my interest waned as soon as they started training Porter back up to match fitness by providing him with some on-prescription sex and sub-Apocalypse Now “preparing for battle” scenes. Because only Porter was qualified to sort out a nasty situation involving a kidnapped journalist.
I’d love to tell you how part one ended, and I’d love to discuss part two (which was on straight afterwards), but I can’t, because I turned off about five minutes from the end of the first installment. That’s how bored I was getting. It’s quite possible it perked up in part two, with all the characters set up and so on, but I was past caring.
I’m just going to have to wait for the next series of Spooks.
Posted by PLA
You should have watched the rest, in my opinion part 2 was superior as its where we really started to see Porter in action. Yes there were some silly / cheesy bits but nothing to put me off from watching it again, and HE looked magnificent (once he got rid of the long hair!)
The hair wasn’t good, was it? I did think part 2 might be better, but by then it was like a book that I’ve started reading and then not picked up again for a few days. I just knew I wasn’t going to stick with it.
Do try again with Ep 2 – it is worth sticking with.
I’ll give it a go!