(Series 9, Ep.8) I’ve been on holiday, hence my very belated watching of the series finale (and finale is the proper word here) of Spooks. And now I’ve watched it, I really, really feel like I could do with another holiday. Drained, I am. Wrung out.
If you let the little implausibilities and “why didn’t he just – ? ” questions flutter away on the breeze like a losing lottery ticket, it was the most gripping and tense hour of television I’ve seen for ages. It wasn’t so much the action (though Lucas kidnapping Ruth and attaching her to a drip of anaesthetic that would kill her in 3 hours if Harry didn’t find her first, or Harry gassing Beth and Dmitri so he could steal the real Albany was action of the highest order). What was really gripping was the psychological drama played out between Harry and Lucas, the man he’d placed so much trust in and who’d become the living embodiment of what Harry’s entire career had stood for.
Lucas’s role was brilliantly written and brilliantly played by Richard Armitage – the prison flashbacks, the glimpses of the hell he’d been through made me think, even to the very end, that maybe Lucas had been “programmed” by the Russians, Manchurian Candidate-style, to acquire Albany, and there’d be a way back for him once Harry had got everything sorted out and a spell in MI5’s version of The Priory restored his basic moral decency. Richard Armitage’s performance was complex and subtle. Lucas was no Bond villain set on world domination – all he wanted was some peace, to be with Maya and perhaps deal with some of his demons. The tragedy was that it was never going to be possible, he was too aware of what he’d done and what he was.
Harry Pearce is a man similarly haunted by his life’s experiences, similarly seeking a calm existence with the woman he loves, similarly realising this will never happen. Peter Firth’s lugubrious face and pained eyes were heartbreaking at times, as he felt the full force and loneliness of being where the buck stops.
It maybe wasn’t the best series of Spooks ever, but it was masterful the way the last three episodes built to this shattering conclusion, with Lucas now reduced to a paste after jumping from a high building (I assume, though we never saw a body – maybe that spell in the MI5 Priory is on the cards after all) and Harry’s career possibly at an end after his actions made him almost as rogue an officer as Lucas himself.
Right at the end a little caption came up informing us that Spooks would return in 2011. Two words: Can’t. Wait.
Posted by PLA (more Spooks here)
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