I love Spooks' blend of slick production, fast-paced action and brilliantly lunatic plotting. It's one of the few programmes I'll actively tune in to on the telly.
Check the review out in situ at WWM or read it in full below the fold.
Quite like: Spooks - Series Nine
Spooks is back, and as ever it’s stuffed with shonkily accented goons who want us all dead and the morally ambiguous spies who love us enough to take them down.
For the last three weeks, the BBC’s high-gloss thriller-cum-soap opera has been delighting me with its thrill-packed plots, stylish camerawork and the deliciously deep lake of nonsense the excellent production draws a veil over so well.
If you’ve not been following the new adventures of Sir Harry and co as they save Britain from their achingly modern MI5 Bat Cave, you’re missing out. So far, we’ve had murders, marriage proposals, Somalian pirates sending torpedoes up the Thames to blow up Westminster, an attempted assassination in a golf club, extremely unlikely hiring procedures and someone who seems like to be a Dutch tramp turning up to harass Lucas North, a character with a dodgy past.
All in the first two episodes! Fantastic.
Monday’s installment, the third in the series, continued this fine work. Russian FSB agents brutally murdered a bunch of dissidents from Azakstan while on an op with our spooks – who let one survivor escape, unwittingly allowing him to continue his search for the episode’s McGuffin: a deadly nerve agent called Madeupium or something.
A tense hunt for the WMD ensued, with dastardly double-crosses, surprising deaths and ethically dubious actions aplenty. It was splendid stuff, particularly the final confrontation between the Azakstani target, a particularly shady FSB agent and two of MI5’s finest.
The best bits of Spooks for me, though, are the little moments you don’t notice thanks to the fast pace of the action but find yourself mulling over after the credits. The reason? They’re usually gloriously stupid. Like a kid unable to stop wiggling a loose milk tooth, I can’t leave these bits alone.
How does the Dutch tramp following Lucas always manage to find the perfect doorway to loom out of on a deserted London street? Is the best way to submit your application to work for the secret service really to turn up on a hijacked container ship and shoot a bunch of iffy forrins? How do two old gimmers, a brace of hot 30-somethings and an exposition-spouting foetus with a genius for computers and stating the bleeding obvious manage to foil the plans of various Blofelds every time?
The plot line promising the most brass-necked tomfoolery this season revolves around Lucas and an alter ego those in know refer to as ‘John’. I’m agog to find out more about this charismatically named chap, but what I’d love to know even more is how Lucas got away with this (paraphrased) exchange with the lass he was knocking about with 10 years earlier when he was known as John:
Miss Lady: “Where have you been for 10 years? I thought you were dead!”
Lucas: “I want to tell you everything!”
Miss Lady: “Ok.”
Lucas: “Close your eyes.”
Both: Sexing on the kitchen table
I get a rollicking if I forget to take the bins out, let alone if I’ve faked my own death and then spent eight years in a Russian jail and two years saving the world.
That Lucas is a smooth operator all right.
All that and a Dutch tramp!
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