Spooks - Series 10 - Episode One

Spooks Series 10

Episode One

Reviewed by Eddie McGuigan

Spooks is back again for what is being billed as it's final series. This makes sense actually, considering the aborted Spooks Code 9 spin off series takes place in 2012, and has a completely different set of characters, including no Sir Harry Pearce. Although, after speaking to former Spooks chief writer Ben Richards, SC9 has been "erased" from canon, so who knows what the future brings.

Series 10 begins with the fall out from series 9 - the Lucas North affair still resonating in the corridors of Whitehall and Sir Harry being hauled over the coals for giving away top secret information - albeit useless information - in exchange for the life of his erstwhile not-quite lover and Section D swiss army knife Ruth Evershed, as well as allowing Lucas to became section head when, in reality, he was a terrorist. All this is put on hold, however, when events further back in Harry's past emerge to haunt not only him, but Britain as a whole.

Britain it seems, straining at the seams of a relationship with the USA, are considering joining forces with Russia, and the face of Russia right now is an old adversary of Harry's cold war days - Sasha Cravik. Not only were these two opposite numbers, but Harry and his CIA colleague had managed to turn Craviks wife into an informer. Not only that, she and Sir Harry had an affair. So the whole deck of cards is threatening to come tumbling down around MI5, and the Home Secretary reinstates Harry to the Grid - a stay of execution, it seems, not a pardon.

Sir Harry finds the grid slightly different. Gone is Beth, thought to be too close to Lucas and South American drug lords, and in comes Calum Reed (Geoffrey Steatfield) as a high flying techie to augment Tariqs role. Running Section D in Harry's absense is Erin Watts (Lara Pulver) whom the Home Secretary insists is kept on to head up the section in the absence of Lucas.

So this episode really sets the ground rules for what looks like being a series of interlinking stories rather than the threat-of-the-week formula, something Spooks goes back and forward from.

So with Harry back in charge and his new team assembled, can he shake hands with the enemy, avoid the machinations of the CIA and avoid any personal involvement with Alice Krige's Elena Gravik? All this, and Ruth too... especially with Harry's cliffhanger revelation.

Spooks is hard not to like. By now, we know to suspend belief, 24-style, in the ways of this pseudo realistic M15. It's a programme not quite set in the real world, with made up Middle Eastern countries, and not one MI5 agent who is in anyway mentally able for the job, but it is engaging, intriguing, polished and classy. In fact, it takes itself a lot more seriously than the premise should really allow.

This first episode is as good as any other, although the revelation won't be hard to guess, and it looks like being another intriguing series, this time very Harry-centric, which is only fair, seeing as it's the last series and Peter Firth is the only remaining cast member.

Ruth's simmering indecision for him is always played well by Nicola Walker, of course, and it's nice to see someone of Alice Krige's standard pouting her way through another femme fatale, but the rest of the team really, for me, are a lot more vanilla than the likes of Tom, Adam and Lucas have been in the past, and new section head Erin is a little too pretty and cold for the job she's been tasked with. Calum, too, is no Malcolm, and as one of Spooks strengths is getting us to care enough about the characters to be shocked when they're put through the mental or physical mill, it might be a stretch in the final series to introduce newbies we just might not get time to care about.

It's good having Spooks back though, and it will be missed when it's gone. Peter Firth carries the command of Sir Harry Pearce with genuine class and ease, and the story looks intriguing enough - global yet personal enough - to hold our interest for its all-too-short six episodes. This series will be all about how it ends. According to SC9 it SHOULD end in a chemical attack that wipes out have of London and kills everyone in the Grid. I'm assured by Ben Richards it won't though. Sort of.