That was terrible

[innocent_lex]

I just watched the last episode of the current series of Spooks, and it's definitely off my list. No idea if anyone's still watching this, but I'll put the rest behind a cut just in case.

So. Terrible. Spooks has a habit of killing off main characters. It's been doing that since the very beginning, and it's not at all unexpected. What's also not unexpected is for the writers to fall into the character assassination trap before killing off the leads, and I can only assume it's something to do with stopping viewers whining about characters being dead because by the time they're dead the viewers don't care any more. So, character assassination started on Lucas North a while ago, and it ended with him throwing himself off a roof. At least, I think that's what happened - I wasn't really watching in detail by that stage. The writing has been going downhill for a while on this show, but the dramatic contrast between last year when Ros was around and this year is pretty worrying.

I don't know if there are just new writers or if something else has happened, but the whole Lucas-isn't-Lucas story was so fanciful as to be ridiculous. And on top of everything, we had two main male characters facing off against one another, with two female characters being used solely as the male characters' motivation. The women had very little agency (one was held captive, the other was in hiding) and once they did get some agency it was only so one could be fridged (leading to main man one's stupid and suicidal behaviour) and the other could be used as a way to demonstrate some character angle in main man two. That's all they were there for. The other characters were all background in this melodrama, where two men dealt with their wangst and compared their dicks.

Unsurprisingly this is off my list.

Comments

[sg1scribe.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the last two episodes yet, but I was concerned about the quality of the writing once we got into the whole Lucas isn't actually Lucas. The writers seemed to not care about giving us a sensible motivation for his behaviour - any old excuse would do, so I'm not surprised the series ended badly.

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

Motivation isn't high on their list of requirements, I don't think. Though astonishing coincidences that just happen to entwine the characters over the course of years without any of them realising it (except the one bad guy, who got shot when he was done with his task of character-assassin-paid-by-the-writers) apparently are a clear need.

Bad, bad, bad.