Spooks - Series 3

Spooks picks up right where we left off last season. Tom Quinn has been set up for shooting the Chief of the British Defense Staff. Backed into a corner Tom shot the head of the MI5 counter-terrorism department, Harry Pierce. He seemingly swam to his death, but goes undercover to salvage his reputation. Now MI5 is under investigation by this pompous Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Oliver Mace (a guest appearance by Tim McInnerny who we know and love as Percy and Capt. Darling from Blackadder), with the alleged approval of Downing Street to clean up the branch for supporting a rogue officer. Fortunately Harry arrives in time from the hospital before the real bloodletting started. He brings in a charming chap called Adam Carter from MI6 who’s with Danny that they need to prove Tom’s innocence. On his part, Tom has been following Herman Joyce, the man who set him up. Tom shoots him and drops his dead body in front of Thames House (MI5 HQ). As Joyce was supposed to have died five years ago, the team realize Tom was right that Joyce had set him up. Mace pressures CIA liaison Christine Dale to meet with Tom. Christine is wired when Tom tells her Danny and Zoe will pick up Joyce’s wife Carmen (who doesn’t yet know her husband has been killed) at her hotel. Mace’s goons are all over the hotel, forcing Zoe and Adam to cause a distraction, but Carmen walks away. They track her to the safe house where she believes she will meet Herman. Instead Adam knocks on the door and not only talks her into confessing they set up Tom and why, or why they chose the target, but also into committing suicide. Tom’s name has been cleared!

This season the MI5 team’s operations include recruiting a noble-price winning chemist to lure terrorists who are trying to create an atomic bomb; protecting a controversial novelist living under a fatwa, who is friends with a Pakistani double agent; the kidnapping and subsequent killing of the U.N. Chief Negotiator in Middle East Peace Talks; the assassination of a scientist selling biochemical information to North Korea; the murder of a Turkish Mafioso running financial operations for al-Qaida; threats of computer hacking that poisons medicines, wipes bank accounts, ans disrupts traffic lights; the kidnapping of a celebrity couple’s baby, which according to Mace is so high-profile it’s an issue of national security; a mercenary who stole a laser target missile designator set to bomb a target in London; and Iraqi extremists plotting to kill the Prime Minister.

Even more so than before, this season delves deep into the characters and their interpersonal relations. Because Christine is in love with Tom, she was deeply distraught when she was forced to reveal his plan setting up Joyce’s wife. Tom feels deeply betrayed – even after she admits she couldn’t stand the strain and resigned from the forces. While he’s himself questioning the morality of MI5’s work, Tom’s colleagues are worried about his emotional stability. They find he’s having a crisis of conscience, which undermines his authority. When he demands they abandon an operation to save a man’s family life, Harry has him decommissioned. Nonetheless, like Tom, others, too, get personally involved in operations. Harry himself was deeply troubled when he feared his daughter Catherine was involved with extremist Israelis. On her part, Zoe catches a photographer on one of her stake-outs, who flirts with her so hard, she can’t resist. Two episodes later he already asks her to marry him. But then his brother steals a photo and takes it to some newspaper, telling them that his brother is engaged to a spy. With everything based on the trust that he would never tell anyone, Zoe has to break it off. Zoe’s later charged with conspiring to murder Turkish Mafioso Celenk and in the process causing the death of a British undercover police officer. Evading ten years imprisonment, she has to leave for Chile.

Adam (an excellent addition to the cast) becomes emotionally involved and distressed when a close friend is murdered. Adam’s wife Fiona at first also works at MI6 (the British foreign intelligence service). He finds it increasingly difficult to maintain a regular family life. But when she is recruited at MI5, she becomes a target for Iraqi extremists who hold her hostage. Adam then has to make every effort to save her life. After Danny witnesses the assassination of one of his charges, he understands better what Tom did, quitting while he was still ahead. While tailing Harry’s daughter Catherine, he has a fling with her and resents it when he has to break his cover. His unrequited feelings for Zoe, moreover, make him unreliable at work, and he becomes bitter after she is forced into exile. In the final episode, he is killed by an Iraqi extremist! During her surveillance work, Ruth has been listening in on conversations of a man who seems perfect for her, but when she meets him he doesn’t ask her out again. When a computer expert from the Government Communications Headquarter invites her over, she realizes he’s none other than the computer hacker responsible for the chaos he was supposed to help them solve. That shady JIC chairman, Oliver Mace, continues his efforts to thwart MI5’s operations as best as he can – except that the team keeps outsmarting Mace. With such human depth, intelligent and fast plot twists, and tense action scenes, I find this show thoroughly engrossing. (I just don’t recall there were as many extreme close-ups in the previous seasons.) I can warmly recommend the show.