Plot-holes

[binkie]

Not all of these are plot holes exactly. They are, though, all questions arising from, or motivated by, the sudden gear change of season 9. I accept the necessity for a certain amount of hand waving in the case of a heightened-reality narrative like Spooks. However, narrative discrepancy and logical disconnect are nobody’s friend. This is especially true of a retcon. If you’re going to re-tell your story, re-tell it in a way that suggests you were telling it this way from the start.

Dakar

The bombing of the British embassy in Dakar, we are told in explicit terms, is something about which Harry has felt, and continues to feel, anger and frustration. It happened “on his watch”, and was so fiendishly well-devised and well-executed, the culprit continues to elude the massed ranks of British intelligence and law enforcement. Still, we are apparently to conclude that never once, in the fifteen years since the bombing, has Harry (who has certainly had a habit of taking confidential files with him out of the office) so much as glanced at the file maintained by his own agency in relation to this incident. Or perhaps he has glanced often at the file, and it simply has not struck him as in the least bit odd that the Lucas North of gym membership renown is not the Lucas North of little more than ten feet away.

During the establishing scene at the riverside in 9.7, we learn that Harry is, apparently genuinely, oblivious to the fact that Lucas(-is-John) was in Dakar at the time of the bombing. Are we to suppose, then, that Lucas-really-Lucas arrived in Dakar by rowing boat or hang glider, never bothering with passport control, and failing to declare his visit in the application form which so wowed MI5 recruitment that they never bothered to contact him, or vet him further than his own say-so, until the last minute interview which would seal the deal?

If Lucas-really-Lucas is in the MI5 Dakar bombing file based on something as ephemeral as his membership of a local gym, why is (Lucas-is-)John not also in the file based on the fact of his encounter with local law enforcement (confiscation of passport, etc.)?

Did Lucas-really-Lucas and Lucas-is-John have no family or friends with sufficient investment in their wellbeing that their disappearance from the vicinity of a terrorist bombsite motivated a total lack of police interest of any kind?

Vaughan

Does Vaughan maintain a lock-up somewhere, stocked with the former possessions of people he thinks he might encounter more than once?

How long ago did the Chinese approach Vaughan in pursuit of Albany? He has, apparently, had sufficient time to establish the whereabouts of Lucas-is-John and to embark on a relationship with the woman who was the object of Lucas-is-John’s affections 15 years ago. The relationship is of enough value to Vaughan that the Chinese are able to use it as leverage against him in cranking up the Albany timetable. His behaviour towards Maya seems genuinely protective and emotionally vulnerable, particularly in the car and again at the warehouse in 9.7. We are not, it seems, looking at a relationship in its early days. Nevertheless, the Chinese suddenly decide they simply cannot wait a moment longer for a file with no use-by-date. Why? Why must they have Albany now, now, now? Why not six months ago; or six months hence?

What was the point of the pseudo-stroke act? The ‘explanation’ that it was an attempt to elicit some sympathy from someone he evidently and explicitly characterises as being utterly without the capacity for such a thing is the worst kind of because-it-said-so-in-the-script storytelling. Vaughan has to know this was a waste of time and effort because he has to know Lucas-is-John has essentially the same character he had in Dakar. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be open to manipulation by briefcase, and Vaughan would not have bothered to bring the briefcase.

Maya

I really cannot bring myself to comment over much, even in a thread dedicated to plot holes, on a character whose stated aim while at university STUDYING MEDICINE was to open a tapas bar. Just... I don’t even know what to do with that piece of information, or the quality of the writing that put it on the page for poor Laila Rouass to say.

Albany

Albany wouldn’t work. The Chinese should not need to have gone to the lengths they did to obtain it before discovering this for themselves. A cursory look at any basic genetics text would have told them Albany wouldn’t work. There is no basis in DNA for a nerve agent to act in the way Albany purports to do in relation to race-based genetic differences. A nerve agent is a nerve agent is a nerve agent. It will work on all complex organisms – human or other animal – or it will work on none. If any of the Spooks should have realised Albany was a bust, it should have been Ruth. Instead, she (the character, not the actress) responds to Harry’s description of Albany in the manner of a chicken with its head cut off, and starts invoking meaningless and irrelevant examples of recent civil wars, as though there is any difference between a Serb and a Croat at the level of DNA. Annoying hole in script credibility is annoying.

That was a pretty spiffy user interface on the creaky Albany file. Not to mention the pretty spiffy laptop on which it was stored.


Yeah... I have more questions, but these are currently being held ransom to my loss of will in articulating them. Lucas questions are in a separate list which I will post when I have finished the list! This thread was a terrific idea. But it makes me sad that it was necessary, and that there is so much material to add to it.