[spoilers] Lucas. Just Lucas.

[binkie]

I’ve been threatening to post in this thread for a while, so here goes. This is in partial response to points raised by Byatil and Belle in the ‘How did you feel about season 9?’ thread. I will probably return to their observations in another (hopefully shorter) post, as they have significance for the story of Lucas across seasons 7 and 8. In this post, though, I want to set out some parameters of the importance of the portrayal of the character on his first appearance. I will not be making any effort to interleave the content of season 9 into any observation I make. Apart from anything else, it would become very boring for me to have to keep writing (and for you to have to keep reading) disclaimers as to the irreconcilable nature of the character treatments between seasons 7/8 and season 9. Suffice it to say, there is no John in the Lucas I am describing. Some people may wish to leave now!

I have to begin with an apology, because I distinctly recall reading a discussion on this forum about the scene in 7.1 between Harry and Lucas in the washroom. I have just spent an hour searching for that discussion and cannot find it again. So, I’m sorry if anybody reading this is thinking, “Didn’t I say this already?” Yes, you probably did!

I have said before that criticism of, or indifference towards, Richard Armitage’s performance in this part surprises me. To me, this seems an extraordinarily subtle rendering of a character who could so easily have been set aside in a box labelled “PTSD for television”, but was instead imbued with a complex inner life, and an understated means of expression, that underlined the dramatic bravery of the decision to feature in a prime time high-concept production someone whose recent life experiences are so unfamiliar – so utterly inconceivable – to the vast majority of the audience. Spooks, in deciding on a period of detention for Lucas of eight years did a genuinely remarkable thing. Eight years is a long time in a human life. At the time of his release (assuming Lucas to be about the same age as Richard Armitage), it would have amounted to approximately one fifth of the character’s life to date. This is not a detail to be ridden over. Two years, even four or five, might have been more comprehensible – more readily acceptable – to viewers’ sensibilities of bounded time. Eight years sounds dangerously close to a decade. This is a different kind of chronological limit, the kind that measures passages, rather than moments, of time. Lucas has been markedly absent from the context to which he is being returned. We need to feel that absence, and the effects of that absence, in the character’s suddenly-restored presence, and Armitage makes sure we do.

The first time we see Lucas, we do not even know his name. This is a fundamental kind of absence in itself. He is anonymous, even as he is present at his own return to life, deaf and blind under a hood, invisible like a mourner at a funeral. He resists removal from the car, and struggles against the efforts of others to orient him in a scene to which he is oblivious. When the hood is removed, he hesitates in the beam of headlights before focusing on what is in front of him. We actually see his vision coming into focus; we see him seeing; we see him begin to comprehend. We hear him take a breath that is almost tangibly a substitute for speech (this will be so important for the character in later episodes). We see him unclench a fist and reach out to the other car, almost as though, if he can touch it, it will be real. We have to wonder how often he has had this dream. All these moments and gestures are so little and real, so terribly affecting in their quality of unconscious rendition. Everything about Lucas’ response to this new reality communicates his reluctance to accept it as reality and, at the same time, his refusal to inhabit this moment as yet another dream.

This clever duality of purpose is present in Armitage’s performance throughout this episode. It is there in the way he sits, slumped in the back seat of the car, exhausted and defeated, but with his eyes fixed on the world moving past the window, keeping it real and in focus. It is there in the way he greets the people he meets on this strange night with such childlike politeness and deference, looking directly at each person, committing their faces to memory, so that if this is a dream, at least there will be something he can take from it. It is there in the way he takes his cue from Connie that his renewed presence – proving the previous absence – is difficult for others to accommodate, so he must act on their awkwardness: “...they have mattresses and everything.” It is there in the way he drops his gaze when Adam mentions a day spent “in the boot of a car”, in the way he radiates the humiliation of his impotency in that recent moment, and in the way he rallies almost immediately to the defence of his own ability to contribute. He is determined to be right in remembering that he once had value in this place.

It is in the washroom scene, though, that we begin fully to appreciate what absence means – and has meant – to both Lucas and Harry. I have watched this scene so many times, and never fail to be moved by it. I think it is the quietness of it, the minute sadness of it, that makes it so memorable. I know that a proper analysis of this scene belongs in the Harry and Lucas thread, but I will try to maintain attention on Lucas for the sake of this post. Here we see for the second time in this episode Lucas’ qualities as a quick learner. He steps into the silence left by Harry’s awkwardness over the starkly alien tattooing, and the reason for its existence. His clumsy, half-remembered, effort at small talk – asking about Tom Quinn - is only a brief deflection from his next question: “How did you get me back, Harry?” This feels like an early test of Harry’s sense of any responsibility for what happened eight years before. What Lucas really wants is an explanation, a justification, a sense of Harry’s awareness of his part in the awful absence of the last eight years. Everything about this question, the way it is asked, the tone of voice, the way Lucas turns to face Harry in this moment, is a component of the question Lucas really wants to ask: “Why did you leave me there?” Harry, though, isn’t going to play that game, and moves to stop Lucas taking the next turn in it.

Lucas’ response to Harry’s practiced introduction of pastoral care underlines the terrible vulnerability of a man so newly restored to life. Armitage communicates so completely and so delicately the rawness and uncertainty and desperate isolation of Lucas in his own life in this moment. The bitterness and contempt with which he utters the line: “Welcome home to a safe house with a stained mattress and nylon sheets”, gives way at once to an almost delirious attempt at a kind of gallows humour about the only TV show he can imagine might still be doing the rounds after all this time. From here, Lucas tries to take back control of this opportunity to do something, to mean something. He asks directly, confrontationally: “Where do I go, Harry? What am I supposed to do when I get there?” But the demand very quickly becomes a plea as Lucas’ vocal tone and facial expression transition to communicate the unbearable dilemma of someone who is so alienated from his own capacity for self-determination that he cannot leave a conversation without receiving an instruction. Lucas is both full of need and entirely empty of autonomy as he concludes: “Just tell me, and I’ll go and I’ll do it.” Then Harry makes him real again by giving him temporary security clearance, and he returns to himself, trying to re-establish a connection to the world by asking after his ex-wife. Harry, of course, will have no part in the effort, departing the room with what he presumably imagines to be a reassurance: “You were missed.” Lucas stands in the middle of the floor, alone in the room, opening and closing his fists, shouting silently after Harry: “You left me there...” It is an extraordinary portrayal of a simultaneous sense of desolate abandonment and an inexpressible need to reverse an absence he himself barely understands.

The next few hours continue for Lucas under the same dream logic of the exchange at Bexley. He is given a coat, proof of the reality of the world, and he keeps it on because he is tired and cold even in this dream. He walks into the bedroom of a sleeping terrorist and his wife and plays ‘catch’ with a mobile ‘phone, because there is no reason a person in a dream would not do such a thing. He speaks Russian to an electrician from Walthamstow, cold cocks a would-be executioner and chases after a tiny female bomber. Then the dream ends: “Adam Carter is dead.” When next we see Lucas, we learn that, not only has he not yet woken from this dream, he has yet to sleep at all in this strange new world.

This is the beginning of the story to which we will now never know the end. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?