(12-10-2010 04:51 PM)Nitrus Wrote: (12-10-2010 10:18 AM)khananel Wrote: I'm new here and probably amongst the 'older' group of the Spooks viewership. This is in the nature of a very critical review.
I feel that Spooks seems to be heading downhill fast. They replaced Malcolm with Tariq, nice bright kid, but too young to be so 'experienced' with the 'systems' he operates. Even a genius has to have experience... Its like he can take over any IT system in the UK, or the world, at will, and manipulate it instantly and effortlessly. Just too implausible... Or maybe he's a very youthful 35-45...
They got rid of the older lady who turned out to be a traitor. Shame, they didn't replace her with someone from a similar age/experience group, just for balance and plausibility.
The only 'oldies' are Harry and Ruth, both welcome, but both not quite acting as more experienced members of the service. Except for the scenes with Harry and the HS that are very well done.
Now we have Dimitri and Beth who can't be more than mid-20s. Now, did they go through screening? Were they trained up? I only ask this because in Episode 4 everyone seems to act like rank amateurs with the Chinese, and Harry admits as much. 'We were played...' I mean this is the nation's security service not the WI! Everyone now seems too young, too inexperienced, too lovesick and too confused. No wonder the enemies are walking all over them! I yearn for the days of Adam Carter and Roz. And the Lucas thing is so confused. Have they screened him? Is he a double or more agent? Is he effective, psychopathic or merely confused? should he be in the service at all?
And Tariq and his impossibly genius talent for taking over technology at the blink of an eye can't make up for these shortcomings. I mean, that Chinese bomb, so, instead of the whole experience of the Bomb squad and a BDO, we have the new Dimitry, and yes Tariq again doing it all by themselves... Implausiblity gives way to plain disbelief. Its becoming a bit daft or even ridiculous for me.
And they got the new Beth to handle the Chinese guy. In reality (what's that got to do with a good story...?) she would have gone under the wing of a Chinese specialist officer to learn the ropes. I mean the Chinese are know for their inscrutability. You don't put a newbie to handle them, certainly not on her own. Harry should have been dragged over the coals for allowing that. Not a, from Ruth ('oh I forgot the Chinese for...') 'your instincts were wrong this time, better luck next time'. It doesn't make even a little sense any more. And last episode they had the FSB guy in the heart of the Secret Service; why not just make Putin PM of the UKand we'll make the UK a province of the RF like Kaliningrad.
The previous episode, episode 3 was a shambles, so many 'holes' you could drive a coach and horses through. I complained to the BBC about that. In this one they were all merely rank amateurs.
If they carry on like this I may stop watching. A (once great) show going downhill fast. Maybe they are aiming for a younger (perhaps less demanding, finicky, grumpy?) age set. And I may be shot down in flames for my comments here. So be it.
Thank you.
I could not disagree with you more on almost every point you made. It is totally plausible that Tariq can do all of the things he does, it's even probable that he can do it *better* than Malcolm could.
You seem to have a real problem with the age of the cast, for reasons I can't comprehend. As for your comments on the training of Beth & Dimitri, it's pretty clear from the little history we know of them that they are basically trained already. Dimitri would've been trained in counter-intelligence while training for the SBS and Beth has been a private security contractor for years, giving her the experience she needs.
Tariq could be easily any age from 25 to 35 I am 50 but people who I worked for though I was mid 30's
When you have physical access to the system its a lot easier to break in. And I have had to do this (leagaly) for work (I used to work for BT). We where asked to recover some systems to which the passwords had been lost and the third party who developed the system had had a major falling out with the end customer. And I was going to take over and run the system for them (online booking for one of the major cinema chains)
A bit of research and a chat with our reformed phreak and after getting the ok from 2 levels of management and the customer I popped over to there DC stuck in a floppy and grabbed what I needed and set some of our then powerful dual processor machines cracking it.
Took less than 48 hours to get a break (they used a week key) - I had considered setting up the engineering centers sun systems as a distributed cracking farm but that wasn't required.
Something like a EVGA Classified SR2 with the top end xeons on water cooling could probably do it in an afternoon – let alone if you loaded it up with 7 top of the line graphics cards and run the crackers on them.
Though to be honest some of the computer treknobabble isn’t that good any one know if they want a script consultant :-)
BTW nothing I mentioned here is secret I just worked in a standard engineering centre not the secret squirrels. And if I had time and budget I could have got hold of the cool gear which they only sell to approved organisations and could have cracked the systems directly.
And things have moved on the Stuxnet virus only needs to be on a memory stick inserted in the right machine for example.
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