Series 9 Episode 8 discussion

[Silktie]

I don't find it so difficult to believe that Lucas/John's good and bad sides have always been there. Just because someone is a criminal/killer, it doesn't mean they don't have a great capacity to love and to be loyal to a group that they see as their "family". There are many examples of terrible people (think Mafia / gang members, who are "bad" but who would rather die than betray their fellow members. I can fanwank that this is what John did all those years in the Russian prison, and why he is willing to risk his life to save other team members once he's back.

I also don't agree with those who want to blame Harry for Lucas' situation. Harry didn't leave Lucas in Russia for eight years just because he couldn't be bothered to get him back. When a country captures a major asset of another country, they're not going to give him up until they're satisfied that they've gotten everything they possibly could from him. It took eight years because the Russians were unwilling to trade him back before then. Ros does tell Lucas in season 7 that Harry sweated blood to get him back. And about Harry's lack of trust in Lucas: when Lucas returns from Russia, Harry tells him that he does trust him, but that that is his mistake. Harry knows that no-one comes back from something like that undamaged, and to just trust Lucas on his say-so would have been a shirking of his responsibility from Harry.

As for his reticence in giving Lucas his full trust and clearance as Section Chief, let's not forget that when Lucas asked for that trust, his main motivation was to get high enough clearance to access Vaughn's files. So neither Lucas or Harry went into that situation with pure motivations.

In the end, it comes down to this for me: Lucas made his own choices - in Dakar, he did not do what he did because someone forced him into it, he did it because it made him feel like somebody. He chose to continue with his fake life in MI5 because it gave him a chance to atone for what he did, perhaps, or because once again, it made him feel like he was somebody. When Vaughn came back into his life, he chose not to come clean. After Maya died, he chose to still give Albany to the Chinese, even though he knew what its horrible potential was.

And I'm not sure when Harry was supposed to have given up Albany to save Lucas? By the time Harry became aware that the whole thing was about Albany, Lucas put in place his plan to kidnap Ruth, and from then on it became a choice between Ruth, who is after all still a loyal MI5 member, and Lucas, who had gone off the deep end by then.