How did you feel about Season 9?

[A Cousin]

For me and as others have mentioned, the individual episodes worked very well but the over-arcing theme, while ambitious, intriguing and worthwhile (to me anyway), was overshadowed. For me the over-arcing theme was of a philosophical bent as played out through Harry, Ruth and Lucas jointly - in parallel and in conjunction. (I could quote Kierkegaard here - but I can feel the collective eye-rolling, so I won't. Suffice it to say: The Three Stages of Life.) From the first lines of the series out of Ros' mouth: "Don't make a decision you can't live with" through to Lucas' "I am nobody", they attempted to address the issues of how the decisions they have made affects their personal lives, the question of truth and decency, how they lose parts of their selves, I could go on. I think they were reasonably successful in every way except one.

To that thematic end, they "had" to send Lucas on the journey they sent him on - warts and all. The problem was that, even for me, someone who has always thought Lucas was at worst under-developed and at best suspicious from the get-go, the leap of faith was a little too contrived in many ways. So it took over and overshadowed what I thought they were trying to really achieve.

For me, Spooks is at its best when it balances plot and character. The first 6 episodes were great for the most part. The pendulum started to swing off balance in 9.7 but was saved by some great acting. In 9.8 the pendulum swung completely over to the character side.

Filming - nicely done in general. I particularly liked Simon Canton Jones' 9.2 and 9.3 and, despite my misgivings of it, I thought 9.8 was beautifully filmed. The rest of the episodes for me were more standard Spooks filming, well done but not obtrusive or distracting.

Acting - no complaints there. Someone just needs to hand PF, RA and NW their BAFTA's right now. I was happy with all of the secondary characters, except Maya. The guest artists were a cut above, esp. Benedict Wong, Johnathan Aris, Amanda Hale, Donald Sumpter, Paul Freeman, Fiona Glascott, and Trevor Cooper.

Overall, I give it an 8 out of 10 because the main overarching theme played out very successfully with Harry and Ruth, but not so successfully with Lucas, the individual episodes were generally very well done, the actors were brilliant and S9 had me guessing and very emotionally involved up until the last episode.