How did you feel about Season 9?

[binkie]

Because it’s always nice to be nice, I choose to begin with a list of things I liked about season 9:

1. The integrity of the principal actors who, called upon to tell a largely poorly executed story as though it actually meant something, did an admirable job and managed to suggest a depth and texture in the work that was almost entirely absent from the logic in the construct (that was a pretty backdoor way of being nice!!)
2. Iain Glenn. Just because I always like Iain Glenn. I would possibly have included him in this list even if he hadn’t been in the show!
3. Benedict Wong, whose performance of a man who wasn’t what he thought he was should really have sufficed as a fill for this theme this season
4. Visually, the whole season was stunning. This show continues to display an outstanding appreciation of the relationship between form and function. There is more than one way to tell the same story, and Spooks has always made good use of signs and symbols
5. I actually did enjoy a lot of the thematic elements of this season, and some of the character work underpinning these was quite brilliant. I particularly liked the extra layers of awkwardness attaching to the fact that Harry places such a substantial portion of his perception of his own humanity in the increasingly uncertain moral certainty of someone else (Ruth) without ever stopping to think what this might mean for her. I do like the flaws in my flawed heroes to be characterised by logic and background detail!

And now, because it would be wrong to pretend they didn’t exist, a list of things I didn’t like about this season:

1. I really wasn’t terribly keen on the John/Lucas thing. Really, really, really not. At all. Even a little bit. I’ll just leave that there...
2. Logic, attention to detail, awareness of provenance, respect for source material and coherent plot/character points are fairly fundamental to a successful narrative. Thematic interest alone, no matter how well placed, is not enough to keep an audience oblivious to faults elsewhere
3. Beth and Dimitri: underwritten and making up the numbers. Absolutely not the fault of the actors, but if they had been part of the body count for this season, I would have been hard pressed to muster any interest in their demise. My problem is not with the characters themselves, but with the way they were so shamelessly used to service a nonsense storyline, which had no interest in them and no real need for them once their weekly plot-device moment had passed
4. For the first time in the history of the show, this season I was annoyed by the Harry/Ruth strand of the narrative. Season 9, for some reason, chose to showcase the fantastically complex relationship between these two people as a sort of frustrated grand romance, complete with uncharacteristic looks-of-longing and twiddly piano music. Again, this was hardly the fault of the actors, but it did stand out – in my opinion - as yet another example of this season’s curious failure satisfactorily to engage with or appreciate its own history

I most emphatically did not love this season of Spooks as a season of Spooks. Individual episodes were brilliant. I really enjoyed ep3 (though I may be in a small minority) and ep4. I thought ep6 was an outstanding example of using the same space to tell a story more than once (Lucas is shown, in his interaction with Danielle, almost entirely in pieces: hands, eyes, mouth. And is shown repeatedly in mirrors/reflections and unwanted encounters. I love this kind of stuff!). But as a piece in the jigsaw of the continuing development of the show, I thought season 9 was disappointing in so many ways I almost don’t know where to begin. I agree with HellsBells that “the writers just went for the WOW factor in a story that didn’t work.” There was a strong, credible, devastating story here that simply wasn’t told because the writers confused surface for substance.

In another post above, conniesachs wonders if enjoyment of seasons 7 and 8 needs to be sacrificed in light of season 9. My conclusion would be that I see no difficulty in doing with season 9 exactly what the season writers did with previous seasons: pick out the things you are prepared to accept and just ignore the rest. If this attitude suffices for the people creating the work, there should be no reason it cannot suffice for the people making use of the work. Respect is a reciprocal relationship, and I am feeling fairly excluded from it at this point.