[spoilers] Sir Harry Pearce - Return of the Jedi (#3)

[nimax1]

(25-10-2011 05:40 PM)A Cousin Wrote:  As I start to pick 10.6 apart (in a good way ), I have been thinking about the following and would like to know what you think.

The code-names Tourmaline and Peregrine. They say a lot, don't they?

Tourmaline is a semi-precious stone that comes in a lot of different colors. Which, of course, turned out to be the case with Elena.

Of course a peregrine is a bird of prey. Turns out Harry was not doing the preying. I wonder if the code-name gave him a false sense of power? And us a false sense of the truth of the matter?

Which leads me to wonder if they were assigned by MI-5 or the KGB? I believe that Sasha mentions finding Harry's MI-5 code-name? Did Ilya have a codename too?

Also, I have been thinking about Harry as the Tragic Hero. (Yeah, that again! ) I have read a couple of mentions of viewers who felt emotionally manipulated by the tragedy of Harry. I did not. At all. In fact, I think that was the point, and a successful one too.

So a couple of questions based on some of Aristotle's ideas in Poetics about what makes a successful tragedy. (Hey! Lookee here - maybe I didn't waste that $40,000 spent on drama school! )

Tragic hero's are supposed to experience anagnorisis, some sort of revelation and/or recognition about human fate and destiny (and the will of the gods in ancient times.) Aristotle quite nicely terms this sort of recognition "a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate." Do you think Harry experienced this and why?

Aristotle mentions that a tragedy should end in catharsis or purification, whether he meant for the character or the viewer is still debated. But most accept that it could be for either or both. I absolutely experienced a catharsis. Did Harry?

Ah Cousin!

Actually, I too am a cousin...and a reader of both Aristotle and Nietzsche on the subject of tragedy being a veteran of numerous classroom hours dealing with the same. This whole series 10 story arc had me thinking of tragedy,[i] the Poetics, The Birth of Tragedy. The Greeks used tragedy as a catharsis for us - They went to the theatre to look at the great man (or woman) - the over the top figure - who was so far away from the life we mortals live - and then they showed us how they always reaped a cruel fate from what they had (usually) unknowingly sowed in the past. Did Harry learn from this? The character, Harry, is trying to survive his own fate, I think. I don't know what he learns from this except that he must go on. One's life must go on - even after tragedy, even after brutal loss. I think that is the point of the trip to the house they might have shared. He wants to give it all up but life, his life, his duty doesn't let him do that.

But, there is no redemption for him because the fates will not let that happen. An inexorable force has acting upon him coming back to him from his own darkness. And in viewing this for Harry we are to try to make sense of our own life through the catharsis. Amazing to me that a television show can do this, but this entire series did it.

All of them, poor Ruth, as well, were spinning to their tragic conclusion, intertwining with the fated tragedies of the persons around them.

The deluded among them, symbolised by Ilya in the tortoise scene with Harry. think they can avoid the fates. Erin thinks she can had a life and "Do this." Even Harry, for a short moment thinks Ruth, "No, you must live there...It would be your crowning achievement." and he, "After this, I am going to stand down.." can avoid it. And in the end none of them can. They are all destroyed by the sins of their past. And the catharsis is for us not for them in the best tradition of the Greeks. You can almost hear the chorus around them.

I, too, have had a catharsis, so much that I have found it hard to think of anything else since Sunday night.

"We were never meant to have those things..." Not in the security services; not in Spooks and maybe not even in life. For me this was the bottom line of the show. I think that Spooks shows us a world in which these people stand on the wall so that the rest of us can have those things. And for me this is why it is fitting that Harry, so sad, so tragic, so brave and stalwart, is left at his desk giving us that last reassurance, "Harry Pearce."