Plot-holes

[binkie]

[Sigh] So here are some Lucas-is-his-own-plot-hole questions, and even an attempt to resolve some of them. The key word there, obviously, being ‘attempt’. It is getting to the point now where my greatest concern is that the fabled ‘Downfall of Lucas North’ feature on the season 9 DVD is going to establish that Lucas-is-John really was the intention for the character from the start. Given how incoherently it was done, I’m not sure if this is a better thing than the unsuccessful retcon we have generally assumed season 9 to be in respect of this character. Either way, it was an operational failure, and all these questions apply whether Lucas-is-John was a plan or a convenient get-out.

1 – Why did Lucas-is-John not kill Vaughan, as well as Lucas-really-Lucas, in Dakar? If he was opportunistic enough to kill his friend for a passport, he was ruthless enough to realise the foolhardiness of leaving a witness to his every crime.

2 – Does Lucas-is-John really believe that “I was so careful” extends to online and telephone research into the whereabouts of the mother of a former MI5 officer using government secure equipment in a government office? I have, in the recent past, worked for a judicial office of government. Keystrokes were logged, ‘phone calls were monitored, e-mails were filtered through GSI, URLs outside the .gov.uk domain were flagged. I am hardly crouching librarian, hidden traitor, but even I have a better understanding of the concept of ‘careful’ in secreting blatantly illegal activity... in the workplace!!

3 – If we are to conclude, as season 9 wishes us to do, that the reason for Lucas-is-John’s lack of personal effects is he was consciously and intentionally distancing himself from any statement of personality (since he didn’t really have one; or, the one he was using wasn’t really his, and he didn’t know how to express it), what are we to make of the quite plainly personal possessions shown in 7.2? Why does Lucas have a life in a box, but Lucas-is-John has only anonymous interior design kit?

4 – Staying on the ‘consciously and intentionally’ theme: seriously, writers, I mean...seriously, how did Lucas/John work? Is Lucas a performance given consciously by John? Is Lucas a discrete, spontaneously arising, persona, operating independently of John with no knowledge of him and no means of communicating with him? Is Lucas a forgotten survival mechanism, created and controlled by John as a means of keeping himself invisible? Leaving an audience guessing succeeds only up to a point. In the case of a plot development which so radically and completely impacts on literally everything your audience (thinks it) knows in a particular context, some demonstration of function is required. Without it, the discussion of the plot development will – as this very thread illustrates - relate only to the rendition, and not to the reveal.

5 – “I know every inch of your mind”. I have tried to make this mean that Oleg know about Lucas-is-John, but the Russia storyline is rendered a nonsense if this is indeed what we are to accept. I will allow that, if Oleg did know that Lucas-is-John, this would be an extremely valuable piece of information to hold over a former intelligence captive, and that such knowledge would create an extra dimension of vulnerability for the sake of manipulation in what is shown clearly to be an exceptionally complex relationship in its multi-dimensional co-dependency. But the logic of retrospective interpretation is too brittle in too many little ways to bear scrutiny in the terms set out by the narrative, even if it was intended from the outset that Lucas-is-John. As Belle says:

(21-01-2011 09:40 AM)Belle Wrote:  What was the point of sacrificing 8 years of his life, if Lucas wasn't Lucas in the first place?

The punishment-for-some-other-crime defence offered in 9.7 is so utterly dependent upon a clear and consistent narrative pronouncement on the operational quality of Lucas/John that the lack of such a pronouncement - coupled with the pick-and-mix quality of what pronouncement is made - undercuts any attempt to make sense of the Russia element of Lucas’ function in the overall Spooks narrative.

6 – In a related note: if Lucas-is-John is content to endure his treatment in prison as deferred and deserved punishment for Dakar, why does such a crucial element of his human character, almost from the moment we meet him in 7.1, arise from the fracturing of his relationship with Harry, whom he holds almost entirely responsible for the length of his confinement?

7 – While Lucas-really-Lucas presumably, in his awesome and trailblazing application to join MI5, demonstrated ample and impressive aptitude for the job, from where did the ability of Lucas-is-John to fulfil this expectation come? Being able to give appropriate, borrowed answers in an interview setting (of, it has to be said, apparently questionable value) is hardly the same as being able to demonstrate qualities that arise from a morally alien mindset. Lucas-is-John is entirely amoral, acting as a terrorist for the gratification of his ego and killing his friend for the sake of a passport. Lucas, as we see him in seasons 7/8 – and as Harry and Malcolm evidently have seen him before he went to Moscow – is a highly principled, morally courageous man, who struggles to reconcile the conflict of normative morality with the demands of the compromised other-moral nature required of his employment. If Lucas-is-John is a “monster who fell asleep and dreamed he was a hero”, how does normative morality play such a defining, automatic, part in his character? Lucas-is-John would be aware of – and, almost certainly, indifferent to – descriptive morality, but he would have no real appreciation of normative values. He would have found it impossible to be Lucas North, as he was represented in his application. He might have talked like him, but he would have been incapable of thinking like him.

8 – Speaking of aptitude: Lucas-really-Lucas showed extraordinarily lax judgment in his decision to spend his time just prior to an interview with the secret service hanging out in a far-from-friendly or politically-stable nation, and getting high with someone he had known for five minutes on the basis that both men were British and had nothing better to do with their time. How much of a loss to the service are we to take his untimely death to be? And can I just say at this point: I am in no way blaming Lucas-really-Lucas for his own death, or suggesting, in a moment of immoral insanity, that he had it coming

I think this is a sign that I should stop now!