Plot-holes

[BravoNine]

(14-04-2011 12:23 PM)molecatcher Wrote:  I thought it was explained. John got in with a bad crowd, murdered his double, the real Lucas, to escape knowing he'd been interviewed and already accepted into MI5. It's a huge organisaton so it would just be a case of John avoiding those people who initially vetted Lucas.

I'm sorry but it was a flimsy explanation at best.

When your whole central storyline is hinged on a plausible character change this dramatic, you have to explain more clearly than simple few quick gloss-overs. Oh yes they touched on his reasons briefly, but the story was more about "what" he did than "why" or "how" he was doing it, which is just as important as the "what", and maybe if the show was a soap opera, it would be okay, but for a drama that boasts its ability to be realistic, it failed at doing its job.

The real Lucas North had not had his interview yet, his application was accepted, but he was not interviewed, and this is where John/Lucas stepped in and magically sailed through the interview without raising any alerts or having anyone notice that he is not the real Lucas North. No offense, but I don't care how big an organization MI5 may be, am I suppose to believe that they have no database carrying agent pictures before doing interviews? A simple gym in Africa still carries the real Lucas North's IDs yet somehow MI5 can't even find it? And the only explanation (if you can even call it that) of how John/Lucas got into MI5 was just a simple toss-away line of how John/Lucas sailed through the interview, filling in the missing pieces, and because real Lucas had already gone through initial vetting. It was a rather lame attempt at an explanation.

And I don't even want to get into the non-explained issue of what is really going on with John. Did he suffer from mental illness or was he just an evil guy? That wasn't even bothered with by the writers either.

This was in the end, a shock and awe, hell even the writers themselves pretty much admits to it in their own commentaries that they thought this was an intriguing storyline, that they didn't really have to fit in all the explanation because it was cool.

But I suppose if one just watches a show to simply pass time and enjoy, then sure, it doesn't really matter. But as a passionate fan of my shows, I like to be engaged, to feel like the writers aren't treating me like an idiot, and that I get quality on my shows. Needless to say, the Spooks writers this series failed.