Series 10 - Episode 6 Discussion

[binkie]

So, I'm not going to comment directly or explicitly on the Harry / Ruth factor. I don't want to agitate the wounds of others in this thread (any agitation is entirely unintentional). Also, forgive me if some of what follows seems a bit... small(?): I'm not nitpicking, these are honestly things that stood out to me.

Things I liked:
- The juxtaposition of the man-made green/blue/grey murkiness of the bunker-of-truth-making and the nature-made green/blue/grey endlessness of the shoreline-of-truthful-opportunity. And the subversion (confirmation?) of expectation, or potential, in the outcomes of those temporal and moral locations, because that sort of thing always pleases me, even where the narrative outcome might not necessarily always do the same.
- "Bad people want to kill us."
- "Why do I feel as though I'm part of an audience?"
- Simon Russell Beale, managing to make interactions with a telephone and an answering service seem like genuine interpersonal engagement.
- Ilya proving to be the most honest and self-aware person in the bunker: knowing, without knowing how, that he would always be the one to act because this has always been the character of his context. And not hesitating, thus demonstrating the cost and value of staying alive and relevant in the environment of the life (lives) he has made.

Things I didn't like so much:
- Should I be delighted that Tom's great escape has taken him only as far as contract killing?
- The episode's apparent endorsement of the morally tattered notion that the most compelling way for someone to demonstrate and fulfill their love for one person is to have another person killed.
- The episode's acceptance, in the person of William Towers, that thwarted love (romantic or otherwise) excuses all other wrongs and that it is this - not the threat to national security - which allows the execution of a foreign national.
- Elena proving to be a character no more complex than the standard wicked witch of the woman who sacrifices her child to an extra-maternal purpose. I would have liked to see Harry's final 'opponent' being someone other than a cariacature of fanatical devotion to a cause never properly given context by the character or her background.

I will also say that, given that the show was pretty much inevitably going to use the final episode to kill either Harry or Ruth (and that it was never going to be Harry, because the show cannot lose its commentary on the necessity of existence in the face of loss and the continuity of cause), at least the death of Ruth saved both the character and the narrative from giving service to the tiresome trope of the woman-in-love-with-a-ghost. Certainly Ruth deserved a better fate than that. Whether or not she got it is very much, I realise, a matter of personal interpretation.



Edited, because pronouns are important!