Episode 6 Discussion

[Kyle Aaron]

(21-01-2010 03:14 PM)grom_ko Wrote:  But like others here I couldn’t understand Sarah’s behaviour. Killing Lucas would be a consistent decision (not that I would approve it ), but running away? Hm-m-m

I think it was quite consistent with the entire series so far, with its themes and (let's face it) repeated storylines.

I see it like this. We have two basic possibilities.

The first is that she simply holds some measure of affection for Lucas. It doesn't have to be true love - but when you have been physically intimate with someone, it's going to be more difficult to do nasty things to them. For example, lying to them.

We've had these themes with the MI-5 officers for seven seasons now. It began with Tom not telling his girlfriend his real name or that he was an officer. Do we say that Tom did not love her because he deceived her? Of course not. This is the recurring theme of all 8 seasons so far, the clash between the deceit and wary caution of the job and the honesty and straightforwardness required in a normal life.

If we can have this theme with the MI-5 officers, I don't see why we can't have it with a CIA officer.

The relative blankness of Sarah's face can thus be explained not as bad acting from the actress, but as the CIA officer's attempt to hold back her feelings. She is a restrained woman, she has to be. It's not like Ros' face is an open book, either, her most frequent expression is one of grim determination.

At the end Sarah breaks down a bit. When she's saying "Why didn't you just shoot?" she's in tears. If not some kind of affection for Lucas, and regret at the relationship now in tatters, why else the tears?

Remember that an officer of an intelligence agency can be a very lonely person. Only their workmates know what they do for a living, and usually only a few other officers will know all the details of their job. All those times in these stories when some boss says, "You tell no-one else of this," that throws up a barrier between the person and all their workmates.

This is why in these stories they have such madly passionate affairs with all the wrong kinds of people. They're people who are cut off from other people in normal honest relationships, they're searching for some kind of connection.

This theme was also brought up in the episode where Lucas meets his old torturer, and says something like, "for four years I yearned for the beatings because it was my only human contact." That's rather lonely. So the officers are going to have all sorts of crazy love affairs.

Contrast it with the times we've seen Ros's apartment. It's blank and empty. Nobody lives there. In the first season some of the younger officers flatted together and went out drinking together. But Ros has been an officer for decades - and her home is empty. This is what happens to them in these stories, the deceit and bad things they do cut them off from a normal life.

There's also a second possible reason Sarah didn't kill Lucas, which is simply that it'd be pointless. Let's assume she was telling the truth to him in the end. She's infiltrated Nightingale on behalf of the CIA. She killed her boss to protect her infiltration, her cover. When Lewis shows up, she says,

"He's after me - my cover must be blown."

If Nightingale has discovered she's an infiltrator and wants to kill her, the op is over for her. Done, kaput, gone. She might kill for the sake of the mission, but if the mission is over, what's the point?

This I think is also why she asked Lucas to kill Lewis, and afterwards said, "Why didn't you just do what I said? Why didn't you just... Why didn't you just shoot?" I think she was hoping that if an MI-5 officer killed Lewis, she would have some hope of running off and salvaging the mission, persuading her Nightingale contacts that was she on their side. But if she did the killing, that becomes difficult or impossible.

So even if she is a total sociopath with no human feeling whatsoever, there's no point in killing him, and like so many MI-5 officers in the 7 seasons before now, she runs - either to a life in hiding or in some wild attempt to salvage the mission.

It made every bit of sense to me