Plot-holes

[HellsBells]

(26-01-2011 01:24 PM)BravoNine Wrote:  And even to this day, I still don't see the use of this briefcase or do I even know what happened to this briefcase after Lucas-is-John was discovered, and why the hell did Vaughn just conveniently kept the briefcase for 15 years.....it was all very silly....

No idea where the suitcase went once Lucas became John. Maybe Vaughn used the suitcase so that Lucas=John would 'rediscover' Maya for himself. I think Vaughn's plan had always included using Maya and therefore Vaughn had to allow Lucas=John to find the picture of her and fall in love with her without him suspecting Vaughn was manipulating the situation between him and Maya, hence the photo in the suitcase.
Why did Vaughn keep the suitcase........maybe Lucas=John told Vaughn of his plan to take over Lucas=Lucas' life on returning to the UK (they did share a long ship journey together from Senegal) and Vaughn just saw a possible opportunity that in some years he would have a MI5 officer whom he could blackmail providing he held on to the suitcase.

[BravoNine]

The magical properties of said suitcase is amazing......I bet the Russians wished they had gotten their hands on that technique earlier instead of wasting 8 years trying to get Lucas/John to do anything...

[WhiteSwan]

(26-01-2011 12:33 PM)binkie Wrote:  

(26-01-2011 12:19 PM)HellsBells Wrote:  Lucas=John said he was trying to earn enough money to return to the UK, how would money help him? Could he buy a fake passport, so why kill Lucas=Lucas? Why didn't he just go to the Embassy say his passport had been stolen and let the embassy staff get him home, that is part of they job after all?

Well, obviously, the reason he couldn't go the embassy is that it wasn't in the script - and that's the worst possible reason for a character in any drama to do, or not do, anything. Too much of the Lucas-is-John storyline relies on this because-it-says-so-in-the-script logic. Were this not the case, we would not need this thread

That's a very good question! It would have been the obvious thing to do!

And why was JB so desperate to get a passport after the explosion? Was he a suspect? But in that case MI6/MI5/the police would have searched for him also in England, which means they probably would have asked his friends and of course Maya if they knew anything about his whereabouts. But quite apparently they didn't (as she didn't seem to know anything about him being in trouble), which means JB can't have been suspected of being involved. And do we know why Vaughn planned to blow up the embassy in the first place? I can't imagine he only did it to give JB the chance to boost his ego - so was he part of any terror organisation? Or did he already work for the Chinese back then? How can it be that on one hand the attack was so well prepared that up to 9.7 no-one had ever been able to find out anything about the people responsible for it - and on the other hand Vaughn hadn't thought of preparing something quite obvious, meaning false passports? Or, in case he already worked for the Chinese - wouldn't it have been very easy for them to obtain something as simple as a false passport? So why was it necessary for JB to kill LN? Other than "because it said so in the script and because we wanted to destroy Lucas' character completely and show that he was rotten to the core and plain evil".
Isn't it amazing how Vaughn was able to cover his tracks so well that he not only wasn't supected of being involved in a terrorist attack, but on top of that he was used by MI5 as an informer (another thing that makes them look very stupid)?

[HellsBells]

I think we just have to assume that Vaughn was a master at manipulation, although that wasn't clear in the writing. As well as being able to manipulate Lucas=John to blow up the embassy, and then later get him to hand over Albany, he also managed to get Maya to fall in love with him.

[Byatil]

It really is laughable... the more everyone posts about it, the more ridiculous it becomes! I just feel like laughing at the absolute stupidity of it all xD

I think the Guardian's "Spooks Blog" (here) sums up a lot of the plot-holes pretty well, I'd just like to quote a couple of things the author Vicky Frost has said about 9.6:

Quote:Who is Lucas North?
Oh, crikey. You'd think, what with being a spy and everything, Lucas would know how blackmail ends. Like normally it doesn't. But when it comes to Vaughn and Maya, he's acting like a first-time internet user confronted with a Nigerian phishing scam – and frankly it doesn't make sense. No matter how much it is hammered home that Lucas loves Maya (not that much, in any case, or he might have remembered her before this series) I'm not sure I quite believe the set-up any more. That Lucas basically let Ortiz die to protect himself, that he was prepared to shoot Malcolm if he needed to, that he just left an extremely precious US asset parked on the drive while he made a housecall. It's ridiculous – even for Spooks. But forgivable, just so long as we don't get any more of that neck-clutching, fuzzy, "noose-tightening" acting. Spare us that at least.

One of the comments on the article:

Quote:When Lucas pretended to feign scepticism at Malcolm handing the file over so readily and then Malcolm lying on the spot with "you were one of three persons Harry said to trust" couldn't possibly have rung true to Lucas as he's just spent 8 or 9 years as a prisoner of the Russians, has he not? And when Lucas returned to active duty there were concerns over security and his mindset and whether he could be trusted, so why did Lucas fall for that lie? As for Malcolm referring to Lucas as 'John' to his mother - not sure what to make of that.

...and the blog post for 9.8:

Quote:Who is Lucas North?
"I'm nothing":
Let's skip straight to the important – and at times somewhat nonsensical – stuff. Lucas/John, having seen off Vaughn, goes on the run. His plan: to sell Albany to the Chinese in exchange for a new life for Maya and himself. I'm presuming that all those shonky, student-drama flashback bits were also meant to suggest that the horror of Russian prison was so great that Lucas couldn't face returning to it and had to escape. Except he wouldn't be returning to a Russian prison surely? Further questions include: why did Lucas still hand over Albany to the Chinese once Maya was dead? Not so he could escape prison and start again, given his decision to not get in the helicopter. Revenge? That seems unlikely - there are limits to Lucas' character. We see that when he tries and fails to shoot Harry.

Talking of which … I found the showdown between Harry and Lucas rather disappointing. The views of London, as ever, were beautiful, but we've already had one rooftop gun-showdown this season, and some of the dialogue was terrible - a criticism you could make of the episode as a whole. After a brilliant script last week, we were back to bonkers amounts of exposition, some awfully hackneyed exchanges and Harry's frankly horrible bit of narration at the very beginning. In their defence, the writers of this final episode did have to do the almost impossible ­– unravel a script that had knotted itself into tangle that could never really be unpicked. But Maya's line to Lucas: "Do you know how I knew it was true? Because for the very first time, you made sense," seemed almost giddily optimistic. He made less sense than ever before.

Plotholes and other distractions:
Where to start? Perhaps with this week's surprise new character, Alec White, presumably being lined up as a spook-with-a-troubled-past replacement for Lucas, or even Harry. Astonishingly, despite Alec's artfully dishevelled flat (one green plastic chair does not a hovel make), apparent alcoholism and need for a fag, it took him about one minute to reinvent himself, kick all his habits and start hanging round Tariq's desk eating apples. Ludicrous. Presumably the lady lolling about on his sofa in her knickers found her own way out.

Other thoughts: How much would Lucas have had to pay the hoodie wearer to dodge armed police? Harry's orders were so unlikely I was waiting for someone to ask him what his favourite opera was; between Lucas' hoarse whispering and Alec's shouty acting it felt like the spooks needed their own individual volume controls; Beth and Dmitri need to go back to spooks school: "Can you smell that? It's stun gas. Let's run towards it!" Also: how did Lucas have access to so many brand new cars, and how long had that handy Land Rover been parked ready for the swap? I was pleased to see Harry had a black leather bag to match his black leather murdering gloves, and that the clothes picked for him fitted perfectly; Lucas North lived a surprisingly short walk from Thames House in what appeared to be an office block.

And most importantly: why didn't anyone actually tell Lucas what Albany was?

Untidy loose ends:
Crikey, there are a few. The marvellous @caitlinb identified the Albany file painting as Turner's Battle of Trafalgar. But why? (On a similar note, why all the pointing up of the Lucas's William Blake book? Am I missing an obvious parallel here?). Aside from trading a (fake) state secret for Ruth's life, what else does Harry have to hide – Towers appeared to suggest there was more to come out. What's happened to Malcolm? Did he really just pop up for two scenes? And is Lucas definitely dead? Odd that everything happened off camera …

Spooks in a nutshell:
"Last week he was our boss, now he's a rogue agent?"
"You should forget about last week"

The blog is hilarious (as well as raising a number of plot-hole issues), I strongly suggest giving it a read

[Saerwen]

As the writers for the last episode are also listed as 1,4,5, & 6 I just wonder they were suffering from short memory recall the jumble of it.

I found one the last scenes where Beth, Dimitri and Alec were standing in the station looking at each other after finding out the bomb was a hoax rather silly, thought they would have rushed back to find out if Harry was ok.

[HellsBells]

I guess Beth, Dimitri and Alec couldn't help Harry so they probably waited at the station, waiting for Ruth to tell them what was going on, although they would have been better placed on the Grid. Once they discovered the bomb was fake why didn't they rush off to intercept Lucas, or had he already jumped by then?
Thanks for that post Byatil. Malcolm's scenes did seem odd to me as while. Malcolm had appeared to be one person who Lucas felt genuine affection for, but it did appear that he was prepared to kill Malcolm for Albany.

[BravoNine]

(27-01-2011 02:40 PM)HellsBells Wrote:  Once they discovered the bomb was fake why didn't they rush off to intercept Lucas, or had he already jumped by then?

Because the director said so....

The director told them that this was designated as "Silent Stoic Upset OMG He Died" moment....so therefore they must all stand there and look pensive and stare.....

(27-01-2011 02:40 PM)HellsBells Wrote:  Malcolm's scenes did seem odd to me as while. Malcolm had appeared to be one person who Lucas felt genuine affection for, but it did appear that he was prepared to kill Malcolm for Albany.

Another relationship butchered by the horrendous writing of Series 9.....

I think even if I come to peace with Series 9, I will never forgive them for ruining all the character backstories and relationships....they butchered Lucas and Harry, now they did it to Lucas and Malcolm......good thing the other team members like Ros and Jo are already dead so they don't have to watch all this fall apart.....

[George]

(23-01-2011 09:13 PM)BravoNine Wrote:  Harry told Beth to search for any match to Lucas North in Dakar since he was surprised to learn that Lucas had been in Dakar around the time of the embassy bombing. Beth found a profile of Lucas North in the files of this sports club in Dakar, she saw the picture was not our Lucas but the signature on the form says Lucas North. That's how she notices that something was not right.

And as an extra plot-hole, for me, how could a small/medium size gym in Dakar decide to keep on file and on the network the digital copy of an application form 15 years old? Were there legal requirements in Senegal regarding keeping that kind of info for more than say 5 years, when even most of real business document life-span is rarely 10-20? Surely if necessary you would keep offline (Tape/CD), as pictures tend to keep more data space than the data they contain.... Sorry for the geekiness...

[Saerwen]

Well thought of George, I don't know what standard of technology Dakar had at the time of the bombing from the scene when Bateman walked through to plant the suitcase the foyer looked pretty rustic to me so to imagine a gym had expensive computer equipment able to generate that such filing programmes is a bit hard to believe and as you say to keep details long term of someone who no longer attends is a bit far fetched.