Plot-holes

[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