Out of the mouths of Spooks: Sometimes fiction rings truer than "reality"

"Keep Wes safe. Promise me you will": The death of MI-5's Fiona Carter (Olga Sosnovska) in the arms of husband Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) broke up TV's sexiest couple.

"There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle [against global warming] to be fought. . . . You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required."

-- the British deputy prime minister, in the
Season 5 finale of MI-5 (known to Brits as Spooks)

by Ken

One of our metropolitan NYC public TV stations, Long Island's WLIW (channel 21), has for some time now been rerunning the nifty British spook series called, well, Spooks -- at least in the U.K. Here it's called MI-5, referring of course to the British domestic intelligence service that stands in a vaguely similar relationship to the British global intelligence service MI-6 that our FBI does to our CIA.

"MI-5" USAGE NOTE: It's extremely confusing knowing whether to refer to "MI5" or "MI-5." There doesn't seem much doubt that the standard British usage is "MI5" (and "MI6"), no hyphen, but if you watch the show, it's quite clearly, even defiantly, "MI-5," with hyphen. Of course this title is presumably the work of Americans who carried out the special-for-America retitling of the show -- and, it appears, confronted with a title comprising a mere three characters, couldn't get it spelled right. Ah, that fine American craftsmanship! However, since, as I just wrote, "here it's called MI-5," I feel kind of stuck with that.

Oh, the show disappears for one or two or three Mondays at a time. I seem to recall a period when it vanished for months. But even for those of us who had seen the earlier seasons when they were shown on A&E, it was great to see the shows without commercials and also uncut. (A&E had to trim episodes to squeeze in all those commercials it runs.) And in recent months patience has been rewarded with an entire series' worth of episodes that I for one had never seen.

UPDATE: On consulting the BBC Spooks website, I see that this "new" season is in fact Season 5 and that following it not one, not two, but three more seasons have come and gone in the U.K.! I don't think Seasons 6-8 been shown here yet, at least in the New York area, but am I ever feeling out of the loop! On the bright side, that leaves lots to look forward to.

The shows focuses on the intelligence heroics of the special team working directly under MI-5 head Harry Pearce, played by Peter Firth -- a long way from the days of his youth when he appeared stark nekkid onstage in London and on Broadway in Peter Shaffer's Equus, thereby becoming the only thing remotely worth looking at in that stupefyingly appalling play. However, in (partial) compensation, young Peter has developed into an excellent character actor. (The rarely appearing head of MI-6, by the bye, is none other than Dr. Gregory House. Oh wait, in England he's called Hugh Laurie.)


Peter Firth was still something to look at in Sidney Lumet's 1976 film version of Equus, with Richard Burton as the psychiatrist -- if not quite as young or as beautiful as when he did Peter Shaffer's godawful play onstage in London in 1973 and then in New York.

The rest of the MI-5 cast has turned over a lot, in many cases several times, though it seems to me that tech genius Malcolm (Hugh Simon) has been on the team from the outset, though perhaps not so conspicuously early on. He lost his later-introduced sidekick of several seasons, Colin (Rory MacGregor), at the start of Season 5:


If you go by YouTube clips, you would imagine that MI-5 is one long, mindless series of protracted chase scenes. By way of analogy, The Rockford Files took great pride in its car-chase scenes, which indeed were often quite brilliantly and ingeniously staged, but would you think the brilliance of that show would be reflected if they were yanked out of context and put on display?

One great strength of MI-5/Spooks is that the producers have managed, at least as of Season 5, to keep filling the gaps with watch-worthy characters played by really watchable actors. In this "new" season, Harry's right-hand man is still Adam Carter, played by the breathtakingly beautiful Rupert Penry-Jones, but it has been Adam With a Problem, namely PTSD from the killing-in-action of his spook wife Fiona (a too-brief but dazzling presence, in the person of the radiant Olga Sosnovska, as MI-5's "lead female" spook).

YOUTUBE ALERT: If you want to know more about MI-5/Spooks, I encourage you to stay away from YouTube. What you'll find there seems more or less evenly divided between "action" clips/collages, wildly unrepresentative of a show that is at heart extremely talky, and pointless collages of the posters' favorite characters, set to mind-numbingly hideous songs, made by fans of the show who apparently have way too much time on their hands.

Actually, the diagnosis of PTSD was rendered only in the episode shown this week, which I see from the website was the finale of Season 5. Up till now we've been seeing Adam having a Bad Time of It, with frequent nightmares (they've made abundant and emotional use of the clip of the dying Fiona asking Adam to promise to keep their son Wes, who as of Season 5 is eight, safe) and clearly increased stress. It was a dandy episode, this Season 5 finale, with a scene so tingle-producing that I have to try to share it in some fashion.

The plot revolves around a British government document called Aftermath, which a band of terrorists is trying to force the government to make public, while the government denies up and down that there is such a document. Of course there is, and Harry's team gets hold of it.

We pick up at Thames House, MI-5 headquarters, as Harry reads from the thick bound document to members of his team including Ros (Hermione Norris) and Zaf (Raza Jaffrey). Then the scene changes to the briefing room where Harry and other top officials are meeting with the deputy prime minister (Cheryl Campbell -- sorry I couldn't dig up a more recent photo than the one below), in the absence of the prime minister on a visit to Japan, and the government's chief scientific adviser, Janet Wheeler (Phoebe Nicholls -- remember her as Sebastian and Julia Flyte's youngest sibling, Cordelia, in the 1981 Brideshead Revisited?).

SCENE: Thames House

HARRY PEARCE [reading from a thick bound document\: "Aftermath, a bilateral U.S.-U.K. agreement agreeing to end the fight against global warming and to focus strategy on maximizing economic, military, and political influence in a world devastated by climate change."

ROS: We give up fighting climate change.

ZAF: And focus instead on being the first to take advantage of the consequences.


SCENE: Cabinet Office Briefing Room

HARRY [again reading from the Aftermath document, with occasional reaction shots from the deputy prime minister, who is not pleased]: "Aftermath advocates methodical U.S. and U.K. acquisition of global fossil fuels and other natural resources in the 21st century in anticipation of increasing resource scarcity, oil depletion, and spiraling prices. It advocates sustained military operations to secure natural resource networks. It anticipates a global population reduction of between 20 and 35 percent." This is described as not only an inevitability but a necessity. [Hurls the Aftermath document down the conference table, past the deputy prime minister, to science adviser Wheeler, then instructs her:] Read the final recommendation.

JANET WHEELER [puts on her glasses and reads from the document]: "The proposal recommends implementing a cosmetic series of environmental measures to neutralize green lobbies whilst establishing an international stranglehold on carbon resources in the next 100 years. This will involve the reintroduction of a full nuclear weapons program, to create effective deterrents in an unstable global climate."

HARRY PEARCE: In short, a Cold War scenario for the Environmental Age. [Snapping at the deputy prime minister.] Why did we not know about this?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: That proposal is in the early consultation stage.

JANET WHEELER: Is that why you didn't consult your chief scientist?

HARRY PEARCE: Not to mention military chiefs, intelligence officials. You're making senior establishment figures look like schoolboys.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: The necessity for discretion makes wide consultation impossible.

HARRY PEARCE: And who exactly are you consulting with?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: Aftermath is a "light pencil" proposal that has been through no kind of consultation process. It must never be made public.

JANET WHEELER: Why not? If that's what you're really intending.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: We publish that, and basically we're accepting the deaths of millions of people. If anyone even suspects we believe global warming will deliver this degree of change --

HARRY PEARCE: And you think it will?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER [dismissively]: Of course it will. Everything Janet's been telling us for the last five years tells us it will. [Reaction shot of a horrified JANET WHEELER.] The point is, you can't stop it without destroying our economies. There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle to be fought.

JANET WHEELER: How do you know that?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER [again dismissively]: Oh, come on, Janet, you've been to Kyoto. You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required. If we go it alone, it will cripple us. We'll be the dinosaur of the global economy. We must hold our position.

JANET WHEELER: Then why not come clean, open up the debate?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: And watch confidence shatter? There'd be a global crisis within days. That's when the wars begin.

HARRY PEARCE: It strikes me that if Aftermath is adopted, then the wars will begin anyway.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: This is a direct order from Downing Street. It doesn't leave this room.

Pretty wild fantasy, eh? Especially the part about an American government taking drastic action based on belief in global warming! Ha ha!

Nevertheless, think about it:

"There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle to be fought. . . . You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required."

I have no idea what the chase-scene aficionados do during scenes like this, which are the heart of the show. This episode -- written by David Farr, by the way (surely he deserves to be credited) -- has sure stuck with me!

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