Five Things I'll Miss About Spooks

Spoiler note: Never seen Spooks?  This piece probably contains very mild spoilers, but no name-specifics about characters who have died during its run.  It does, however, reveal one character who has endured throughout.

Last night, I watched episodes four and five of the current series of Spooks.  I couldn't face watching the sixth.  It was just too much to face.

This is because it is the last Spooks episode ever.

Ever.

This fact pains me.  As much as I understand and appreciate the need for a show to ideally bow out gracefully before it starts making a fool of itself like some ginned-up dancefloor gran, I could go on watching this for years yet.  Even water-treading Spooks would be preferable to most other drama shows.

So what's been so great about Spooks?  Let's hack into my memory banks and exercise covert surveillance...

1) Spooks entices you into a world to which you'd otherwise have no access.  The scarily seductive micro-universe of MI5.  Sure, it's MI5 played for drama, but it's about as much of an authentic feel as you're likely to get, without subsequently being bundled into a black van in the middle of the night and vanishing forever.  It's a relative safe, entertainingly vicarious look into that mind-boggling world via majorly souped-up TV specs.  There's no question however that, at the very least, Kudos have managed to mirror, and sometimes pre-empt, the global climate when it comes to terror, espionage and lurking threat.  Its finger has remained squarely on the pulse, as well as the trigger.

2) Spooks has great characters.  Ingeniously, it makes you care more about these characters by dint of the fact that any of them could die at any moment.  This was established early in Series One, when one character had her hand dunked into a deep fat fryer, followed shortly afterwards by her head.  That was a seriously horrific scene, matched only for intensity during Spooks' entire run by another sequence in Series Five which saw a really likeable Section D character being psychologically terrorised by two thugs before being hung by the neck.  I still think the latter is one of the most disturbing things I've ever witnessed on TV - and despite myself, I love to be disturbed.  How often does drama properly shake you and feel like it's doing something forbidden?  Spooks plays hard, fast and loose with its people, keeping you on the edge at all times.  No-one is safe.

3) Spooks moves fast.  As the producers have noted, the show munches narrative like a nuclear-powered Pac-Man (okay, so I'm paraphrasing).  It's clear that, while assembling each episode's plot, writers have been encouraged to pile in as many shocks and twists as possible.  The show has worked hard to anticipate your expectations, subvert them and then throw the whole thing into a blender roughly ten minutes from the end.  Dear God, that whole bomb plot has been a decoy!  This is actually about feeding the Prime Minister headfirst into a cement mixer while his weeping children watch!  Spooks not only moves fast, but it's jampacked with brain-warping plot goodness.

4) Spooks tempers its brutal ice with heart.  Behind all the explosions, gunfire and nail-biting transferrals of confidential data to USB sticks, the show has always wisely striven to give their agents a personal life.  A recurring thematic question throughout Spooks' run has been how MI5 operatives can balance their work with their often sorry excuses for home lives.  Drama's most likeable characters tend to have one thing in common:  altruism.  That's arguably why the two most evergreen professions in long-running drama are medicine and law enforcement.  Spooks' characters constantly have to value the greater good above their own lives, even if it means losing colleagues who have also become friends.  I'll never forget Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones, the finest of Spooks' square-jawed leads) throwing up into a sink upon hearing a fellow operative getting shot in the head over a comms link, then having to immediately pull himself together in order to deal with the ongoing crisis.

5) Spooks has Sir Harry Pearce.  Section D's quotation-spouting, scotch-sipping monarch has remained the decade's sole constant as horrendous things happen to his agents, whose heads he regularly has to place on chopping blocks for Queen and country.  Peter Firth is consistently astonishing in the role.  He's the master of underplay.  Where other actors might overly wrap their gums around lines, Firth practically whispers them - and his increasingly weathered face always says far more than his mouth.  Harry's also a truly brilliant character.  Never predictable.  A man who relies on his gut instinct and remains steadfast in making impossible decisions while all around is madness.  Most importantly, I think, Harry is never entirely knowable.  We've spent 10 years with the man, but have remained muzzled at just the right distance.  More than close enough to empathise with him, but never enough to work out what makes him tick.  Frighteningly, if Harry turned out to be a Russian spy all along, our hearts would sink with the realisation that we never really, truly knew anything about him.  It would be entirely gutting, but all the more so for its plausibility.  That's a really tough trick to pull off in drama's leading characters, but it's common among its best.  Harry Pearce, The Doctor, Peter Boyd (Waking The Dead), Vic Mackey (The Shield)...

You'll notice that I've been talking about Spooks in the present tense, even though every episode which will ever (presumably) be made is now in the can.  That's because referring to Spooks in the past tense would be almost as painful as hearing the Eleventh Doctor talking about himself that way, in Gareth Roberts' recent and splendidly touching Doctor Who episode Closing Time.  "Those were the days..."

I don't want to employ that past tense.  No, not yet.  The past tense must remain unemployed for a while.

Besides, I first need to muster the gumption to watch that final episode.  

Goodbye, Spooks.  You were the most arresting and dynamic drama series that the BBC ever made without the aid of a blue police box.  I'm so sorry to see you 'go dark'.

What else are you going to miss about Spooks?  What did I miss?  Tell me in the comments below.

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