Sunday 16 January 2011

Pity for the Murderer

The last post about the unbelievable behaviour of Maya in "Spooks 9" let a new idea grow in my mind.

Was it the intention of the scriptwriters that we should pity Lucas / John in the end? 

The whole of MI-5 is hunting him down,
Harry is disappointed of him and does not support him (though Lucas / John does not let him. But Harry also does not give the impression that he really wants to help Lucas, he wants to control him, but help him?)
Nobody understands him and Lucas / John stands alone against the whole world.

The only thing is, what did the scriptwriters want to reach with this?

John the murderer was the only one at the end of Spooks 9 who had my sympathies.
Though I must admit, I normally fall for the underdog and would quite naturally try to defend him.
I did not care for Ruth's tears, for the grimaces of Beth and Dimitry which I could not interpret as compassion for Lucas / John
or for the complete absence of remorse which Harry showed.
Harry at the end to me seemed disappointed, that it was not he himself who died and not in the least relieved, that he survived.
Whatever the feelings of the team were, they did not solve anything for me in the end.
Lucas / John / Nobody was gone and did not leave someone to remember him, as all seemed glad that he was gone.
Problem solved, let's see what the next problem will be.

Is this meant for us to read as a criticism of the system, which killed 'our kind and gentle Lucas'?

6 comments:

  1. I usually fall for the underdog as well...

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  2. It was a strange ending(?). The culmination of all those weeks of stress left me drained of emotion and so disgusted with the plot that I was like "meh!" **shrugging shoulders** The Bateman character reversal hardened my heart as well as his.
    I had no sympathy for any of the characters and was just relieved it was over so I could return to the sanity of daily life.
    If this was what the writers' intended, then they are much more diabolical than I ever could have guessed!

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  3. @Avalon
    Thank you for your comment and welcome here!

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  4. @phylly3
    I completely agree with you, it really was a very strange ending of Spooks 9.
    Though I must admit, I at the end still had sympathy for Lucas / John. Nothing of what he did was so completely bad or unforgiveable for me to give up hope for his character. (For the Lucas North murder the scriptwriters in my opinion forgot to give any kind of sensible explanation, so that does not really count for me as bad. Also it was 15 years back and that would have been a very long prison sentence for murder, as in a way John had been imprisoned in Lucas North's character all those years. Murderers normally leave prison a lot earlier than after 15 years.)

    What I begin to suspect is that the scriptwriters had a very wicked sense of humour while writing the script and wanted to play around with our expectations and our concepts of good and bad.

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  5. I hope that there is some reference to Lucas / John in the next series and that they don't pretend that it all never happened. I don't hope for much, just something.

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  6. @kaprekar
    Welcome here and thank you for your comment!
    I absolutely agree with you and also hope that Lucas / John will turn up again in the next series.
    My only fear is that RA will be too busy to film sequences for the next series of Spook and so has to be left out of further episodes. My hope is, that they already pre-filmed sequences, but that would stretch things too far, as not even the scripts are on the table yet.

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