TV episode review: Spooks (2009), season 8 episode 3
A group of filthy rich businessmen and -women called the Bilderberg Bendorf group are kidnapped and held hostage during one of their super-secret meetings. Ros (Hermione Norris) is trapped inside along with them. The anti-establishment group behind it all are staging a live online broadcast and trial to make them pay for crimes against humanity. Guilty or not guilty? Polls are open and by a click of a button, you can decide the outcome.
Oh, and the place is rigged with explosives, so they can’t just rush in at the last minute all cavalry style and save everyone. Not that it stops them from wanting to try, of course.
I wasn’t paying 100% attention to what was going on on screen, but every now and again, it caught my attention anyway and made me look, so well done there. Lucas (Richard Armitage) wasn’t in it an awful lot, unfortunately (maybe that’s why the attention was slipping?), but it was a suspenseful episode nonetheless. I loved his “this isn’t the time” thing to Cauldron on the phone. “Snaaap!” as Alice in The Vicar of Dibley would say.
Maybe I found it interesting because I could sympathise with the baddies to a certain degree. Yes, those bastards should be tried for their crimes against humanity in their ruthless pursuit of money, but unlike the baddies, I just don’t agree with the whole kidnapping and vigilante online trial and killing people.
The ending was a bit … well, when A Certain Something happened, I was thinking “shouldn’t that have gone through, realistically? Oh look, it did. K bai.” So, umm, yeah.
The funniest thing while watching any kind of drama involving computers or “the internets” is when people techno babble, and you KNOW they’ve just gone and made stuff up. I wonder if doctors roll their eyes when they watch medical dramas because the character say things that sound perfectly correct for Joan Public’s ears, but are in fact just made up mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t work or exist in real life, which anyone actually working in the field for real are painfully aware of. Here, it was basically the “will be appearing on your screen now”, because that had me wondering if they were doing some sort of iframe setup with autorefresh or something. But I digress.
Next week’s episode seems like it’ll have a lot of Lucas in it. Hooray!.
P.S. I found four series of Ultimate Force on DVD at a street market vendor in Mansfield last Tuesday. I only got series two, though. That’s the only one of interest. Gee, I wonder why? 😉 He also had a George Gently box, but no mention of Richard Armitage on the back, so I skipped it. Paid £8 for it, and if I had tried getting it from Play, I would’ve saved £1.99. Unfortunately, I just noticed you can get it off either of three Amazon resellers for about £2.20, postage included. For those near £6 I could’ve saved, I could’ve got the one where he’s a doctor! Never make impulse purchases offline unless you’re 100% sure you can’t find it buckets cheaper online, dangit!