TV episode review: Spooks (2009), season 8 episode 7

The penultimate episode of this series! I’ve had the DVR faithfully record each and every episode off Freeview, so I can put them on DVD discs and swoon whenever I like. And now my plans are FOILED! BAH! Ten minutes in, something went amiss with the Freeview signal and the audio dropped. 50 minutes of silent movie. Not one to keep for posterity and a bit hard to try and lip-read my way through it. Ended up watching the rest over BBC iPlayer, which is a marvellous invention for just this type of emergency!

A Hindu extremist group are wanting to blow up Muslims for religious and historical reasons. The group is led by a handsome guy kind of reminiscent of Sayid in Lost, whose little sister landed in hospital after being brutally assaulted by a group of Muslim youths, and now he wants revenge. The group is infiltrated by a 17-year-old boy who used to be a Pakistani asset, but is now turned into an MI5 asset.

Meanwhile, Lucas (Richard Armitage) found a USB stick under Cauldron’s (Genevieve O’Reilly) sink and has Tariq (Shazad Latif) analysing it … which takes pretty much the entire episode. Where Cauldron is, no one knows. As Lucas laments, he doesn’t even know her at all any more. I’m happy to have an episode without her and that phony accent!

It’s an engaging episode, even if it’s perhaps not super high action and such. It engages on an emotional level and even though I was watching it on a stuttery iPlayer-download, it still drew me in. Looking forward to next week – it looks like it’s going to be explosive in many ways. Hopefully at least one where they can sacrifice Cauldron to the gods of decent accents.