NOTIFICATION: Spooks Season 2

Next season to start will be:

Spooks
Season 2
Initial run: 02/06/2003 - 11/08/2003

Starring:

Matthew McFadyen	as	Tom Quinn
Peter Firth	as	Harry Pearce
David Oyelowo	as	Danny Hunter
Keeley Hawes	as	Zoe Reynolds
Shauna MacDonald	as	Sam Buxton
Nicola Walker	as	Ruth Evershed

Pre-season buzz (quotes):

• "Back in June 2002, the sixth and final episode of the first series left viewers on the edge of their seats as Tom's girlfriend and her daughter were trapped inside a securely sealed house, with an explosive-packed laptop that was just about to blow. The second series is set to pick up from exactly where it left off with Tom helplessly watching from outside as the timer ticks down. Due to the huge success of the first series, this time around the BBC commissioned 10 hour-long episodes, and are set to drive the topicality of the storylines even further home. The original series was written during the September 11th atrocities, but the writers stuck to their anti-terrorism unit plots and delivered a brave series which won much critical acclaim." (mi6.co.uk)
• "The outcome [of the first season's cliffhanger] is plausible enough not to turn impressionable adolescent viewers into cynical television critics, but that it does involve a trick. A clue is that Spooks has a habit - which it repeats twice more in this opening episode - of misleading us about what we think we're seeing." (The Guardian)
• "We discovered with the first series that Spooks can tell stories no other long-running British TV drama can tell. There were times when we found our fiction blending imperceptibly with the news. Episode two, for example, was about race issues and at the time it was broadcast, the national news followed with a story about race riots. This new, longer series builds on that. Threats to national security have never been greater and our team of spies have to match the growing sophistication of an often unseen enemy. Spooks continues to demonstrate that what may seem at first unlikely can all too frequently become a reality." (Jane Featherstone, quoted in BBC Press)
• "In the first series she had this will they/won't they thing going on with Danny and nothing happened in the end. But in this series, Zoe does have a bit of romance. She meets this Italian stallion called Carlo and she does some quite unexpected things, like running off to hotel rooms in the middle of the day! I think she is a bit wary of romance. I think it's hard enough for anyone who's single to meet someone but, when you do what Tom and Zoe do for a living, then it's especially difficult; you can be called out anywhere at anytime. They don't have much of a social life really apart from with each other. The easiest way sometimes is if they date each other, which is what Zoe tells Danny when he fancies Sam." (Keeley Hawes)
  

Pre-season buzz (from last season's finale):

• Obviously the main thing was the bomb leading to the apparent death of Tom Quinn and Ellie Simm. However, given that the former is in the credits for this season, it would seem that things didn't turn out exactly as they were shown (a giant white light at the end of last season would seem to indicate that the bomb did indeed go off).
• No doubt Tom and Ellie's relationship will have taken a pretty bad turn after these events too.
• Zoe finally confessed to Harry that she knew of Tessa's involvement in the phantom agent scandal. Tessa blackmailed Harry with some information she knew about the shooting of a man back in the 1970s. Harry arrested her anyway. So presumably Tessa won't feature much in this season, but Harry is itching for a fight against her, which will presumably surface.
• The actual main story of the episode, involving Tom going over Harry's head to allow an IRA terrorist to launch an attack on the UK in exchange for information used to prevent a nuclear explosion, will probably resurface too, as it was so integral to the bomb going off.
• Danny has only recently (in the penultimate episode I think) been found out for his illegal credit rating hacking; not sure if this will come up in the new season.
  
• Not much was going on between Danny and Zoe - that storyline had kind of petered out, as confirmed by Keeley above.
  

Pre-season buzz (statistical):

• Much like season 1, the episodes of season 2 did not have official titles (in keeping with the "secretive" theme of the show), but most people go off the working titles for the episodes.
• The season premiere is titled "Legitimate Targets" and takes place immediately after last season's finale "Lesser Of Two Evils".
• This season's finale is titled "Smoke And Mirrors". There are 10 episodes total in this season.
• New main characters are Sam Buxton and Ruth Evershed, who did not appear at all in season 1.
• There are some returning recurring characters, but all had very minor roles in season 1. It's not clear if their season 2 roles will be any more significant, though it seems that at least in the case of Christine Dale, she will be a fairly major recurring character (she only previously appeared in the pilot, although she did have a fairly medium-sized role in that). Jools Siviter does not appear in this season at all.