[SPK] Nest Of Angels

TV Programme: Spooks
Season: 2
Episode: 2
Date I watched this episode: 30/08/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 15 days.

With the last episode having served mainly to tie up "loose ends" from the last season, this episode was the first "real" episode of the season. It was mainly a good episode in terms of the core storyline, but also tried to work with far too many "new" characters, which kind of made it feel a bit all over the place.

Let's start with the core storyline then - the Mullah Rachid. Rachid was truly a very interesting and complex villain - not that I've come to expect anything less from this show. He was really very cautious, making Khaldun go to his limits to try to get into his inner circle. This made for interesting television, as we the audience weren't quite sure where Khaldun's loyalties really lay.

I was glad that Alexander Siddig seemed to get a lot of screentime in this episode. I "know" Alex quite well from his starring role as Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and his main recurring role as Hamri Al Assad in 24 season 6. In fact, his character Khaldun in this episode was not too dissimilar from Assad. He's a great actor, and I particularly liked the scene where Khaldun is in Tom's bedroom in the dark - what a brilliantly scripted, shot and acted scene, the jewel of this episode.

I'm always honoured at how clever this show expects their audience to be. Sometimes shows like 24 and Damages really try to tell the viewer something over and over again, expecting them to be a little stupid, while other shows such as The West Wing, The Sopranos and this one, assume a certain level of intelligence from their viewers. I don't think readers of The Sun would be particularly likely to watch this show, they'd probably prefer a show like Ultimate Force. Anyway in particular this episode made the viewer think that the book Khaldun gives to Tom was actually the book Peter Pan, without any explicit reference to that, and then does almost a "double-cross" of the viewers by revealing it is actually the Koran.

But I think the key theme of this episode - and probably the most well-written - was the theme of a clash of cultures between Khaldun and the rest of MI-5. This theme ran right through from the early encounters with Khaldun and was first explicitly mentioned when Khaldun's suggestion that they should "just kill" Rachid was met with a deadly silence. Rachid gave a third dimension to this by his own taunting of Tom that his intelligence service was powerless to do anything.

The clash of cultures really came to a head at the end of the episode, where Tom wants to pull Khaldun out of the operation, but Khaldun just wants to work with the boy to "save" him, both physically and spiritually. In the final moment, Khaldun defied established procedures, ignored orders, and in a beautiful gesture of heroism, sacrificed himself to (at least spiritually) save the boy.

This episode was in many places quite gritty. It didn't take any prisoners, showing the real effects that Islamic extremism can have, and didn't have a particularly "happy" ending. In fact the start to the episode was really disturbing. Tom's reaction to all this was typically cold and unmoved.

So moving back to the rather stringy parts of the episode, as previously mentioned it just tried to work with far too many characters. Carlo, Vicki and Tessa were mentioned in the "previously on" but it was hardly worth it; each of them only appearing in very minor scenes. In particular I was sorry that Tessa's re-introduction was not a really big deal. Actually I hadn't expected to see Vicki again, given that she's basically a civilian, but she's obviously poised to become Tom's next love interest. Vying for Tom's affections is Christine Dale, who appears here for the first time since the pilot, but again had a rather pointless role. Sam Buxton was hardly in the episode, appearing in a couple of incidental scenes. The new main character Ruth Evershed was introduced, but hardly got the best intro; she just seems weird and didn't contribute very much. Even Danny and Zoe went back to having minor roles; this was a very Tom-heavy episode.

I've already talked briefly of the ending to this episode but in general it was quite thrilling as that wasn't how it was supposed to go down. It almost felt like a Damages season finale, where we've been building up to something for a while and then it turns out totally differently from how we would expect.

Normally at the end of a review I talk about what this means for the rest of the season, but since there's not really any continuity in Spooks episodes I can't really do that. I'm looking forward to a less action-packed episode with more character development at this stage of the season though.