Spooks 6.2

Connie, an old friend of Harry and Malcolm’s who appeared to have retired from the grid, appeared to have conveniently retired to a farmhouse built on top of an old germ warfare lab. What are the chances, eh? Actually, Connie (the delightful Gemma Jones) looks like being an inspired addition to the team. Anybody who, on hearing a car draw up, instinctively reaches for a handgun and a breath freshener spray is my kind of girl.

Harry’s plan — to infect each agent, in the hope that it would act as an incentive for them to surrender the antidote (which they were still calling a vaccine) — turned out not to be necessary; the Russian agent divulged that not only did they have it, they were already negotiating with the British government — but everyone’s favourite Home Secretary was refusing to meet their terms. We never did find out what those terms were. Is this going to have a further impact on the new, multi-episode story arc, or is it something we’ll never hear of again? That’s one of the questions that the new serial format is throwing up, and I love it.

As Adam and Jo raced to track down the vital drugs, Ros followed a lead from the abducted French agent that suggested that Zaf, who initially was thought to have been killed with the mercenaries from last week, might actually be alive. Some more tantalising clues emerged about the mysterious ‘Copenhagen’, courtesy of the French agent ‘Magritte’. “Do you know who your enemies are… historically?” was the enigmatic clue. Maybe TV Today commenter Eva was right, and the name Copenhagen is itself a clue, based on it being the name of the Duke of Wellington’s favoured horse?

With the vaccine tracked down, an increasingly whey-faced Adam flagged down a passing civilian to take him and the drugs to the hospital where they were needed, even when the Russian agents threatened to kill Jo if he didn’t return. In a nice little touch, Jo was sticking up for Adam’s stoicism under fire (“the benefits of a public school education”, she quipped at gunpoint) just as the man himself was going to pieces in the back of a stranger’s car. In the world of Spooks, that’s what passes for romanticism.

Just as Adam got to the hospital in the nick of time, another Russian agent calmly regained the box of drugs and walked away — but straight into the path of a fortuitously returning Ros. In one of the series’ most audaciously preposterous moments, she calmly walked past him, injecting him with a strong sedative as she walked by, then calmly turned on her heels to pick up the vaccine just as he fell to the ground. It was a beautifully shot and acted sequence, completely ridiculous in content but carried out with such conviction that it worked completely.

In any other series of Spooks that would be that — but, now that we’ve got an ongoing storyline, Ros had to decide to pursue her French lead to track down Zaf — only to be felled at the last minute by a tranquiliser dart. The ‘next time’ trailer implies that Magritte is behind that, but who knows, maybe there’s a reason she named herself after the Belgian master of surrealism? Ceci n’est pas un espion, perhaps?