Spooks is back, and a good thing too. To be honest, I think that in this opener, we saw the best and worst of Spooks. On the one hand, and beware that there are spoilers ahoy here, Tom seemed to sort out his spot of difficulty with remarkable speed. From the cliffhanger, there seemed no quick fix, yet within 60 minutes, he'd wrapped it all up quite neatly.
On the other hand, we were introduced to a likeable new agent, who ended up in a perilous situation at the end of the episode. I can honestly say that I didn't know whether he was going to live or die - something you can never be quite sure of with Spooks. Tim McInnerny was introduced as a fine foe - the chair of the joint intelligence committee who's ear seems easily bent by politicians. When he slapped CIA contact, and lover of Tom, Christina Dale, you felt like thumping him yourself.
This series, the BBC seem to have dispensed with the "next episode right now on BBC Three" thing, with next week's episode being shown, oddly enough, on Saturday nights. Instead, we get an interactive thing on Sky and Freeview, but not cable. I had a bash at the Freeview version, but frankly it didn't work on my prehistoric OnDigital Philips box (yup - one of the first boxes released). The idea of the interactive feature is that Harry talks you through some training modules for the first five weeks, and you have to press buttons to answer questions at the end of each module. Your total score is totted up at the end of 25 minutes or so of this. Basically this is Fighting Fantasy roleplaying books with TV: there are two channels showing essentially the same footage, and at the end of a section, you either watch Harry saying well done, or him telling you to buck your ideas up. Sometimes you have to choose camera angles or audio feeds, but that really involves flicking from channel to channel. My poor old box couldn't cope with all this excitement, so I fear I'm going to miss out on the delights of interactive.
Posted by adambowie at October 11, 2004 11:04 PM