Spooks: Code 9 episode 3 review

Mark isn't upbeat this week about the Spooks spin-off Code 9, as it reaches the half way point of its run.

Mark Pickavance

"I'm getting very bored with the characters treating every mission like they're trying to find a curry house"

Oh dear. I was marginally optimistic about this week’s episode based on the promo, but it turned out to be a false dawn, or whatever metaphor you’d like for complete lack of delivery.

Yet again we’re given another Jez-centric story, but with some Kylie mixed in for good measure. They pose as a couple to infiltrate a crime ghetto and unravel the secret identity of the mysterious ‘Zero’. Except his true identity was so obviously telegraphed that I’d guessed who it would be within thirty seconds of his character being announced. But so much in this story was badly handled that having an un-mysterious character was actually the least of its problems.

What is really beginning to bug me about Code 9 is how abysmal they are as Spooks, because they appear to have no idea about espionage or even how to remain undercover. In two episodes now, their approach to finding someone has been to walk into his neighbourhood and then directly ask someone do they know him. Gosh, that’s an original approach! Funny how in both stories the target of the mission knew that they were coming, isn’t it?

I know they’re supposed to be inexperienced, but I don’t recall them mentioning that stupidity was a criteria for joining. So far we’ve seen very little that could be classed as ‘intelligence’, on any level, and I’m getting very bored with the characters treating every mission like they’re trying to find a curry house. Just one of them must have some idea what being a spy is actually about, please?

I also don’t understand why Code 9 has all become focused around Jez, as there seems little depth to his character to reveal. But the biggest disappointment of this week was undoubtedly Kylie, who got more screen-time, but had zero character progress as the end of it to show for it. She seemed genuinely interesting in episode one, but now she’s the girl that takes pills and suffers from that special Hollywood version of radiation sickness where you look completely fine. Yawn.

The reason I liked Spooks is that it would occasionally throw you a beautiful curveball that would take you completely off-guard. But Code 9 is so pedestrian in it’s delivery that the ball it throws under-arm barely reaches the batter.

For the second week they ran a sub-plot that’s meant to make us think that Rob is a bad guy. Given the unsubtle nature of Code 9, the chance of this being so is virtually nil, but I expect more of this pointless diversion in episode 4. And then we have Rachel and Charlie who think they’ve been employed in a National Treasure TV show, hunting ridiculously convoluted clues. What’s the money the bad-guy is one of them?

In my first review I suggested that this was Spooks-light, but actually so far it isn’t actually good enough for that classification. If it doesn’t buck up its ideas in the second half of the run, I can’t see this getting another series.

18/08/08

Original article here.

Spooks: Code 9 episode 4 review

After four episodes of Spooks: Code 9 and repeat water-boarding, Mark's finally cracked.

Mark Pickavance

This week’s Code 9 was a slight diversion from the previous three, because to find someone this time they tried a different approach than just asking around. But that doesn’t substantially alter the fact that every story so far has been a person hunt of sorts, which is getting remarkably tedious to be honest.

The character with most screen time this week was Rachel, followed by the cartoon bad guy (who I predict is also a good guy) Rob. She goes ‘undercover’ to follow a clue left for them in a tree last week by the long dead Hannah (or is she?). The means of sending her incognito was entirely preposterous, having her appeared to be stabbed in a nightclub. This was one of the first things that happened, and at that point they’d lost me.

Surely a good scheme to disappear is to have an excuse where people don’t keep asking about you or asking how you are? Not on Code 9, they need one where all the other characters are the most curious they can be! This was followed through to its most ludicrous conclusion at the end, when Rachel needed a scar so everyone else would believe it actually happened.

But long before this I began to seriously wonder about whatever is presented as logic in Code 9. So much that has happened in this show defied belief, way beyond a point I’m willing to suspend.

At one point this week the lovely Kylie fought off would-be assassins by shooting at them while riding on the back of a moving saloon car. With the pursuing vehicle only feet away she unleashed an entire clip from her semi-automatic without actually hitting either of the two men in the vehicle! She then changed clip before remembering to aim at them, all without being dislodged from a smooth car body without any visible means of purchase. Typically, TV shows over-estimate the effectiveness of hand-guns, but Code 9 assumes they’re utterly useless unless they’re been pushed up the target’s left nostril.

At the end of proceedings, episode 4 was almost entirely a collection of dumbness, none of which was remotely plausible. Other examples included: a spy who told a complete stranger that they worked for MI5, a public identity database that includes the new ‘secret’ names of people in a witness protection scheme, two shootings in public streets with no witnesses, and spies who are forced to lock-pick their way into their own safe house in an emergency. They should have added a backing track of consternation, with a regular ‘Doh!’ thrown in for good measure.

If you haven’t guessed I’m rapidly losing patience with Code 9. So far it’s proven to be formulaic, predictable, contrived and implausible. All in a fashion that made me hark back to Mission Impossible as a bastion of feasibility. But worse than all those things, it’s broken the cardinal sins of being boring and pedestrian. Spies, as I recall, are supposed to be exciting people living a dramatic lifestyle, even the young inexperienced ones.

It seems best to look forward now to the penultimate outing. Not because I’m especially keen to see it, but because it gets us closer to the end of Code 9, presumably for good.

26/08/08

Original article here.

Spooks: Code 9 episode 5 review

It's the penultimate episode of Spooks spin-off Code 9. And at last, it's showing signs of life...

Mark Pickavance

It’s taken five episodes, but Code 9 finally came to life at last, with just one week of the show to go. While the proto-spooks have mucked about for the previous four shows, demonstrating how little they know about being spies, here they make things happen for once. It was a belated relief that they’ve all remembered what the job title ‘spy’ is actually about, and thus subverted a surveillance operation to overcome an unexpected hostage scenario.

This episode had a distinctly different feel, so different that it made me wonder if I’d been tuning into the right channel for the last four weeks. People reacted like you’d reasonably expect them to, most of what went on made some sense, and despite submitting to those urges for Bourne-esque incidental music it all played reasonably well.

But, and this is a sideways compliment, it was all a little original Spooks for my liking. This script could have so easily been a Spooks one, purely by transplanting the characters It's as if they thought they had an unused script and thought they’d use it here.

Curiously the script is credited to Cameron McAllister, executive producer of ITV’s Primeval, LWT’s Daylight Robbery and a director/writer of Sky One’s Mile High. And given this is his only Code 9 outing, he made a half decent stab at it.

Plenty happens in this story, which I’m not going to entirely spoil here, but what was noticeable was that they’ve given up with character development. With only one show to go it looks unlikely now that we’ll ever understand who Vik is, and frankly many of the others haven’t been fleshed out in any meaningful way from the pilot. My biggest disappointment in this respect is for Georgia Moffett, whose Kylie character looked great initially but overall she’s failed to make the half the impact she did in one episode of Doctor Who. In this one she gets some spy things to do, but she’s never one exhibited the firebrand personality she had in episode one, much to my personal disappointment.

What’s best about this episode is the weaving of the main story arc around the hostage proceedings, although the excuses presented when the inevitable ‘Where’s Charlie’ comes are thin at best. The revelation that the original nuclear bomb that devastated London had a twin is an effective set-up for the season finale. Although, that said, the teaser for what could be the last Code 9 did leave me somewhat cold, it just didn’t look remotely exciting or interesting.

The worst bits this week were the annoying interactions with their supposed boss, who seems to turn up each week just to wear petulance like a Chanel fragrance. They also injected a stupidly sentimental rich mother/misunderstood daughter relationship, where you hoped both wouldn’t survive, but they unfortunately did. I know that within the 50 minutes running time they’re forced to use cinematic shorthand to tell a story, but nothing those characters said or did convinced me of their emotion for one nanosecond. In a word, sloppy.

Even with those impediments this was probably the best episode so far, but that’s a little like saying a horse won a race because amongst the field it was the only one with a symmetrical layout of legs. Most have been weak and at least one has been abysmal, so the standards haven’t presented much of a challenge to better.
Next week we get the final outing, which unless it moves dramatically up a notch I’d predict is the last we’ll be seeing of Code 9.

01/09/08

Original article here.

Spooks Code 9 episode 6 review

Mark bites the cyanide capsule after reviewing the final episode of Spooks: Code 9.

Mark Pickavance

When Spooks: Code 9 started a month ago I was immediately suspicious that the BBC had dumped into the relative broadcast no-mans'-land of BBC Three. But the scheduling monkeys put the cringingly crap Bonekickers on BBC One, so until it aired I clung onto the possibility that this might be a sleeper show that would progress to have another series on higher profile channel. But alas, now I’ve seen the whole thing it was probably well positioned on Three, as the BBC doesn’t normally release its productions directly to UK Gold.

In my first review of Code 9 I suggested was Spooks-lite, and in retrospect it was exactly that. The problem was that it was also light on just about everything that made Spooks so watchable: character development, plot development, action and viewer involvement. You can add horribly inconsistent to that list, which I can only attribute to having a different writer for every one of the six shows, and three different directors involved. Split between nine different people it’s not exactly rocket science that the show lurched from one insipid episode to another. Surely if you wanted to get a format established you’ve make it a one writer and director deal for the first six episodes, or was this just meant to be experimental from the outset?

But enough of what this show might have been and wasn’t, how was the climactic final episode? I was hoping we’d find out more about Vik than his name, that at least one of them was gay or transsexual or just alive, that we’d been looking at the traitor for five weeks and someone would punch that MI6 lady Gates with the burr up her ass. But I could have found out the answers to all those points before Sunday, because bizarrely the series DVD went on sale officially today (Monday), yet most online retailers would send it out before then. I know the timescales for DVD release are shortening, but two hours and ten minutes after screening must be some record!

Spoilers from here…you’ve been warned!

This first half story fancies itself as Mission Impossible, as the team must get a David Blaine look-alike nuclear scientist out of high security prison. The method they use is so off the wall that it makes some of the MI episodes seem tame by comparison. In this, Vik gets some useful screentime, but we’re not any wiser who he is at the end. Better served is Kylie who returns to being the crazy chick she was in episode 1, but far too briefly.

I’d rightly worked out in episode 3 who the mole inside their group was, and the identity of the potential MI5 traitor, so when Rachel and Gates started acting strange it didn’t actually come as any surprise. It also wasn’t much of a shock that the obviously fake attempts to incriminate Rob were just that. Twists are only that if they’re not telegraphed obviously in well in advance, something the writers of Code 9 haven’t mastered at any point in the whole run.

The back half of the show is divided between them locating the second bomb and the traitor, which turns out to be stupidly easy on both fronts. The only surprise in the whole of this show comes at the end when there have the over-dimensioned cahooners to deliver a cliff-hanger ending! Will they stop the bomb going off? Does Rachel - who’s hot for Charlie - live? And most importantly, does anyone watching care?  

This makes the amazing leap of faith that Code 9 gets another outing. I’d be amazed if it did, but then I thought that Lewis Hamilton had won a Grand Prix fair and square yesterday, before the stewards decided that his car was the wrong colour, or something.

So I’ve decided that it’s better to make my own ending up, as I’m unlikely to see any on TV. Rachel is dead, because Rob’s track record of saving shot people is 100% failure. Vik and Jez are blown up by the bomb because they’re boring characters and wouldn’t be coming back anyway. Charlie leaves MI5 and, using his maths skills, works for the BBC in the risk analysis of new productions actually working. Kylie goes on the game till the radiation makes her skin fall off, and Rob becomes a Vet where he gets to put patients down rather than make fruitless efforts to save them. Done.

I’m left with the distinct sense that Code 9 was meant to be something brave and experimental, an edgy TV show about rogue intelligence agents. But in the end the challenge of making it seems to have overtaken those involved to the point they fell back on by-the-numbers production that offered nothing new or even on par with Spooks. Overall, a massively disappointing production that didn’t even deliver the unintentionally funny highlights of Bonekickers, for what they were worth.

07/09/08

Original article here.