The sense of crisis gathering over Spook Central in the last few episodes finally burst through this season finale like a Krakatoa-style cataclysm. Any lingering hopes that Richard Armitage’s Lucas North – the man we now know was really John Bateman – wasn’t really a black-hearted killer were brutally dashed. There was no more wriggle room. Bateman was bad to the bone.
He blew up the British embassy in Dakar in 1995 and he murdered the real Lucas North. We’d watched him as he coldly allowed a young American cryptanalyst to bleed to death, just because she’d had the misfortune to overhear him talking about the deadly Albany file. Now, the last straw was his kidnapping of the gloomy but stoical Ruth (Nicola Walker), Section D’s shrewdest operator and the object of Harry Pearce’s desire.
Bateman was using her as leverage to force Harry (Peter Firth) to hand over Albany, with its details of a fiendish “genetic weapon”, which he proposed to sell to the Chinese and start a new life with the proceeds. But we knew Harry wouldn’t let him get away with it. Sure enough, with help from seedy mole-hunter Alec White (Vincent Regan), he sawed the floorboards out from under Bateman by telling his inamorata, Maya, the murky secrets of the man she planned to run away with.
Even the most casual Spookophile would have taken the demise of North/Bateman for granted, since the show’s great tradition of topping its most prominent protagonists demanded nothing less. He duly plummeted from a high rooftop in the closing minutes, with a wide-angle panorama of the City of London as a backdrop.
Having originally found Lucas North a bit too much like the Milk Tray man for comfort, I’d become quite attached to him. His aquiline curtness was reminiscent of Timothy Dalton’s James Bond, and he was able to project a more convincing deadliness than such predecessors as Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones, too Nick-and-Dave for comfort) or Ros Myers (Hermione Norris, always more soap queen than killer bitch). In fact, he made his workmates look slightly daft in this final outing, selling them an obvious dummy by pretending to be hanging out in a café in Greenwich, then sending out some luckless stooge as a decoy to be gunned down in the street.
But never mind the collateral damage. The bigger question is, where do we go in series 10, which has allegedly already been commissioned? And will it be the end for Spooks? Top of the agenda will be the fate of Harry Pearce, who was left teetering on the brink of disgrace and involuntary retirement, as punishment for the paradoxical “crime” of allowing John Bateman to get his hands on the top-secret Albany, even though he'd known all along that Albany was worthless.
And we devoutly expect that Simon Russell Beale (pictured above) will return as the Home Secretary, having been ushered in by the election of “our new Coalition” to replace his treacherous predecessor Robert Glenister. Sly, clubbable, and about as sentimental as a pack of starving timber wolves, Russell Beale has expertly massaged reams of suggestion and implied menace from a not very large role. “You’re the spy they want to kick back out into the cold, I’m afraid,” he told Harry last night, sounding as remorseful as if he'd just spilled some fine cognac down his shirt-front. “I’d start preparing for life after MI5. I’m truly sorry. Goodnight.” Harry, the consummate professional, maintained a watchful silence.