TV review: The Spooks finale was so nail-biting the nation’s hands have probably been reduced to bloody stumps, as Harry Pearce and Ruth Evershed’s will-they-won’t-they romance came to a climax.
Given the relentless tension of any regular Spooks episode, it was with great trepidation that I sat down to watch the show’s finale, which promised to put you so far on the edge of your seat as to find your nose touching the TV screen. And it did not disappoint.
The action/spy caper portion of the episode was taken up with the conclusion of the Ilya/Elena Gavrik story, as a non-responsive passenger airliner hurtled towards London leaving the Spooks team to decide whether they could trust their Russian counterparts or whether they were being led into a trap.
As ever this was suitably peril-ridden with plenty of last minute airstrikes and time-sensitive interrogations, but the real tension lay with the fate of everyone’s favourite po-faced head of operations, Harry Pearce.
The relationship between Harry and Ruth has always been at the heart of Spooks so it came as no surprise that this formed the series’ denoument. The lack of a happy ending will annoy some, but Ruth’s demise was a captivating bit of TV as Harry was left with the deaths of two past loves on his conscience following Elena’s strangulation at the hands of Ilya – and an ending involving Harry retiring to a beach cottage to take up racket sports would have felt a little anti-climactic.
It would have been nice to see all ten series of the show tied together a little more perhaps, but the return of Tom Quinn as a hired assassin in the final few seconds was a nice nod to early series of show.
In its lengthy run Spooks has at times been fantastical and a little holey in the plot department, but it has also been flawless in engrossing viewers and creating very palpable tension – and this final outing did not disappoint.
