Watch London Spy - Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode 1: A romance between an MI6 code genius and a man working dead-end jobs promises happiness for both. But tragedy strikes wh. London Spy - Season. As I’ve noted in recaps past, London Spy has a tendency to emphasize style and atmosphere over plot. Perhaps that’s why answers to the show’s mysteries are doled out so sparingly. With Ben Whishaw, Edward Holcroft, Jim Broadbent, Zrinka Cvitesic. A chance romance between two men from very different worlds, one from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, the other from a world of clubbing and youthful excess, leads into mystery after one of them is found murdered.

1. London Spy Season 1 Episode 4
2. London Spy Season 1 Episode

London Spy is a British-American five-part drama television serial created and written by Tom Rob Smith that aired on BBC Two from 9 November until 7 December 2015.^[1][2] It was aired on Netflix in 2018.

• 2Cast

Plot[edit]

London Spy begins as the story of two young men: Danny (Ben Whishaw)—gregarious, hedonistic, and romantic—falls in love with Alex (Edward Holcroft)—asocial, enigmatic, and brilliant. Just as they discover how perfect they are for each other, Alex disappears. Danny finds Alex's body. They lived very different lives: Danny is from a world of clubbing and youthful excess; Alex, it turns out, worked for the Secret Intelligence Service. Although utterly ill-equipped to take on the world of espionage, Danny decides to fight for the truth about Alex's death.

Cast[edit]

Main[edit]

• Ben Whishaw as Daniel 'Danny' Edward Holt
• Jim Broadbent as Scottie
• Edward Holcroft as Alistair 'Alex' Turner
• Samantha Spiro as Detective Taylor
• Lorraine Ashbourne as Mrs.Turner / Nanny
• David Hayman as Mr.Turner / Groundsman
• Clarke Peters as the American
• Charlotte Rampling as Frances Turner
• Mark Gatiss as Rich
• Harriet Walter as Claire
• James Fox as James
• Adrian Lester as Professor Marcus Shaw
• Riccardo Scamarcio as Doppelganger

Recurring[edit]

• Josef Altin as Pavel
• Zrinka Cvitešić as Sara
• Nicolas Chagrin as Charles Turner
• Richard Cunningham as Danny's Lawyer

Production[edit]

The series was commissioned by Janice Hadlow and Polly Hill,^[3] and produced by Guy Heeley for Working Title Television.^[4] The executive producers were Juliette Howell, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Polly Hill.^[5] Filming began in 2014 in London,^[6]West London Film Studios, Kent, on the Isle of Grain and at Dartford.^[7]

The story is based on the death of Gareth Williams, an MI6 agent found dead under similar, mysterious circumstances.^[8]

Release[edit]

The first episode premiered in the U.K. on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday 9 November 2015, and the serial concluded 7 December 2015. In the U.S., it premiered on BBC America starting 21 January 2016.^[9] In 2018 it was carried on Netflix.

Episodes[edit]

Critical reception[edit]

Reviewing Episode One for The Guardian, Lucy Mangan called it 'an unutterably delicious, satisfying dish,' with 'Jim Broadbent, in fully teddy-bear-carrying-a-switchblade mode.' and Whishaw 'the most powerful actor ever made out of thistledown and magic.'^[11]The Daily Telegraph's Jasper Rees was unconvinced: 'Whishaw's intense fixity of purpose could do nothing to defibrillate his DOA dialogue..' ^[12] The same newspaper's Harry Mount gave a critical review of episode 3 which he regarded as 'wearily unconvincing' with 'long spells of ennui.'^[13] In the Daily Mail, Christopher Stevens wrote: 'Believe it or not, BBC execs reckon there is not enough gay drama on the Beeb [..] You might think that it's become impossible to switch the telly on without seeing two men locked in a naked clinch, or in drag, or snogging.' The Huffington Post UK reported that Stevens' review had inspired a reader backlash, with online comments noting, 'It's not a gay spy drama, it's a spy drama and some of the characters happen to be gay.'^[14]

After Episode 4 had screened, several prominent critics agreed that, whatever they thought of its story, the series possessed a haunting quality. Gabriel Tate of The Daily Telegraph wrote: 'London Spy, has been adored and abhorred. Its ambition has delighted and infuriated, its obfuscation has intrigued and frustrated. It is, if nothing else, a singular vision..'^[15]A.A. Gill of The Sunday Times wrote: 'This is a strange, inexplicably compelling story. There are vast lacunas in the plot, filled with the unblinking performance of Ben Whishaw, made more memorable because most of it is done without words. Everyone else revolves around him, but he remains essentially a hole at the centre of the doughnut. It is a characterisation of great depth, in a plot that is nothing more than a series of enigmas, presented enigmatically.'^[16]

Jack Searle in The Guardian called it an 'intoxicating series' with 'a beguiling emotional aesthetic.' 'It was inevitable that, when prosaic explanation finally had to intrude on all this elliptical artistry, the spell was partly broken. A thriller hasn't so boldly made the genre beautiful since The Shadow Line. London Spy has lived in the gap between plot and subtext – between what it's about, and what it's really about. It's really about self-knowledge, and how lovers try to know each other while lying about themselves.'^[17]

Following the screening of the final episode, Gabriel Tate wrote in The Guardian that the series had 'a somewhat daft and implausible ending, but there was still much to enjoy, mostly from the brilliant Ben Whishaw.' ^[18] Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph called it 'wonderful and infuriating in equal measure.Has there ever been a television series that's frustrated as much as London Spy (BBC 2)? Over five weeks this contemporary thriller has scaled giddy heights and then plumbed ludicrous depths, gone from being completely gripping to turgid as hell, thrown up single scenes of startling brilliance then followed them with some preposterous self-indulgence.. London Spy's potentially great script was in desperate need of some doughty editing.' ^[19]

The Guardian'sMark Lawson named the series one of the best shows of 2015.^[20]

The series was nominated for the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series.^[21]

References[edit]

1. ^'BBC Two announces brand-new five-part drama series London Spy'. BBC. 14 February 2014. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
2. ^Morgan, Joe (14 February 2014). 'Gay writer to pen new gay spy drama for BBC'. Gay Star News. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
3. ^Kanter, Jake (14 February 2014). 'Acclaimed author pens BBC2 gay spy drama'. Broadcast Now. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
4. ^Eames, Tom (14 February 2014). 'BBC Two announces new drama series 'London Spy' from 'Child 44' writer'. Digital Spy. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
5. ^Barraclough, Leo (14 February 2014). 'Working Title Teams with 'Child 44′ Author Tom Rob Smith on BBC's 'London Spy''. Variety. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
6. ^Creamer, Jon (14 February 2014). 'BBC2 orders Working Title drama from Child 44 author'. Televisual. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
7. ^Kent Film Office. 'Kent Film Office London Spy Article'.
8. ^' 'London Spy' based on real life murder of Gareth Williams', The Guardian, 12 November 2015
9. ^'London Spy'. BBC America. Retrieved 1 January 2016.
10. ^'Weekly Viewing Summary (see relevant week)'. BARB.
11. ^Mangan, Lucy (10 November 2015). 'London Spy review: compelling new thriller with a love story at its handsome heart'. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
12. ^Rees, Jasper (9 November 2015). 'London Spy, episode one, review: 'unconvincing''. The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
13. ^Harry Mount (23 November 2015). 'London Spy, episode three, review: 'a poor man's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy''. Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 24 December 2015.
14. ^Allegretti, Aubrey (10 November 2015). 'Daily Mail TV Review Of 'London Spy' Laments The Number Of BBC 'Gay Dramas', Sparks Reader Backlash'. The Huffington Post. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
15. ^'London Spy, Wolf Hall, The Honourable Woman.. The three things in a TV drama that divide viewers'. Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
16. ^Gill, A.A. (6 December 2015). 'Frank's patter does little to flatter him'. The Sunday Times. News Ltd.
17. ^Seale, Jack. 'Is the final episode of London Spy doomed to let us down?'. the Guardian. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
18. ^Tate, Gabriel. 'London Spy recap: episode five – the end of lying'. the Guardian. Retrieved 13 December 2015.
19. ^'London Spy, episode 5, review: 'frustrating''. Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 8 December 2015.
20. ^Mark Lawson. 'Best TV of 2015: No 5 – London Spy'. the Guardian. Retrieved 24 December 2015.
21. ^'GLAAD Media Award Nominees Revealed'. The Hollywood Reporter. 31 January 2017. Retrieved 3 April 2017.

External links[edit]

• London Spy on BBC America
• London Spy on IMDb

London Spy

As I’ve noted in recaps past, London Spy has a tendency to emphasize style and atmosphere over plot. Perhaps that’s why answers to the show’s mysteries are doled out so sparingly. It took four episodes, for instance, to find out what actually got Alex into so much trouble.

The price to be paid for all of those slight calories is the table-breaking buffet of exposition that comes in London Spy’s farewell offering. The hour is dominated by Charlotte Rampling, who returns to fill us in on several novels’ worth of gory details. It’s also dominated by Danny’s famed intuitive gifts, which run at full tilt as he uncovers long-buried secret after long-buried secret in the time it takes mere mortals to pull on a sweater.

Danny has to do all of this without dear Scottie by his side — the episode begins with Scottie’s funeral and some exquisitely heartbroken work from Ben Whishaw — but that seems an appropriate choice. If one theme of the episode is “let’s tie up the plot while we still have a chance,” another is Danny’s journey towards an emotionally settled plane without the two most important people in his life. It takes a complete unmooring for him to learn how to anchor himself.

This is evident when Danny’s scumbag parents show up to see him for the first time in 11 years. They’re there because the shadowy villains — the same ones who killed Alex, possibly killed Scottie, and are still tormenting Danny — forced them to visit, but he reacts with admirable equanimity. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to love me?” he asks, then departs, journeying to see Rampling’s Frances in that spectacular, preposterous mansion.

I wish that writer and creator Tom Rob Smith had not tied Danny’s personal growth so neatly to the turbo-charging of his Spidey sense, but suddenly, he’s able to spot connections at light speed. He dismantles the lies in the story that Frances tells him with unnerving ease, pulling the most important truth about Alex seemingly out of thin air. Yes, the wounded maid working for Frances is his real mother. But how’d he piece together that one?

Extended geocom leica 1200. Frances’s story is a dark fairy tale: the woman trapped in a decaying castle, doomed both by patriarchy and her husband’s professional disaster, who steals another woman’s child and condemns that boy to a life of lonely torment as acute as her own. Rampling tells the story in a typically spellbinding fashion, her voice at once cool and suffused with a near-bursting ache. Like most good fairy tales, hers is somewhat absurd in its particulars and shattering in its effect. It becomes clear that Alex, like his mother, never had a chance: He was victim twice scorned, first of a broken home and then of Frances’s attempts to turn him into the spy she could never be.

London Spy Season 1 Episode 4

As it turns out, Frances’s parenting methods come back to haunt her in an especially nasty way. We are finally given confirmation that Alex died just like we thought he did — trapped in that box by the government whose commitment to lies he had threatened to destroy. I was not a fan of the lie detector as either a thing or as a MacGuffin, but it’s deployed here in perhaps the best twist of the series, which draws out superb work from both Rampling and Edward Holcroft. After a heartrending back-and-forth flashback between Frances and Alex, wherein she extracts from him a commitment to destroy his project and vanish forever, it turns out that the government has already put his lie detector to use. The detector concludes that everything he said — including that he loves Frances — is a lie. Her frantic attempts to go back to him are rebuffed. She is forcibly sedated, and Alex is left to die. It is a dreadful way to go, the cumulative weight of all of Frances’s and Alex’s mistakes catching up to them. Her mistake was to raise him in the way she did; his mistake was to try to be something other than the person she helped create.

After this story unfolds, Alex’s birth mother, the maid, winds up leaving the house in a devastated frenzy and burning the hedge maze to the ground — a symbolic act of solidarity with the boy whose ability to master that maze proved to be his ultimate undoing. Frances then kicks Danny out of the house, but just as he’s leaving, she joins him in his car and says, “Let’s burn them down for real.” Though she adds, “You understand we don’t stand a chance,” they share sly smiles as they hurtle towards a confrontation with the forces that have hounded them for so long. The sight of Ben Whishaw and Charlotte Rampling grinning in a snappy little motor provides a glamorous, improbably hopeful end to the show.

London Spy Season 1 Episode

There are a couple of ways to interpret these final scenes. One is that both Danny and Frances have finally grown tired of being smacked around by spies, and that Frances, in particular, has had her cynicism broken and wants to avenge Alex’s murder. A more intriguing reading is that these two damaged souls are ridding themselves of their burdens — that they’re exorcising Alex’s demons now that he is gone. Despite their yearning for him, Alex has ultimately been an imprisonment rather than a liberation. When Frances says, “Let’s burn them down for real,” she might as well be referring to herself and Danny — or, at least, the versions doomed to be trapped by Alex’s grip on them.

You may notice that neither of these scenarios have much to do with Alex’s actual life. After all of the chaos and destruction, the fatal weakness of London Spy is that the man who caused all of the action — the man who gave the show its title — winds up functioning more as a symbolic mechanism rather than as a real human being. By the hour’s end, Alex has perished so that Danny and Frances may find themselves. Doesn’t he deserve a little more than that?

Other Thoughts

• One mystifying thing about this show: the near-total indifference it showed to Danny’s roommates, who seemed very nice. Fittingly enough, he abandons them in this episode, and moves into Scottie’s much nicer digs.
• I’m not sure I could be patient with my parents if they turned up after 11 years, told me a pack of lies, and then tried to guilt me about their health problems.
• The most unintentionally hilarious part of the episode has to be Danny’s visit to the HIV support group. He tells the group the entire story of Alex, the spying, his injection with HIV, all of it! And instead of looking at him like he’s crazy, which any normal person would do, one guy just asks, “What are you going to do now?” What, indeed?