MI-5 - Season 2

MI-5's second season follows essentially the same pattern as the first. A team of British secret agents juggles occasionally dangerous missions, interoffice politics, and personal lives without letting anything get too far away from them, but sometimes things in one of these areas go wrong, and in the season finale, something very dramatic happens. There are some additions to and subtractions from the cast, but the core players are basically the same, with Matthew MacFayden as Tom in the lead role, Danny and Zoe as his support, and Harry as his angry boss. Some of the episodes are a lot more interesting than others, but the general level of quality is fairly consistent. The fifth episode is an interesting departure with its extremely high stakes, although it becomes obvious that things aren't what they seem because a show like this would be excessively unlikely to actually do something like that. Otherwise, the characters take on false identities, covertly monitor communications, undermine conspiracies, and occasionally watch helplessly while very bad things happen. While the off-duty stuff was spread around pretty well in the first season, it's almost all on Tom this time around, as he deals with the aftermath of the first season's cliffhanger, and it builds to a final episode that has him in a ton of hot water. Still waiting to see if the show will ever truly surprise me, but until then, it's a pretty enjoyable spy show.

MI-5 - Season 1

Well this is cool - a spy show that doesn't totally glamorize the profession. I guess you can leave it to the English to do that. If James Bond's MI6 is the globe-trotting foreign intelligence agency like the CIA, then I guess MI5 is the equivalent of the FBI, focused on rooting out operations on British soil. The stakes on the missions are often somewhat low, with some aspect of the intelligence community at stake rather than the world, and the spies aren't superheroes. They live secretive lives outside the job, and sometimes they get killed brutally and unceremoniously. It's a lot different than the standard depiction in the media of this kind of work, and I like it for that.

This show is actually called Spooks in its native Britain, and I kind of like that more than the slightly generic-sounding MI-5. It sets the correct expectations for what the series is. The headquarters aren't terribly high tech beyond a few computers, and the cast is relatively small. It's not about the operations of a whole intelligence force, it's a few people in the spy game. I know Matthew MacFayden from Pillars of the Earth, as the monk in charge of getting the cathedral built. Here he has a mid-level position at the agency, and has to worry about protecting his girlfriend and her daughter from the truth about him. There's a couple younger spooks below him and a couple older ones above him. They deal with things like possible IRA bombing threats and white supremacists trying to start riots on British soil. There's only six episodes in this first season, but they do a good job of establishing the setting for a show that's still running today, with each episode on its own telling an interesting and often quite tense story. The office politics and domestic stuff is surprisingly interesting as well, and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing a lot more.

The Pillars of the Earth

Pillars is a miniseries based on a British historical fiction novel, and plays like a half decent representation of what the Game of Thrones series will probably be like. It's about the creation of the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral, set against the actual reign of King Stephen during the 1100s. A Cathedral already being an incredible undertaking back then, construction is beset by complications arising from the dispute over the throne and the ambition of a noble family and a bishop played by Ian McShane, who is more or less the story's main villain. There are a couple other notable recognizable faces, including Donald Sutherland, who gets credited in every episode despite only appearing in a couple, and Hayley Atwell who stood out in the remake of The Prisoner that aired last year and does again here as the daughter of a fallen Earl.

So the show is a mix of a very human story mostly focusing on the family that guides the building of the Cathedral, endless political maneuverings and backstabbing, and some decently filmed (for television) battles. The latter two tended to interest me more, although it's hard to ignore what is really the emotional core of the story. The good guys are mostly likable and the bad guys are pretty easy to hate, although I will say it's harder than it should be to really be against Ian McShane whatever he's doing, so good is he at every role he seems to take.

There are a few plot bits that are pretty annoying, but overall it's a solid tale, and pretty damn well paced for about eight hours of content. One thing that always kind of bothered me was the passage of time though. The timeline lurches forward in fits and starts, sometimes months or years at a time, and by the end I was unsure about how much time things took. And it never seemed like the right amount of effort was put into portraying the ages of the characters. Young characters aren't recast often as they get older so they stay looking too young, or just disappear from the plot. And most of the other characters don't age much as the years pass by, until something gets triggered and suddenly the next time you see them they're in full-on old person makeup. It's a bit clumsy, and maybe something of a budget concern, but it doesn't hurt the story too much. Anyone interested in some medieval history portrayed in perhaps a less than historical way should probably give it a shot.