Spooks: The Greater Good

It starts on a London street, with a prisoner convoy and a flash of gunfire, and it ends with Harry Pearce apparently hitting the Thames from Lambeth Bridge. In between, Spooks: The Greater Good does what the old series always did best: it boxes Harry Pearce in and waits to see how he gets out.

Years after the series ended, Harry is still running Section D. The convoy carrying the terrorist Adem Qasim through London is ambushed. Qasim escapes. A CIA operative is killed. The press has a field day. The Americans want a scapegoat, and Harry, who can read a resignation letter before it is written, decides to give them one in the most dramatic way available: he jumps off Lambeth Bridge.

The film then becomes a hunt. Will Holloway, a young agent with more nerve than patience, has to track down Qasim before he attacks London, and find Harry, who is officially dead and plainly nothing of the sort. Peter Firth slips back into Harry with all the old weary authority, and Kit Harington holds his own beside him, all jaw and righteous anger. The pairing works better than it has any right to.

Jonathan Brackley, Sam Vincent and David Wolstencroft wrote it, with Bharat Nalluri directing. Jennifer Ehle's Geraldine Maltby, Michael Wildman's Robert Vass and Tuppence Middleton's June Keaton staff the corridors, David Harewood's Francis Warrender glowers from the American side, and Elyes Gabel's Qasim stays quiet and dangerous at the centre of it all.

It's a reunion picture in the truest sense, down to the grey suits and the corridor walls. The country is still one bad call away from disaster, and nobody in the building doubts it. The plot is straightforward stuff. But there's a proper welcome-back warmth to it all the same, and watching Firth pick up the role again after so long is its own reward.