Episode 5

Adam Carter is on his way to intercept a Russian arms dealer who plans to sell nuclear weapons blueprints to Iran when a mugger jumps him. Adam kills the man in self-defence. That mugger, it later turns out, was a journalist, and the episode has to carry that weight along with everything else. It is the kind of coincidence that would feel contrived anywhere else; here it lands as the job finally catching up with him.

There is also the matter of Ana. Adam and Ana have decided to bring their relationship to a close, and this is their last encounter, which the episode treats as the fateful thing it is. Neither of them gets the exit they wanted. Between the dead journalist and the goodbye, Adam has a bad week. And the arms deal keeps ticking away in the background, indifferent to all of it.

The episode is built on that collision of the personal and the geopolitical, and it works because it keeps the two properly tangled. The nuclear blueprints are the excuse. The real story is what one killing does to a man who thought he had compartmentalised that part of himself, and the quiet goodbye he did not want to say. You watch him make the same choices you would make, and that is what makes it uncomfortable.

Zinnie Harris and David Wolstencroft wrote it, Brendan Maher directed. Rupert Penry-Jones plays Adam Carter, Peter Firth plays Harry Pearce, Hermione Norris plays Ros Myers and Gemma Jones plays Connie James. Alexander Donald is Agent Bill, Yuri Klimov is Valentino, Alex Lanipekun is Ben Kaplan, James Laurenson is Sholto, Matthew Marsh is Bob Hogan and Ian Maden is the diplomat.

The arms deal gets sorted, more or less. What stays with you is the cost of the job when it lands on a man who has already decided to give up the one good thing he had left. That is the weight Spooks carries best. The episode will not let Adam off the hook for the killing, and it does not need to. The audience can do that themselves.