Episode 10

War with Iran has been averted, which should be good news, except that hardliners resisting the peace have chosen a London school as their target. Then the episode gets worse. The team discovers that Zaf, the colleague they lost, was grotesquely tortured and killed by a group of mercenaries called the Redbacks. And then the Redbacks snatch Jo Portman.

Adam Carter is supposed to be coordinating the defence of the school. Instead he is consumed by the need to find Jo, and the war has become personal for him in a way the mission cannot touch. The episode runs the school threat and the hunt for Jo in parallel, and the strain on Adam is the real subject of the hour. He is a man watching the clock from two directions, and the episode does not pretend he can have both.

It is a grim piece of television, and it does not flinch from what was done to Zaf. The reveal is properly horrible, and the show trusts the audience to understand what that discovery does to everyone who knew him. There is no grand speech about Zaf, which is right. The silence around him is the tribute. The mercenaries are efficient and nameless, which is exactly why they are frightening; they are a business, and the team is just a job.

David Wolstencroft wrote it, Alrick Riley directed. Rupert Penry-Jones plays Adam Carter, Miranda Raison plays Jo Portman, Peter Firth plays Harry Pearce and Simon Abkarian plays Dariush Bakhshi. Alex Lanipekun's Ben Kaplan, Matthew Marsh's Bob Hogan, Gus Gallagher's Boscard, Joe Montana's Ryan Millar, David Michaels's diplomat and Badia Obaid's Gaza school teacher fill out the hour.

Adam's refusal to keep his eye on the bigger picture is the most human thing in the hour, and you cannot really blame him. The school matters. So does the woman he works with every day. Spooks has always known which one a person actually chooses when it gets to that. It is the episode where the series admits that its heroes are people who happen to operate, and the admission is the point.