Spooks Series 10 - Is there no thread??

[TheSmallPrint]

I am counting down to Sunday where they show Harry looking over the edge of the building at a nasty car crash below and Lucas legging it down the stairwell

Have also been thinking overnight, the fact that Harry proposed at a funeral, ultimately culminating in Ruth accepting as she was off to hers could have been quite a neat deliberate motif . . .

I have been thinking - how did Harry know where to send Tom? Elena never said. I assume that the plane man told them, but I hate it when we were supposed to guess.

Yes what was on the laptop? Just the fact that Harry was (allegedly) sachas father?
Why was Jim so keen for this not to be discovered??
One more thing- do you think ilia knew about the attack on the plane? Was it his govt who ordered it and other attacks or an offshoot of the KGB??

Ps CPR has less than 1% success rate in out of hospital arrests so likely both would have died anyway. Would have been more dramatic though

I assume that the laptop proved that Elena was a double agent?

Jims laptop? So he knew that??

Is anyone else up for a 'Misery' style intervention on the writers where we kidnap them and lock them in a room to write a new endng where Ruth isn't dead and she and Harry live happily ever after?

DH told me this morning that he had woken up in the wee small hours and lay awake fuming about the sad ending!

There were two differerent laptops - the one Callum had at the very beginning of the series, that got stolen (and that's the one I can't remember about) and then Jim Coaver's laptop which had the info about Harry being Sasha's father. I didn't think that Jim's laptop had info about Elena - I don't think he knew that.

Also pondering overnight

• Did the CIA drop all charges on Harry (as proved KGB had taken Jim?)
• Would Harry have been allowed back to work after breaking so many rules?
• does swishy only have 2 outfits???

Aviation expert(-ish) here! I'm struggling to understand the jammer bit of the plot too. Yes, the chap with the suitcase could have jammed the aircraft radios, but I am curious to know if he could have jammed the transponder too. The transponder is the piece of kit that tells Air Traffic Control where you are. The fact that they had a screen showing the aircraft as a flashing red blob moving toward the coast of England suggests that that was working, and there are ways for the pilots to send messages via that too.

The aircraft I fly is not a brand spanking new one, it is about 15 years old. And we have 5 radios (VHF and HF,) 2 transponders, 2 ELTs, and 1 satellite communication method. Also our mobile phones would be used as a last port of call if all other comms methods failed. Newer aircraft in the fleet also have passenger and crew satellite phones too. I have no idea if the jammer used would jam all of that lot, but if it did then it would also jam the signal the aircraft sends to ATC that shows the flashing blob on the radar screen (which was still working in Spooks.) If all of that stopped working the aircraft would follow a very precise radio failure route which would be recognised by ATC and any deviation or failure to follow that would be assumed to be indicative of suspicious behaviour. The military interceptor aircraft would make considerable attempts to make visual contact before an instruction to shoot down is issued, and would not be pulled off but would continue to escort the passenger aircraft to it's destination.

Moving on to the cabin crew. They work in teams of 2 or 3 and keep an eye on each other. I know from the comments I sometimes get that it is rare for someone to be able to disappear into the loo to touch up their make-up/read Hello magazine/etc without their colleagues grumbling about them. There are also significant security procedures (which I shan't go into) involving very frequent checks of the loos, especially approaching destination. The discovery of a body would be inevitable within minutes, and that would certainly ensure that the pilots would do everything in their power to establish communications with someone, anyone, by all means necessary. They would not just keep trundling on blindly towards Heathrow, one of the busiest bits of airspace in the world, in such circumstances.

Apart from that, I love Spooks! And am sad that Ruth died.

Ooh, v impressive Backinthebox! I too wondered why they didn't notice the stewardess was missing.

But since when did we ever watch Spooks for realism or consistency of plot, eh?

The Home Sec. seemed to be remarkably unbothered by the fact that Ruth, his new appointment at the ministry, seemed to keep going off to do work for her former employers. She seemed to be running out on him in all kinds of situations.

I was bothered by the poor stewardess being bumped off and nobody noticing, too!

I was bothered about the air stewardess not being missed too, Abra1d.

Backinthebox - thanks for all that technical explanation - it made far more sense than their plot! Can I ask - if the pilots couldn't make contact with ATC, they would wait for the military aircraft to come and escort them to the airport, would they? They'd expect a 'rescue' mission?

Shotinfoot - Staverton suggested that Ruth might have been stabbed in the heart, which would be why CPR would have been useless - I was saying why I didn't think this was the case.

I'm not sure you always get frothy, bloody sputum with a punctured lung - but you would get shortness of breath, which Ruth did have. A stab wound to her stomach or intestines wouldn't cause shortness of breath so fast, I think, and wouldn't have been fatal so fast either.

Anyway - they had no way of knowing what organs had been stabbed, and in that situation - stab wound, casualty has stopped breathing - I would perform CPR just in case it would do any good - and I think that is what the ambulance men do too. When my dad collapsed at home, our neighbour did cpr for the half an hour+ that it took for the ambulance to arrive (very remote rural location), and the paramedic carried on with it for a while too, before Dad was pronounced dead.

I can't believe that Harry et al wouldn't do anything in their power, however slim the chances of it working, to bring Ruth back.

What was Sascha up to? Weren't we being led to believe that he was behind everything, or did I make that up? But I'm sure there were scenes of him surrounded by dodgy people. So what was he doing?

I thought that maybe the glass might've nicked her liver but then they said it was her lung.

Backinthebox - love the idea of a pilot being talked in via mobile phone if all else fails!! Hope they have handsfree sets. If it is dangerous to drive a car with a phone in one hand or tucked under your ear . . . .

Has noone thought of adding Sasha to the list of rather good looking men. Tom Weston-Jones is definitely alright

Even if he did kill Ruth, we can blame his mother and father for that

Bottlebank - the liver is on the other side of the body - Ruth was stabbed in her left side, the liver is over on the right side.

I used to be an operating theatre nurse and from the angle and position of the stab wound, lung would be my best guess.

Only on MN could you get pilots and nurses deconstructing all the technical guff behind an episode of Spooks. Are there any spies out there who might care to add their twopennorth?

STDG, we wouldn't hang around and wait for the military to rescue us. If our radios failed we would be working our backsides off to do everything correctly so we didn't get a military intercept. You don't want a bunch of trigger happy boys in fighter jets breathing down your neck!

I need to buy box sets of earlier Spooks series. I feel I missed out on the earlier ones.

Didn't Tom have a breakdown?

He did--and tried to sabotage an operation.

Backinthebox, yes you must get the earlier series - they were much better than this last one! It got a bit dull somewhere around S4 or S5, I forget which, but there have been some absolute corkers. Especially the ones with Lucas North in :)

Twigs that pic is good enough reason for anyone to buy the last three series on box set. Actually, I really enjoyed the series with Adam (not just for the view) and also all the Ros ones, I don't remember being bored by any of them.

BackintheBox - I am very impressed with your explanation. I will make it my personal challenge to use the word 'transponder' in conversation tomorrow.

The point of stealing the first laptop was to compromise all the touts in order to discredit MI5, so that Russia wouldn't consider signing the partnership deal with a bunch of incompetent half-wits.

Tariq saw that it was Elena who received the suitcase and that's why he tried to warn Harry.