I’m still hanging out for someone to provide a compelling theory for John/Lucas’ enduring interest and/or dedication and obsession with the English poet and mystic William Blake. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you may recall that it’s been a fascination of mine. I don’t know a hell of a lot about William Blake and there may not have been a precise reason for the writers to involve Blake in the Lucas/John story – but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a stab at creating one. As you can probably guess, I’m not interested in hearing about so-called character contradictions and holes in story lines and plots for this particular discussion (so please respect these parameters – if you find serious discussion of John/Lucas irritating or impossible because you think season nine was a bucket of bollocks then this discussion might not be for you). Yes, I know it’s hard, but just try your darnedest to put that aside for a moment and consider genuine theories as to how William Blake inspired, comforted, (mis)informed, or motivated John. This discussion is as much about understanding William Blake as it is about understanding John Bateman. An interest in Blake is the only solid thing we know about the character (or is it?). The floor is open..

In publishing this post it is not my intention to reopen the debate on series nine as I feel like that discussion has run its course. Whether you loved or loathed this series, you’re probably tired of talking about it by now! My intention here is simply to tie up some loose ends in my commentary that for reasons I explain in this post I was reluctant to do before. I feel weird about leaving the comments open because this piece contains a personal story, but seeing as you guys always find a way to comment even when they’re closed (you pesky thangs!), I’m keeping them open. I may change my mind about the wisdom of posting this at any moment so read it while you can. If I end up pulling it hopefully Wikileaks won’t republish it later ;)

A few weeks ago I said I would write a piece about the “plausibility” of the John/Lucas story line in series nine of Spooks. I’ve tried to write this post a number of times but have stalled at each attempt because I realise that I can’t write it without referring to a personal experience I had over a decade ago, in which I discovered that the man I was in a relationship with “was not who I thought he was”. I’ve not thought about this period in my life for a long time, however some of the dialogue between John and Maya made me pause and reflect. On two occasions their words mirrored those spoken to me by my ex-partner and the those I had said to him. The parallels, meager as they were, were hard to ignore.

Despite the passage of time, I’ve been debating whether I really ought to share this story, how much I could safely share, and indeed whether it is actually relevant to the issues of plausibility in the John/Lucas story. I guess this piece is my way of explaining why I haven’t written any more posts about John/Lucas, and why I get a a little tetchy when folks say the story was “implausible” and “unbelievable”. When heated criticism concerning the plausibility and believability of Lucas’s transition into John began to emerge, I couldn’t help but think that those who found the John/Lucas story to be implausible were lucky to not have had a life experience that would make his contrasting character believable to them.

In writing this piece it is not my intention to convince you that the John/Lucas story was plausible or believable, that’s too much of a subjective thing for us to be debating whether it was or was not plausible as if a correct answer to that question could be achieved – it can’t. The intention here is simply to reveal, as best I can, why it was tangible to me. It’s difficult to explain my story in clear terms because I’m not prepared to tell all, consequently the details I give are brief and unsatisfactory to the overall import of this post. I’m not trying to be mysterious and enigmatic here, I just feel that given the intense attention to the Lucas North character on this blog over the past 10 months, it seems appropriate to offer an explanation for the abrupt end to the commentary. It has felt disingenuous not to share the experience that has informed my thinking.

Needless to say, my ex-partner did not blow up a British embassy, steal secret files for the Chinese or murder innocent bystanders (to my knowledge!), so I’m certainly not saying that he was “like John/Lucas” in that way or that John and Maya reminded me of our relationship in any significant sense. My ex did, however, turn out to be as elusive as John/Lucas in the sense that in the end I did not know what the real character of this person was. Here’s what I’m prepared to say – this relationship occurred pre-Spooks and was my introduction to that world of official secrets and lies. Late in the relationship I learned that he had another, hidden identity which was his true identity. He was not a criminal or a fraudster, he was, as Ros Myers might say, “official”, and that’s about as much as I can confirm and say about that. He also did what seemed to me a complete character backflip and harmed and betrayed me in such a way that my trust in people and perception of reality was shattered for some time. At the time I was too intimidated by his associations with powerful people to do anything about the harm he had caused. If not for the good fortune of meeting a wonderful man a year later, I’m not sure when and if that trust would have been restored. To find out that I had been lied to over a long period of time concerning his identity, and that he could act in a way that contradicted what I thought to be his value system, was a complete mind fuck to say the least.

It’s my impression that the character inconsistencies between who we thought was Lucas and who we learned John to be was one of the most difficult parts of the story for many to swallow. We thought we knew this man to be full of virtuous, moral intentions. We watched him as Lucas act in accordance with those values for two full seasons, and then it turned out that he was John, a murdering, selfish bastard, the antithesis of who we believed him to be. The bipolarity of this character is hard to process and reconcile. For most of us, the people we know in our own lives are more or less consistent in character and behaviour. Their past behaviour is an indicator of future behaviour, and to the extent that we know the content of their character, we can imagine what they might think about certain things and understand why they might act in particular ways. To put it simply, they make sense. John/Lucas, in the end, did not make sense. I imagine that this lack of sense is what made the John/Lucas story particularly unbelievable to some people.

My ex-partner did not make sense, the pieces of the puzzle did not fit together to make a comprehensible “believable” picture. I never had a “Maya moment” of realisation in which the jumbled picture before me finally become a decipherable image. The more I learned the less sense he made – but he did exist, he was a real person. When he called one day wanting to see me so that he could “tell me everything”, win me back, and make that picture a little clearer, I declined. I was done. By that point I had already learned that his true identity was concealed, and that I could not continue in a relationship with someone who kept so many secrets, even if he was justified in doing so. I was not prepared for his secrets to become my own (my value system trumped my curiosity in this case, it was a surprisingly easy decision), so that clearer picture I never did see, and the truth about him remains a complete mystery to this day.

His intangibility is (partly) what made John/Lucas tangible to me. I did not find the “failure” to depict a coherent character reason to view the story that unfolded as implausible. In my experience, some people really are that fallacious. One could argue that it was the job of Spooks to convince its audience that this is the case, fair enough. One could also argue that the mystery and apparent incoherence of John/Lucas was an invitation, a deliberate challenge to the audience to try and create a comprehensible picture of this character, to create intrigue, rather than a character assassination or lazy writing, which many feel it to be. Which is fine, each to their own. As I mentioned earlier, there is no correct answer to the plausibility question.

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and depicting strange truths on screen does not always work. The John/Lucas story was not a true story, but even if it were, it still might have been difficult to believe simply because he did not make sense. Real, non-fiction stories from the real world of espionage are filled with people who weren’t what they seemed to their colleagues. And some of these stories are hard to believe. The case of Robert Hanssen, the CIA agent who spied for the Russians, comes to mind. I don’t mention Hanssen to imply that the John/Lucas story is plausible, but rather to suggest that the development of the John/Lucas story may have been influenced by the long history of spies with secret hidden lives that their spy colleagues did not know about. The obvious one is that of the double agent, like Hanssen. Perhaps Spooks gave this kind of story a twist with John/Lucas. In the end, the question of John/Lucas plausibility, on an individual level, might come down to the extent his character “inconsistencies” made sense with our own sensibilities, expectations and inclination to digest and rationalise that which seems unbelievable.

And this is where my commentary on this matter ends. On a final note, one of the takeaways from the sorry saga of the relationship I was in is that my eyes were opened to the hidden corners of this world that operate under our noses yet out of sight. They were opened not only to the fact that things are done in the shadows and in our name by the institutions of our nation states, but also to the entities that do things not in our name, supposedly in our interests, who have no mandate to do so (yep, I just went all X-files “dark men” on ya). Some of the things I was exposed to during this time has influenced my belief that Wikileaks is a good thing. The more secrets a man has the more they hallow out his core and leave a shell (perhaps John/Lucas had no core self in the end, and latched onto Maya for a mirror of himself that he could hang on too. I’m starting to think that the name Maya was chosen deliberately). If secrets can do this to a man, what could they do to a nation? JFK has some compelling thoughts on this question.

The truth is out there?