Everyone dies sooner or later. And if you have the misfortune to appear on MI-5 (Spooks), your chances of going "sooner" are greatly enhanced. ...As are your chances of going horrifically.
Though there have been a few killings on this show that felt gratifying, I admit -- such as those prompted by vengeance after one or another of our team members were killed -- generally all the deaths on Spooks are disturbing. However, to narrow that list down a bit : ) I am including the deaths that are not just disturbing in the ordinary way, but shocking or upsetting on a magnitude that lasted for days... Deaths that seemed particularly wrong or unfair - - deaths that have burned images in my mind that may live there a while along with a strong residual emotional reaction.
Oh, by the way, big time SPOILERS in this post for various episodes up to Series (season) 8 -- but none for Series 10.
The List:
Helen in Series 1, Episode 2: I can still hardly type what happened to her. The scene where she was plunged, first her hand, then her head into the deep fat fryer was astonishingly horrible. Haunted me for days. Add to the sheer horror that someone actually dreamed up this idea, that they applied it to a newbie agent on her first field mission. Wow.
Samuel Walker getting tossed over a balcony in Series 8, Episode 4. He was a minor character, sure, but he had just been introduced and was just starting to gel . . . and I was definitely finding him sympathetic, not to mention the major bonus that the British actor who plays him, Brian Protheroe, was brilliant as an American -- neither his accent nor his style were too over the top. He really got how to play American. Then, boom. Dead. And not just any dead, but tossed over a railing for a 20 story drop flailing all the way down dead. Way out of the blue, that scene was a conscionce-shocker.
In Series 5, Episode 1, Poor Colin should not have had to die. He worked in the office on computers for heaven's sake. Its one thing when the field officers who are knowingly risking their lives are put in jeopardy but another when a sweet innocent lovely man like Colin gets it. And to be hung in a tree in the woods is all just too much. No, this one was way too jarring.
Ros & Home Secretary Andrew Lawrence dying together in Series 8, Episode 8. So unfair to give Ros this great new spark of chemistry with the very coolly-awkward-in-a-Hugh-Grant-sort-of-way Home Secretary and then kill them both by making him paralyzed dead weight that she couldn't rescue. Watching the explosion while Lucas is running back in to save her was horrible. Hated that Ros had to die being ineffective. Yes, of course she was brave here, but she should have been allowed to die diffusing a bomb or actually saving the H.S..
The teenage boy, Dean Mitchell, who Lucas spends the show protecting in Series 7, Episode 6: This was a powerful episode in which Lucas and Dean were a fascinating pair struggling and unraveling and fleeing. To get to a place of almost resolution, to reunite him with his mom, and then get them on the threshold of safety -- only to shoot him in the head in front of Lucas and to watch his mom grieve -- is deeply disturbing and one of the saddest moments in Spooks.
Ben Series 7, Episode 7. This one struck me as (in the Colin mode) just so unfair and out of the blue for someone who didn't have it coming. Ben was just looking through files in the Spooks basement (or whereever the heck he was) and "we" had no reason to be on our guard. To have the double shocker of Connie being discovered as the evil mole and then having her kill him by slitting his neck with a piece of a file (I think that's what it was) was horifying.
If I'm missing some other important glaringly horrible death let me know.
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