My wife and I just tried starting it because we’d heard good things (we struggle to find shows we like). It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, I had the impression that it was more of a character driven series and more light hearted, with the spy stuff being less of a focus.
We are not into procedurals or spy stuff at all, but even with that I found the internal logic of the show kind of ridiculous. If you’re going to do spy stuff then the whole point is to have tight, intricate plotting that shows off the complexity of the setting and the skill of the agents. The first episode was just constantly annoying me with dumb plot points. Why was the agent only given a very basic verbal description of the target rather than an image? Why wasn’t the comms between him and the handler recorded to verify who said what? The fact that it was a training scenario didn’t match at all with the intensity of the agent’s actions. He just casually commits treason by breaking into the secure suitcase. There were no protocols or communication about how he laptop was being transported so nobody realised he’d broken into it. Just nonsensical, lazy writing in a genre that lives and dies on its internal logic and believability.
Sorry for the rant, it just really bugged me.
Yeah when they drop that after the fact in the first episode I was like uh wtf that makes no sense, why would that guy go completely rogue like that for a training exercise? And then the entire reason he gets shitcanned is because the other guy lied about getting the description wrong… are you seriously expecting me to believe that MI5 are doing training exercises like this and not recording all of the communications for analysis and training later?!? It’s idiotic, just no respect for the audience’s intelligence at all.