Sandbaggers, The - Series 2

A customer from Co.Durham England , 08/08/2006

it was a good spy series wish they would make more like it

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Thomas Kane from Hull, England , 05/11/2006

The Sandbaggers stands out among espionage dramas for its realism, its intriguing storylines and its three-dimensional characters. Series Two follows the obsessively dedicated spymaster Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) as he oversees new clandestine operations, defends his branch of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against lethal bureaucratic mismanagement and privately confronts the emotional aftermath of his decisions in Series One. As the series goes on, Neil loses one after another of his most valuable colleagues, and not only to enemy bullets. Action addicts may complain that the second series dwells on Neil’s angst and SIS bureaucracy longer than strictly necessary. This show’s virtues, however, outweigh any of this particular series’ faults.

The realism of this show goes beyond believable premises and flawed characters. Visually, Sandbaggers captures the look of Cold War Europe in all its drab menace. Scenes of a Stalin-era skyscraper looming over Warsaw in a haze of dirty snow alternate with images of a London which, despite busier streets, also shows signs of decrepitude. Ethical issues come in similar shades of grey. Better yet, Sandbaggers writer Ian Mackintosh avoids the trap of simulating moral complexity simply by harping on the point that Western intelligence agencies do many of the same unpleasant things as their opponents.

Mackintosh develops his plots and his characters fully enough to offer fully developed ethical dilemmas as well. Viewers of the more polemical BBC series Spooks (shown in the USA under the title MI-5) will be interested to note that Mackintosh’s American characters are not always the least scrupulous. Moreover, although Sandbaggers lacks simplistic heroes and villains, its main characters have a real enemy. As Neil occasionally points out, he and his colleagues operate in the shadow of the KGB. The tension and realistic complexities of this show have the far greater tension and complexity of the Cold War as their backdrop, and Sandbaggers reminds us of how that struggle seemed when the outcome was still very much in doubt.

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