Spoiler alert: this blog covers details of episode three of London Spy on BBC2. Catch up on last week’s episode with our recap here.

If there was any doubt before, there is none now: Danny is being framed, painstakingly and mercilessly, and the conspiracy is enormous. The security services of at least six countries were apparently involved in Alex’s demise, which allows Danny (and our) theories to suggest that more or less anything is possible.

The longer London Spy goes on, the more I appreciate the cleverness of its pacing and the more confident I am that loose ends will be tied. And the more convinced I am that defeat is indeed inevitable. “The story of you two has been written,” says Scottie, and there will be no happy ending, surely.

‘I knew you were a young man who’d make a lot of mistakes, but never the same one twice’ – Danny

Oh, Danny. Pulled out of a truly horrible nightmare and bundled into the police station to be bombarded with incriminating information and evidence that his flat had been bugged (evidence denied by the police, of course), and only able to muster some clearly ludicrous guff about someone hacking his handset in the warehouse. And then he has another nightmare recalling Ben Whishaw’s earlier experience in Criminal Justice. The jury might not necessarily hate him, as his charmless interrogator suggested, but they would surely convict him. I’m not sure why the police don’t detain him until the tests on the bedsheets (which even Danny seems resigned to accepting will implicate him), unless they’re allowing him time to … Well, see Scottie’s entry for my full implausible theory.

That scene in the clinic. Almost unwatchably well performed by Whishaw of course, but also by Priyanga Burford, even if I’m not sure a medical professional would have left him alone after the positive test result. Danny, awaiting the first test with almost breezy confidence, and the second with panic, paranoia and violent despair. A gut-wrenching, completely plausible switch. That said, I was a bit surprised that it took Danny’s flatmate to point out that he’d been given an antiretroviral. No shrinking violet, wouldn’t he have recognized it as such?



And no wonder Danny was so thrilled to meet Alex. Who wouldn’t want to escape that past? The drug-fuelled sex in Rich’s flat looked notably joyless, while Danny had also reluctantly dabbled in auto-asphyxiation with some guy called Steve Fields (such a random name that it had the feel of a writer’s in-joke).



Detective Taylor (Samantha Spiro). Photograph: WTTV Limited/BBC/WTTV Limited

‘There are always other people’ – Alex



The contradictory speculations about Alex continued. I know Danny is about as unreliable a narrator as there is, but I’m increasingly inclined to believe that everything we’ve heard about Alex from anyone other than Danny is at best compromised. I don’t think there were “other people”, and I do think Danny’s fears that the attic was built from Danny’s past may prove well founded.

The loyalty of Alex’s tutors does him great credit. Claire (Harriet Walter – a brief appearance, and I hope not the last) clearly thought a great deal of him, and I can only assume we’ll meet Marcus Shaw next week. He sounds like a man with the key to the puzzle. I don’t recall University College London having that level of security last time I checked, though.

But what on earth was he up to? Having made enemies of the English, French, Chinese, American, Israeli and Saudi secret services (quite the roll call), might Alex have been an Edward Snowden figure, on the cusp of releasing the motherlode of state secrets from all sorts of different countries? The mind boggles at what he could have been implicating them in.



Finally, that phone call. With Rich promising “the impossible”, could it be Alex on the other end of the line?



‘We will lose, but we will fight’ – Scottie

Another sheaf from Scottie’s back pages tonight, this one perhaps even bleaker than the last: Scottie watched helplessly as the love of his life withered away in 1983, one of the UK’s first Aids casualties (the lesions left me gasping with shock), reduced to providing fresh fruit while he dabbled in colour therapy – a little nod to Derek Jarman, there? A roundabout way to make a straightforward point, perhaps, but a very affecting one.



That Whitehall members’ club felt just right: a bunch of hypocritical, emotionally neutered old husks mired in a game of mutually assured destruction: Scottie effectively sealed his own fate by raising the stakes unacceptably high. I can only assume James (James Fox, yet more on-point casting, and already distancing himself from Scottie before the favour was asked) had his own gay skeleton rattling around a closet, allowing Scottie some leverage to extract that absolute rib-tickler. “An awful shame”, indeed. Unlike Danny, Scottie knows exactly what they’re up against, but is still persevering. There’s something very admirable about that.



And yet. I still don’t trust Scottie, mainly because the script dropped such a big hint at the end of episode one that he was a wrong ‘un, and has since worked very hard to make us think he’s on the level through a combination of soul-baring and sage advice. My current theory: having established that Danny is determined to persevere, Scottie has been ordered to find out what Danny has stolen and, if possible, crack the code. Otherwise, why work so hard to dissuade him in the past and then, with Danny on the cusp of quitting, urge him back into the fray?



Of course, the flipside would be that he’s so outraged about Danny’s treatment that he can’t hold back any longer. And he’s got a lovely, cosy-looking study.



‘Over and above everybody, I choose fun’ – Rich

Vulpine. Beady-eyed. Clammy. Epicurean. Call him what you want, but Mark Gatiss’s queasy fixer made an unforgettably poisonous impression. We probably won’t see him again, but his appearance was worth the price of entry alone. His predatory charisma – sniffing Danny like a hunter sizing up “the very particular stink” of his doe-eyed prey – was such that I worried Danny might enter into that Faustian pact, but good sense prevailed, thankfully. Can’t blame Danny for feeling like a shower afterwards, mind.

Rich (Mark Gatiss) and Danny (Ben Whishaw). Photograph: WTTV Limited/BBC/WTTV Limited

So, what do we know about Rich other than the fact that he makes Hilary Briss seem a model of charm and affability? He knew the “escort agency” symbol and didn’t much like what he saw. I can’t imagine he’s a man who scares easily, but that did the trick. I also suspect he’s exceedingly well connected, knows the dirty secrets of many powerful men and likes to be in control of everything from naive young men to the writing of his own epitaph.



“What made you change your mind?” “I didn’t.”

This underlines my fears about Scottie – someone high up has decided to steer Danny towards cracking the code in order to take control of the contents of the cylinder themselves, so Rich has just had new orders, not changed his mind. There’s not much chance that a man like him ever had a conscience in the first place, let alone found it for Danny.

London

Mostly interiors this week, but a couple of lovely locations. I’m not sure where the swimming pool was, but the sequence was a highly effective aesthetic palate cleanser, replenishing Danny and Scottie for the battle ahead (and the dingier goings-on in the sauna).

Senate House, too, was a perfect choice for this series: imposing, impassive, giving nothing away.

Rich’s chauffeur-driven approach to Danny at the end was the stuff of stalker-ish nightmares.

Notes and observations