http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/arts/television/in-worricker-and-the-game-betrayal-always-lurks.html 2014-11-07 00:40:21 In ‘Worricker’ and ‘The Game,’ Betrayal Always Lurks “Worricker,” starring Bill Nighy, is a disquisition on misdeeds in the war on terrorism, while “The Game” features a good old-fashioned villain. === “The island is interesting for its flora and fauna.” That line is so bland it sounds like an enunciation exercise for English-language students, or, possibly, terrorist code for an imminent attack. Actually, as pronounced by the actor Bill Nighy, the words are deliciously rich in irony and elliptical portent. Mr. Nighy, who plays the British spy Johnny Worricker, is the main reason to watch Plot isn’t: Like Part 1, There is at least one other espionage option that is more enticing and not quite as pious: “Worricker” owes a huge debt to Mr. le Carré’s later novels, written after the Cold War ended, especially two that were made into movies, Mr. Hare, who has excoriated American foreign policy in plays like “Page Eight” set the scene: Johnny is an upper-class, burned-out but righteous MI5 analyst who is struggling to expose the crooked dealings of a hawkish, pro-American prime minister, Alec Beasley, modeled on Tony Blair and played by Ralph Fiennes. In “The Game,” set in the ’70s, the Soviet Union is still a superpower, so there is actually an enemy outside the fold, not just swindlers, traitors and faithless allies who wreak havoc from within (though there is at least one mole deep inside the higher echelons of British intelligence). Joe (Tom Hughes) is a spy pulled back from the cold. After a mission in Poland falls apart, he is rescued and given a second chance, but it’s not entirely clear which side he is really on. Inside MI5, he is certainly not one of us: He has a northern accent, which marks him as an outsider to the Oxford-Cambridge establishment. Then again, anyone inside the department, including its chief, could harbor divided loyalties; even the chief is having an affair with a Chinese dancer. Soviet spies in raincoats and trilby hats may seem a little dated, but in the era of Vladimir Putin, they are not entirely far-fetched. “The Game,” which looks a little like another BBC period thriller, “The Hour,” is a cleverly conceived throwback to a time when the Soviet Union was a truly scary riddle wrapped in a nuclear arsenal. “Turks and Caicos,” by contrast, is more or less contemporary and set in a high-end Caribbean resort frequented by low-life New Jersey businessmen and Worricker, who is on the run from British intelligence after standing up to Beasley. Christopher Walken is amusing as an eccentric C.I.A. operative, and Winona Ryder does a creepy impersonation of a ’40s film-noir vamp, but Sunday’s episode is weighed down by too many caricatures and clichés. The final episode, “Salting the Battlefield,” is set in Europe, and adds some interesting developments and great performances by Judy Davis and Mr. Fiennes, but not much more suspense or mystery. Mr. Hare doesn’t want to puzzle and intrigue viewers, but to hammer home his outrage over Britain’s contribution to the invasion of Iraq and the United States’ secret prisoner It’s not that Mr. Hare is wrong — the Tony Blair government But this spy parable is too preachy and heavy-handed. Mr. Hare evidently cannot allow that Mr. Blair acted out of principle, however misguidedly. Instead, in this fictionalized version, Mr. Hare posits that greed, self-interest and a slush fund were the real motives. He is not alone: Robert Harris, who wrote a roman à clef about Mr. Blair, In her memoir, Margaret Thatcher complained about her country’s “Suez syndrome,” a wound to national pride that is now part of British DNA. In the earlier phases of the Cold War, before Britain had fully felt the loss of empire, the most potent symbols of betrayal were the real-life Cambridge spies who secretly worked for Moscow, notably Later, the Americans, known as “the cousins,” loomed as a more insidious enemy and still do. C.I.A. perfidy undermines British honor and tradecraft in spy stories including Mostly, viewers can trust that Mr. Nighy will deliver the most subtle, colorful performance that can be squeezed out of a sermon.