Wow.
Another riveting performance by Rhys Ifans in Episode 7.
Just when it seems he cannot get any better or more amazing, he tops his previous effort.
Am so glad the director(s) have the sense to do a number of close-ups on Hector's face when he's got key scenes. So you can see every nuanced expression more easily.
Man, he owns this show. :-)))
Also, just an impression from a couple of quick scenes in episodes 6 and 7, but there were some emotional embraces between Hector and Daniel and in one scene in episode 7 I think, Daniel really gave Hector a couple of intense stares and held his eyes for a moment. It was subtely done and given what was going on with Clare, not out of place in a fraught series of scenes.
But with this complex relationship Hector and Daniel seem to have from boyhood, and from Chechnya, etc., and with Hector's somewhat fluid sexuality, it made me wonder if we are going to find out later that Hector and Daniel had a relationshp of sorts when they were young?
The way some of these scenes between them are played, it comes off subtely like people who were involved at one time, because there is a subtext of tension running through their scenes that seems to be more than work related. If so, well acted by both to convey this.
Just a thought given some brief but intense looks--but it would make their cat and mouse game have a deeper context if they have a sexual history.
OFF TOPIC SLIGHTLY: With "Hinterland" series 3 currently airing on S4C, and with Ifans on screen in BS, it made me really wonder how amazing he'd have been as the Mathias character in "Hinterland"! Harrington has done a fine job making the character of Mathias his own. But now, just thinking about what Ifans would have done with Mathias, it boggles the mind. ha.
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Sluggr-3
8 years ago
I think that Daniel and Hector share a common "foxhole" bond where you have a special bond forever to the guy you faced death with. It has taken a number of episodes for Daniel to see through Hector's facade for what is really going on. That being said, if we look at all the other players, each is being somewhat duplicitous in their own ways, with the giving of secrets to Israel, the fake agent accounts, the German agent trying to turn Daniel, etc. If anything, it seems that Hector may be the only one doing it for ideology.
My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2
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CobblersAwls
8 years ago
That's an interesting thought.
For good drama, it's sometimes great to make the guy who putatively wears the black hat be the guy who acts purely from an ideological and principled stance. Ergo, that might be Hector in this scenario. He's the only "honorable" actor here?
Whereas, all the folks who should be able to wear the white hats with honor are the ones who are cutting corners, acting outside the law, or outside ethical principles, etc., at Berlin Station.
So, then, who really IS the "bad guy" black hat in these scenarios? An age-old dramatic technique, that.
And one that Olen does seem to like, because his Yalta Boulevard series of novels does use that theme quite a bit.
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macktan894
8 years ago
Rhys, so far, is owning this show which makes me comment thusly: He better not be killed off. Right now, he is my favorite character and I cannot imagine BS without him. IE...he better not "accidentally fall or purposely jump."
No, I don't think Hector and Daniel have any kind of sexual relationship. I believe Daniel doesn't trust Hector, has distrusted him from the start, and hasn't been able to work out why. His volunteering to dog Hector when he left to find Clare was done so out of suspicion, largely. He knows that Hector is an agent who has no qualms about going off the reservation in pursuit of his own agenda.
But now Daniel has figured it out about Hector, his other identity. But will Daniel turn him in? His German counterpart, the one he slept with, observed that he often sounded like Shaw himself when he expressed remorse about returning Lin to China after intelligence had drained him of all his secrets. Daniel is also conflicted and angry, still, about his mother's death. Could be that Daniel will not expose Hector because of his own sympathies and doubts.
Will Daniel turn out to be a "company man" as Hector called him, or a principled man?
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CobblersAwls
8 years ago
All of the above Macktan.
We all were discussing in another thread how so VERY quickly Rhys Ifan began to utterly own this show and everybody in it. In fact, hey Olen, just get rid of all the other characters (well, maybe, except for Valerie because she tells all her obnoxious bosses to f-off. haha)
That series of Hector scenes in Episode 7 were a masters class in acting. Or, perhaps more apt, it's a masters class in how to act without looking like you are acting. ha
I just sit through other scenes saying lalalalalala until Hector arrives on screen, then it's game on.
Daniel may all along have been the wild card rebel? So guess it's possible Daniel is in charge of the investigation sent in sureptitiously to the Berlin station to keep the investigation about himself under control.
Or not.
Did anybody else have the sense at the end of the Hector interrogation that we viewers (and Daniel and Foster) might have been totally taken in by his handling of it in general and especially the way he acted after the scopolamine?
Did Hector puposely overplay the scopolamine effect, admitting to all kinds of things in order to give credence to the fact that it was making him tell the truth?
Because, while the things he admitted to were in fact pretty bad things, it strikes me that none of them would get him imprisoned if the agency were able to justify his behavior while trying to save Clare in the line of duty.
However, on the ONE question that could actually get Hector a treason charge by admitting he's Shaw, he sits up with GREAT clarity of all a sudden and says...NO. Simple as can be. Clear as a bell.
At that point, I nearly fell off the chair and wanted to yell at the screen, "Hector!!! You were f-ing with us the whole time!!!" :-))
Was he messing with the interrogator (and everybody he figured was watching) during the interrogatio and also at the end? It seemed so.
Rhys did a great job of the demeanor change when he said "NO." And he had a kind of hint of smug satisfaction too, which seemed to give away his act.
Lord, Rhys is brilliant.
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