The Thick Of It Season 4: The Humbling Of Malcolm Tucker
Much as I hate to admit it when I'm a late TV bandwagon jumper, I didn't see any of The Thick Of It until this year. In fact, when I saw the feature-film kind-of spinoff, In The Loop, I was only dimly aware of the original source material that spawned it. IN MY DEFENSE, I am not British, unlike the show, which only became legally available in this country very recently, but still, I should have tried harder. I owed it to myself, and more importantly, I owed it to you.
As great as all of In The Loop's characters are ("...difficult difficult lemon difficult," God bless you Tom Hollander), the clear standout is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the raging Labour Party fixer with the spectacular commode mouth. Malcolm is the kind of role I imagine an actor dreams of: pivotal to the production, instantly iconic, given more lines than anyone else -- most of which are extremely quotable. Malcolm is a total shit, but one who's pretty much always right, and pretty much always comes out on top. He's one of TV's greatest antiheroes and, if I may get personal, the TV character I told The Awl, earlier this year, I would most like to be.
That said, if you love Malcolm -- and I think everyone who's seen him has to love him, right? -- this latest (maybe final) season of the show could be tough to watch. For all the pleasures of seeing the show's milieu adapt in line with factual developments in contemporary British politics, the Labour party's move into Official Opposition meant that Malcolm was sidelined along with the party. Until the end of the season, Malcolm was only in every other episode; when we did see him, he had lost some of his fearsome edge. Story developments brought him back to the center in the penultimate episode, last week, as all the season's major characters were called to testify at a formal inquiry regarding the death of a Mr. Tickel, who'd been protesting the government over his removal from subsidized housing, and the leak of a damning internal DoSAC email. But in the course of testimony, a horror: Malcolm is accused of having illegally acquired the protester's confidential medical records -- and is not prepared, in the moment, with a counter-move. Eventually, he hits back by causing one of the inquiry panelists to get embroiled in a press scandal herself, but that alone is not enough to get Malcolm out of trouble, and the season finale finds Malcolm in disgrace: about to get ankled from the job we've seen him perform so beautifully/horribly, and finally surrendering to the police over his part in the Tickel incident. If this were the real world, it would probably be good for politics for a Malcolm Tucker to leave the stage. But in the world of the show, having Malcolm sidelined -- maybe even imprisoned -- is extremely disturbing. He's our guy! Were we wrong to root for him all this time, even (or especially) when he was being shitty?!
Because series creator Armando Iannucci clearly loves Malcolm like we do, he gives Malcolm one last blistering rant for us to remember him by.
In the end, Malcolm is robbed of his moment -- but seems to have a moment of clarity.
I see what they did there.
Though both Malcolm's official and unofficial statements in his final moments of Season 4 suggest that he's lost the will to fight, it seems clear that, if the show is to live on in specials or -- dare I dream? -- another film, Malcolm will find a way back into "top tier politics." For one thing, we've seen him get out of a tough spot before. For another, none of the characters that have been introduced in Season 4 is fit to replace Malcolm at the center of the action. Stewart (Vincent Franklin), Malcolm's dippy Conservative counterpart, also ended the season getting forced out of his job -- but, tantalizingly, we see him replaced by Mary Drake (Sylvestra Le Touzel), who seems like she might actually be a worthy sparring partner for Malcolm in a hypothetical future that the audience -- or this member of it, at least -- dearly needs. Just as our complicated love for David Brent earned him a warm sendoff with the sublime Office Christmas special, so does Malcolm deserve the chance to come back and destroy his enemies the way we all know he can.