The F.B.I., season one part one (1965)

The F.B.I. was one of the many hit TV series in the action/adventure genre made by Quinn Martin Productions in the 1960s. In fact it was the most successful of all Quinn Martin’s productions, running for nine seasons from 1965 to 1974. The F.B.I. has been released on DVD in half-season sets and it’s the first part of season one with which this review is concerned.

In this series we always know the identity of the perpetrator right from the start, so these are inverted crime stories. This is also very much in the police procedural mould, with the interest lying in the methods used by the F.B.I. to hunt down wrongdoers.

The two lead characters are Inspector Lewis Erskine (Efrem Zimbalist Jr) and Special Agent Jim Rhodes (Stephen Brooks). Erskine is the old hand and he’s a complex character with some personal tragedies that he’s still working through. Rhodes is a young hotshot but he’s a decent guy and the two agents have a very amicable relationship.

You have to remember that this series originated in 1965 and in 1965 the idea of a series that painted the F.B.I. in an entirely heroic light seemed pretty reasonable. And this series really does present a very very favourable view of the Bureau. It was made with the blessing of J. Edgar Hoover (who was still F.B.I. Director at the time).

The fact that the series began its run in 1965 really is quite important. The F.B.I. deals with all sorts of crimes and this includes political crimes. In 1965 it could be assumed that any political crime would almost certainly be the work of communist agents working for Moscow. And it could be assumed that these communist agents would be working class. This is 1965, just before the social revolution of the 60s. Within a couple of years the F.B.I. would be looking for subversives at university campuses rather than among dock workers.

Social and sexual mores were also about to change radically. In the first season Erskine’s daughter Barbara and Special Agent Rhodes have fallen in love and want to get married. Erskine wants her to wait until she finishes college. Barbara and Rhodes want to get married straight away. Within a few years a senior F.B.I. officer like Inspector Erskine would be delighted by anything that would get his daughter away from the subversive atmosphere of university.

The Episode Guide
The Monster was a rather bizarre opening episode for any series. A con-man named Francis Jerome (Jeffrey Hunter) has escaped from a federal prison. Jerome preys on women. What the F.B.I. don’t know is that he also kills women. Jerome is a seriously weird guy with a weird history.

Erskine is convinced that Jerome will return to his home town. He also suspects that he will try to make contact with one of his previous victims, Jean Davis. There’s some rather odd flirtatious stuff going on between Jean Davis and Erskine. In fact Jean Davis is pretty seriously weird as well. This is just a weird episode.

Image in a Cracked Mirror is a lot better. Erskine and Rhodes are hunting an embezzler. Charles Gates (Jack Klugman) has covered his tracks well. He has managed to destroy every photograph that has ever been taken of him. No-one really seems to know what he looks like. He’s now on the run with his 13-year-old son and that could be his weakness. It’s a weakness that Erskine is prepared to exploit with a ruthlessness that shocks Rhodes. Erskine has an odd personal stake in this case because Gates reminds him of himself. A very good episode.

A Mouthful of Dust is like a flashback to the Wild West, with Erskine and Rhodes saddling up (with six-guns in their gun belts) to join a posse tracking down an Indian. Joe Cloud (Alejandro Rey) is accused of killing a man who raped his wife. Erskine had been Cloud’s commanding officer in Korea and Cloud turns to Erskine for help. Erskine doesn’t want to let Joe down, but he does. Can he then put things right? Can Cloud be persuaded to save himself? Rey’s performance is OK but the Argentina-born actor’s very strong accent is rather wrong and jarring. Italian-American Robert Blake is no more Native American than Rey but he pulls off the important rôle of Joe’s brother Pete Cloud much more successfully. An offbeat episode that works, up to a point.

Slow March Up a Steep Hill is a case of history repeating itself, or at least it seems like it. A bank in Exeter Maryland is robbed and the same bank is robbed again three days later. Everything about these robberies seems to parallel a similar case in 1938. And the 1938 bank robber has just been released from prison. Erskine trusts his instincts on this one. Everyone thinks he’s on the wrong track but he won’t compromise. An excellent episode.

The Insolents involves a very rich young man accused of murder. Special Agent Rhodes seems to have a personal stake in this case. It’s a mystery that appears to have only one solution but what if that solution is the wrong one? This time around it’s Rhodes who has to trust his instincts. Not a bad episode.

In To Free My Enemy Erskine has been trying to find evidence to convict pornographer Bert Anslem. Now his suspect has been kidnapped by a trio of cheap punks and Erskine has to save him. By saving him he may also be helping him to escape justice. But Erskine has no choice. He has to do his best to save Anslem. A good episode with with some cool police procedural stuff.

Given the priorities of the F.B.I. in the sixties it’s perhaps surprising that it’s not until the seventh episode, The Problem of the Honorable Wife, that the evil commies make their first appearance. They’re planing to sabotage the U.S. war effort in Vietnam by planting bombs on the San Francisco dockside. One of the saboteurs is married to a Japanese woman and she unwittingly puts the Feds on her husband’s trail. This is an episode in which Special Agent Rhodes, who is basically a decent young guy, feels just a little uncomfortable about working for the F.B.I. This is quite an interesting episode.

In Courage of a Conviction Lew Erskine should be a very happy man. He’s just caught up with a master forger who has eluded all law enforcement agencies for years. He’s a forger on the grand scale and it’s quite a feather in Erskine’s cap. But he’s not happy. It’s all because of a girl he saw in Ray Lang’s office. The girl is a junkie and Ray is a lawyer who has been supplying the F.B.I. with quality information for years. Ray and Lew are also old buddies. But what is Ray Lang doing with a junkie? As he connects the dots Lew realises  that the unshakeable case he had against that forgery suspect isn’t so unshakeable after all. This is one of a number of episodes that emphasises two key things about Lew Erskine. Firstly, he trusts his instincts no matter what. And secondly, he will risk his own career rather than see a man convicted if he becomes convinced that the man is innocent. Of course it not emphasises Erskine’s high moral standards but also those of the Bureau (and emphasising the honesty and probity of the F.B.I. was a pretty good idea for a series that relied heavily on the coöperation and goodwill of J. Edgar Hoover).

The Exiles would appear to be inspired by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Exiles from a certain Latin American nation are planning to launch an invasion to overthrow the ruling dictator. The F.B.I. have to persuade the leader of the exiles, General Rafael Romero, not to go ahead with the invasion. It’s not that the U.S. government doesn’t want the dictator overthrown but the F.B.I. has intelligence that indicates that the invasion is guaranteed to be a messy and expensive failure and therefore very embarrassing to the U.S., especially given that the invasion is planned to be launched from Florida.

This is an intriguing one. General Romero and his private army (and his rich backer Maria Blanca) are not portrayed as being the bad guys, in fact they’re portrayed as heroes,  and yet they have to be stopped at all costs. And Erskine has to infiltrate Romero’s group and betray them. This is a surprisingly ethically complex tale and it’s also surprisingly realistic in depicting international relations as a frustrating quagmire. A very fine episode.

The Giant Killer is a total hoot. A fanatic is trying to sabotage a U.S. ballistic missile being transported by road to an Air Force base. This is not just a regular nuclear missile. This is a brand new design and it’s immensely important. If this missile is sabotaged the whole free world will be endangered and world communism will triumph. The paranoia is approaching Dr Strangelove levels in this episode. On the other hand it’s certainly exciting and the idea that a lone fanatic with a rifle can destroy a ballistic missile is intriguing. Robert Duvall is at his crazed best as the lone fanatic. The epilog to this episode is absolutely beyond belief. Dr Strangelove himself would have been embarrassed. A bizarre but weirdly and morbidly fascinating episode.

In All the Streets Are Silent automatic weapons are stolen from the U.S. Marine Corps. Erskine persuades cab driver Frankie Metro to turn informant but informing on the Murtaugh brothers is dangerous work. This one includes a fairly spectacular shoot-out. A pretty good episode.

An Elephant Is Like a Rope presents Erskine and Rhodes with an odd problem. They have a young man with a bullet wound in the head. He’s going to make a full recovery but is suffering from compete amnesia. So he can’t tell the G-Men where the half million dollars in his possession came from. There’s no actual evidence that he has committed any crime. The half million dollars seems to be clean. A strange little offbeat story but it works.

How to Murder an Iron Horse is somewhat silly but very enjoyable. It taps into 1950s obsessions that bad child-rearing practices were going to turn kids into juvenile delinquents. And this is really a typical 50s B-movie juvenile delinquent story with some bizarre diabolical criminal mastermind flourishes thrown in. A young man whose father was more interested in his model trains than his son now wants to blow up trains. Not model trains, real trains. And he demonstrates that he can indeed blow up a freight train. If he isn’t paid $100,000 he threatens to blow up a passenger train. It’s all quite crazy but if you like trains and explosions you’ll enjoy it.

Pound of Flesh is one of the few episodes in which we’re not sure of the identity of the criminal. The chaplain’s wife at an army base is murdered. Private First Class Byron Landy is the obvious suspect and there really isn’t much doubt of his guilt. In fact Erskine and Rhodes wouldn’t have any doubts about the case themselves if only Landy hadn’t confessed. But the confession really seemed bogus and now the two F.B.I. men are more or less convinced of his innocence. Unfortunately the media, the civilian authorities in the nearby town, the base commander and the top brass in the Pentagon just want a quick arrest and Erskine and Rhodes are put under extreme pressure. Of course if you try to put Lew Erskine under pressure like that he just gets really really stubborn. A very good episode with a good performance by Leslie Nielsen as the chaplain blinded by hatred.

The Hijackers is a rather light-hearted episode involving a truck hijacking which is actually a practical joke gone wrong. This one tries to combine whimsicality with sentimentality. The results are not as bad as you might anticipate.

The Forests of the Night deals with a fundamentalist Christian sect victimised by an extortionist on top of having to deal with less than sympathetic neighbours. When you’re dealing with such subject matter there’s always the risk of becoming preachy and that’s what happens here. This is crude hate-filled propaganda that portrays rural people as knuckle-dragging redneck bigots. A shockingly bad episode.

Final Thoughts
It’s easy to mock this series. There’s plenty of full-on hysteria about evil commies and the whole country seems to be overflowing with fifth columnists and foreign agents. But this is how reality looked to most people in 1965. There’s a sincerity about the series that tends to win you over. Erskine and Rhodes and their colleagues at the Bureau are brave dedicated men and they’re thorough professionals. This is basically a police procedural. We pretty much always know who the bad guys are right from the start so the interest lies in the methods used to track down the criminals. There’s some high-tech stuff but mostly Erskine and Rhodes rely on hard work and patient methodical routine investigative procedures. These guys do not give up. One of the things I really love is seeing the technical side of law enforcement in 1965 – it’s all still delightfully analog! To find a fingerprint match you go through thousands of fingerprints on file, and you go through them with a magnifying glass!

The series is a fascinating time capsule with a slightly melancholy edge – the American  society depicted in the first season in 1965 had to a large extent ceased to exist by the time the series ended its run in 1974.

The F.B.I. is a slightly odd series.  The tone is sometimes very serious, occasionally quite dark, and at other times light-hearted and even whimsical. The scripts are however mostly clever and well-constructed and often quite original and the execution is always top-notch. There are unfortunately occasional signs of the preachiness that was already starting to infect American television (signs that are also all too apparent in another contemporary Quinn Martin production, The Fugitive). Production values are high. Efrem Zimbalist Jr has real star quality. This was, like most Quinn Martin productions, very well-made television.

Recommended.

The Time Tunnel (1966-67), part two

The first part of this post appeared back in April.

The Time Tunnel was released on DVD in two half-series sets (and later as a complete series set). The second half-season set opens with The Revenge of Robin Hood pitching Doug and Tony into the middle of the tumultuous quarrel between King John and his barons in 1215, and Doug and Tony will have to help in an attempt to free Robin Hood from the clutches of the king. This one is kind of fun.

Visitors from Beyond the Stars propels Doug and Tony into the past but with a futuristic touch. They’re caught up in an attempted alien invasion of a small town in Arizona in 1885. The silver-skinned aliens with their robotic speech patterns might seem silly but they’re really mean. They want protein. Lots of protein. In fact they want all of the Earth’s protein. They intend to leave nothing living behind them.

Meanwhile General Kirk, back at the time tunnel control centre, is getting very excited by UFOs. This was 1967 and the UFO craze was still a huge thing.

And just to make sure there’s sufficient mayhem, the local Apaches are about to launch a large-scale raid on the town.

The goofy silver makeup and the kitschy spaceship are major highlights. I couldn’t help liking this one despite its very high silliness content.

Kill Two by Two drops Doug and Tony onto a tiny Pacific atoll, which is not very far from a slightly larger atoll called Iwo Jima. It’s February 1945 and things are about to get rather hot and our time travellers are going to be in the middle of an extremely fierce battle. But they have more immediate problems to worry about – they have to fight their own private little war with two Japanese soldiers who are the only troops left on their tiny island.

This is a tense episode but it also has some emotional depth. There are questions of honour and it turns out that there are worse things than death, like forgetting who you are. One of the best episodes of the series.

The Ghost of Nero is an oddity. Our time travellers have landed in the middle of the First World War, on the Italian Front in 1915. They’re in a villa belonging to an Italian nobleman who claims to be a descendant of Galba, emperor of Rome (very briefly) after the overthrow and death of Nero. The Germans are planning to use the villa as an artillery observation post. The German officer in charge is played as a typical cruel sadistic thug and things are looking grim for Doug and Tony and for Count Galba.

This is all rather strange. In 1915 Italy was not even at war with Germany (although the Italians were at war with Germany’s Austro-Hungarian allies). I get the impression that the scriptwriter also assumed that the Germans in the First World War were pretty much the same as the Nazis.

But that’s not the end of the strangeness, since Nero’s ghost is stalking the villa, in fulfilment of Nero’s dying curse. His ghost is there since Nero’s tomb is in the basement of the villa. The fact that the historical bits about Nero (and all the historical bits in this episode) are not exactly historical and are in fact pretty much fantasy is a bit of a worry since The Time Tunnel is a series that usually tries not to depart too outrageously from history. And it’s also a series that at least pretends to be true science fiction with no fantasy or supernatural elements. The appearance of a ghost is therefore very disconcerting.

And there’s also a guest appearance by Mussolini! This episode is totally insane. Is it insane in a good way or a bad way? I’m still not really sure. All I can say for certain is that scriptwriter Leonard Stadd really really hates Germans.

The Walls of Jericho is, as the title suggests, a Bible story. Giving a science fictional treatment to Scripture was perhaps a little risky back in 1967 but it manages to be quite respectful without being too stridently preachy. It’s an episode that couldn’t be done at all today since it comes down firmly on the side of faith. It’s quite cleverly done, with Doug and Tony finding themselves cast as the two spies sent by Joshua to infiltrate Jericho. This is one episode where the sudden appearance of oddly dressed strangers who claim to be from another time doesn’t actually surprise anybody. The Israelites assume they’re messengers of the Lord while in Jericho it’s assumed that they’re sorcerers.

It’s a story that could easily have come to grief but it’s more successful than you might anticipate. Full credit must go to James Darren and Robert Colbert, and also to Whit Bissell, who express a quite sense of belief without making an embarrassing song and dance about it. Myrna Fahey is good as the harlot Rahab who shelters the two presumed spies and Australian actor Michael Pate has fun as the hardbitten lecherous captain of the guard in Jericho.

Idol of Death lands Doug and Tony in Mexico in 1519 where the conquistador Cortes is searching for a golden mask sacred to the local Indians. Possession of the mask will make his conquest that much easier. Doug and Tony however team up with a young Indian chief to thwart the wicked Spaniards. Fairly entertaining.

Billy the Kid obviously lands Doug and Tony in New Mexico during Billy the KId’s short but busy career as an outlaw. This is one of those episodes that centres around the central truth of time travel (as far as The Time Tunnel is concerned) that history cannot be altered. So Doug cannot kill Billy the Kid, even though that’s what he has just done. On the other hand Billy the Kid can certainly kill Doug or Tony without altering history.

In Pirates of Deadman’s Island Doug and Tony fall into the hands of pirates in 1805, just as a United States Navy squadron under Stephen Decatur is about to attack the Barbary pirates. The pirates also have in their hands the nephew of the King of Spain. The Barbary Wars represent a colourful and somewhat neglected episode in American history, which happens to make a pretty good basis for a Time Tunnel adventure. The episode is a bit corny and contrived but it’s a pirate tale so that just adds to the fun.

Chase Through Time is one of the episodes in which the time travellers travel forward rather than backward in time. In fact they land a million years in the future, in a human society modelled on bees. There’s also the added difficulty that a spy in the present day has planted a nuclear bomb in the time tunnel complex and has escaped into the future as well. Doug and Tony have to chase him across a million years of time to force him to reveal the location of the bomb. If the bomb goes off they will never get back to their own time. This story tries hard for breathless excitement and it succeeds reasonably well.

The Death Merchant is an attempt to get clever, with an extra unauthorised time traveller tagging along. A kind of stowaway in time. The stowaway is Niccòlo Machiavelli. The evilest man who ever lived! Which is of course grossly unfair to poor old Machiavelli. In any case somehow or other the Time Tunnel has accidentally plucked Machiavelli from sixteenth century Italy and dropped him onto the battlefield of Gettysburg in 1863. Where he proceeds to wreak havoc, and it’s not easy for Doug and Tony to stop him since Tony got a blow on the head and now he thinks he’s a Confederate officer and he thinks Doug is a damned Yankee. Machiavelli’s presence has also overloaded the Time Tunnel. So this is an episode with a lot going on and it actually doesn’t work too badly. It’s actually thoroughly enjoyable.

Attack of the Barbarians lands Doug and Tony in another fine mess, right in the middle of Genghiz Khan’s Mongol hordes. Well actually Genghiz Khan is now dead which sort of makes things worse since there’s now a war between his successor, Kublai Khan, and his grandson Batu. Doug and Tony throw in their lot with Kublai Khan’s great general Marco Polo. Tony also finds time to fall in love with Kublai Khan’s daughter. This episode is notable for Dr Ann MacGregor (Lee Meriwether) losing her grip completely and deciding that Tony should be left in the thirteenth century because he had found True Love. John Saxon gets a more straightforwardly heroic role than usual as Marco Polo. Marco Polo’s forces are heavily outnumbered. If only they had some gunpowder! It’s a reasonably fun episode.

In Merlin the Magician Doug and Tony help to launch the career of a young English king named Arthur Pendragon. They fight Vikings on his behalf and they play a part in introducing him to a young lady named Guinevere. The main problem here is that the guest stars don’t quite have the stature or the presence to convince as larger-than-life characters like King Arthur or Merlin.

In The Kidnappers a time traveller from the future kidnaps one of the Time Tunnel’s key personnel – Dr Ann MacGregor. General Kirk takes a gamble, sending Doug and Tony to the same future time to which Dr MacGregor has been taken. They find a highly advanced civilisation several thousands years in the future. A highly advanced civilisation, but perhaps not a very humane one.

Raiders from Outer Space is very silly. Doug and Tony find themselves in the middle of a war between the British and the followers of the Mahdi in the Sudan in 1883 but there is a third party involved as well – aliens who are trying to destroy the Earth as part of a game. There’s some outrageous hammy acting from the guest cast, and some truly atrocious alien make-up effects. On the other hand there’s lots of action and it has a certain 1950s Z-grade sci-fi movie charm.

In Town of Terror it is 1978 in Cliffport Maine and alien invaders are about to steal all the Earth’s oxygen. This is another episode weakened by very poor makeup effects. The liens have also taken over the townspeople, which could have given the story an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work since that would require some uncertainty about who is an alien and who isn’t, and that’s all too obvious. Not a really successful episode.

Overall The Time Tunnel is a rather underrated series. It’s no sillier than the average television science fiction series and it at least handles time travel in a slightly more sophisticated manner than Doctor Who. It’s an uneven series and it seemed to go into a bit of a decline towards the end but there are some very decent and very entertaining stories and it has its moments of cleverness.

Irwin Allen often gets unfairly blamed for the problems that afflicted his sci-fi series when in fact the problems were mostly caused by the insistence of the networks on dumbing down science fiction series at every opportunity.

And while Irwin Allen’s series do have their problems they do at least mostly avoid the preachiness that makes so many episodes of other series such as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone such heavy going.

The complete series DVD boxed set includes some fairly interesting extras so it’s well worth getting.

The Time Tunnel is silly at times but it’s fine entertainment. Recommended.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. – The Birds of a Feather Affair (novel)

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. only lasted for one season (from late 1966 to early 1967) but it did spawn a series of tie-in novels. There were five original novels, although oddly enough three of them were published in the UK only.

The Birds of a Feather Affair by Michael Avallone was published in both Britain and the United States in 1966. What’s immediately obvious is that the tone is rather more serious compared to the TV series. The TV series is wildly uneven in both quality and tone but generally speaking it adopts a very light-hearted spy spoof approach, and in fact at times  it degenerates into out-and-out farce.

The Birds of a Feather Affair is much closer in feel to the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. which combined solid exciting spy thriller plots with a mildly tongue-in-cheek approach.

The novel does have its outlandish elements but it also has some surprisingly dark moments.

The story begins with U.N.C.L.E. agent April Dancer arriving at fellow-agent Mark Slate’s apartment to find that he’s disappeared. What she does find there is a glamorous redhead and a deadly snake. She suspects that Mark has been kidnapped by THRUSH. And then a multi-national delegation arrives and kidnaps her.

Mr Waverley has no doubts as to what is going on. U.N.C.L.E. has captured one of THRUSH’s most important agents, a man named Zorki, and THRUSH are obviously hoping to trade Mark and April for Zorki. Zorki however holds the key to a discovery so astounding and so dangerous that Mr Waverley is not willing to give him up under any circumstances. He does however have a plan to hoodwink THRUSH over the affair.

In this adventure April Dancer and Mark Slate are up against THRUSH agents who are outstanding not just for their cunning but for their deviousness and cruelty. There’s the sadistic Arnolda Van Atta and the creepy and mysterious Mr Riddle, not to mention Fried Rice and Pig Alley. Even worse, there may be treachery within U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.

The action is fairly relentless. Avallone’s style is not always polished but his pacing can’t be faulted. The action climax is effective enough.

Apart from being much darker in tone than the TV series the violence is also slightly more graphic and there are some faint hints of sexual perversity that you weren’t going to see on prime-time TV in 1966.

A successful TV tie-in novel has to get the characters right. They have to be recognisably the characters from the TV series. The difficulty with this book is that the darker tone means that some of the good-natured banter between the two lead characters is missing. April is reasonably convincing. Mark Slate perhaps does not quite have the boyish charm that he should have and he’s just a tiny bit too overtly macho but overall the novel succeeds at least reasonably well on this level.

A successful TV tie-in novel normally needs to capture the tone of the TV series as well but in this case the author has obviously deliberately chosen to aim for a quite different feel. Given that the TV series suffers from taking the comic approach way too far I can’t say that I blame Avallone for his decision. He has tried to write a genuine spy thriller. It’s not that the book takes itself overly seriously, but it takes itself seriously enough to work as a piece of spy fiction. If only that more slightly more serious approach had been taken with the TV series it might have been far more successful.

The Birds of a Feather Affair isn’t great spy fiction but it’s fast-moving and exciting and it’s entertaining in a lightweight sort of way. You’re probably not going to read this novel unless you’re a fan of the TV show, but if you are a fan of the series I think it’s worth picking up. It’s not quite as successful as the Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel The Dagger Affair but it can still be recommended.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – The Dagger Affair (novel)

TV tie-in novels have been around for a very long time and while they have never been a consuming interest for me over the years I have read a number. I’ve never been very interested in the “novelisations” based directly on episodes of the TV series. To me that has always seemed to be a fairly pointless concept. Original novels based on TV series always seemed to be a more interesting idea.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. may well have been the first TV series to spawn a really spectacularly successful and prolific cycle of TV tie-in novels. Twenty-four original novels were published between 1965 and 1968 and they sold in enormous quantities.

The Dagger Affair was the fourth to appear, in 1965. The author, David McDaniel, went on to write half a dozen Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels including some of the biggest sellers in the series. He also wrote a tie-in novel based on The Prisoner. McDaniel’s literary career was cut short by his early death in 1977 at the age of 38.

The Dagger Affair opens with a break-in at Illya Kuryakin’s apartment and with Napoleon Solo having a chance encounter with a girl in a fast car. Whilst racing the girl his own car develops serious engine trouble which oddly enough seems to fix itself in a short time.  Trivial enough events but they occur at the exact moment that Mr Waverley is fretting about the fact that T.H.R.U.S.H. is not up to anything. That worries him because it isn’t natural. T.H.R.U.S.H. is always up to something. If they’re not then they must be planning something big.

Solo and Kuryakin are off to Los Angeles to follow up a very slender lead. They discover that T.H.R.U.S.H. is worried as well. They’re worried about D.A.G.G.E.R. and mostly they’re worried because they don’t know D.A.G.G.E.R. is but they’re sure it’s important.

Mr Solo’s engine trouble was in fact an important clue. A reclusive and eccentric young scientist has built a device called an Energy Damper that has strange and severe effects on electrical devices, and possibly on other things as well. Like people. Eccentric is perhaps the wrong word to describe this young man. Severely paranoid and totally insane might be more accurate.

The Energy Damper has the potential to destroy civilisation. Even T.H.R.U.S.H. are horrified. They’re so horrified they’re offering to work together with U.N.C.L.E. to save civilisation. Even this may not guarantee success – D.A.G.G.E.R. is an organisation run by full-blown fanatics with a super-weapon.

A successful TV tie-in novel needs to capture the flavour of the original TV series. If a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel ends up being just a generic spy story with characters who happen to be named Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin then (in my view) it’s pretty pointless. The Dagger Affair does a reasonably good job of capturing the necessary flavour. It’s important to note that in this case it’s the flavour of the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when the tongue-in-cheek elements were definitely present but were kept under control and the plots were at least semi-serious spy stories. They could be somewhat far-fetched but the series had not yet descended into self-parody.

That’s the feel that McDaniel achieves. The central plot device, the Energy Damper, is fanciful but can at least be made to sound vaguely plausible with enough technobabble to back it up. There’s plenty of action and it’s treated more or less the way the action is treated in the TV series, with lots of gunplay but no graphic violence (although there is some gruesome threatened violence during an extended and rather baroque interrogation sequence). Mr Solo takes a keen interest in the female of the species but there’s no actual sex. The story is handled with a moderate attempt at realism but Solo and Kuryakin get to trade wise-cracks and their characterisations are pretty consistent with their TV counterparts.

While there are moments that are gently humorous McDaniel is definitely not aiming for comedy and his approach is fairly consistent with that of the first season of the TV show.

McDaniel takes the opportunity of giving us a fascinating glimpse into the history of T.H.R.U.S.H. going back to the 19th century. Of course the novels are presumably not regarded as canon but it’s still an amusing idea that one of the founding fathers of this infamous criminal organisation was none other than Professor Moriarty! It’s a weird but fun touch.

The whole point of a TV tie-in novel is that the target audience is fans who have watched every episode and still want more and The Dagger Affair seems just like the thing to satisfy that craving. It was a huge seller so obviously in this case the strategy worked. The Dagger Affair might not be absolutely top-flight spy fiction but it’s fast-moving and it’s enjoyable in a lightweight way and it does feel like a Man from U.N.C.L.E. adventure.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Dagger Affair, and I’m encouraged enough to be seriously considering sample a few more TV tie-in novels based on 60s and 60s cult TV series.

Eleven Days To Zero, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea pilot (1964)

It’s always interesting to see the subtle changes between the pilot episode of any series and the series proper. As I’m now almost at the third season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea it’s an interesting time to look back at how it all began.

What makes it especially interesting is that there are several different versions of the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea pilot to choose from. The Region 2 season four DVD boxed set includes as extras the original unaired version of the pilot, the also unaired recut version and the original broadcast version.

Eleven Days To Zero, the pilot episode of Voyage, was interestingly enough shot in colour although the first season would be shot in black-and-white. That first version of Eleven Days To Zero now seems to exist only in a slightly battered black-and-white print. The episode was subsequently recut and that recut version survives, in colour and in excellent condition.

Eleven Days To Zero was written and directed by Irwin Allen and it gives us a fine taste of what is to come in the first season – plenty of action, big ideas, the fate of the world in the balance, good special effects and extremely good acting.

The world’s leading seismologist has predicted a devastating earthquake in the Arctic (presumably an undersea earthquake) that will unleash tidal waves that will devastate coastal areas throughout the northern hemisphere. Millions of lives are likely to be lost.

Admiral Harriman Nelson (Richard Basehart)  and Dr Fred Wilson (Eddie Albert) however have a plan to save the world. They will detonate a nuclear device in the Arctic which will nullify the effects of the tidal waves. Admiral Nelson’s super-submarine the Seaview (which he designed himself) will carry the device to the Arctic.

It’s a dangerous plan and they only have eleven days in which to accomplish it but there’s another problem – a sinister international force is determined to prevent the Seaview from carrying out its mission. They have already assassinated the Seaview’s former captain and  they narrowly missed killing Nelson as well.

With a new captain, Commander Lee Crane (David Hedison), the Seaview sets off on its mission.

It seems that the odds are stacked against the Seaview. They face a depth charge attack from the air, they’re stalked by a hostile submarine and subjected to drone attacks. And that’s without mentioning the giant squid.

The major change in the recut version is that more focus is put on the Seaview’s new commander. In the original version it is implied that the crew don’t fully accept him at first, until he has proven himself, and that in his early career he had a reputation for being unimaginative. This sub-plot is beefed up considerably in the recut version, with the implication that Crane is a bit of a martinet and that he is initially viewed with definite suspicion by the crew.

The change is a positive one, adding not only more human drama but a bit more depth to Captain Crane.

The recut version also adds the suggestion that even Admiral Nelson is not at first entirely sure he’s made the right decision in accepting Crane as commander of the Seaview.

There’s a definite Fu Manchu vibe to this episode (something I thoroughly approve of) although the chief villain also has, somewhat bizarrely, just a hint of a kind of malevolent Noël Coward about him. Either way he’s a fine super-villain.

Irwin Allen obviously realised he’d need some fairly impressive visual effects in the pilot if the series was going to have any chance of being picked up by the network. And the effects are generally extremely good, especially when you get to see the episode in colour.

Of course when you’re almost at the end of season three watching Eleven Days To Zero serves as a reminder of just how terrific Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was in its early glory days. The combination of fairly plausible science fiction with spy thriller elements was uniquely effective and made the first season without question the best American sci-fi television of the 60s.

Whichever version you choose Eleven Days To Zero is worth seeing again.

three Star Trek episodes from 1968

Three season three Star Trek episodes from 1968.

I have to be a bit careful in talking about The Enterprise Incident. Giving any plot details could give away spoilers so I’m going to be incredibly vague about the actual story.

We get first Kirk and then Spock behaving very uncharacteristically, and then we get an explanation of their behaviour that makes sense and is more than just a convenient plot device. It’s the heart of the episode, which is all about deception. It also offers some insight into their actual characters. They behave very dishonourably but they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are justified in doing so. It does however tend to make nonsense of the whole idea of the Vulcans as a remarkably honest and honourable race. It is a little worrying that they seem quite unconcerned about their conduct. I’d have thought that these were both men who would dislike having to behave dishonourably, even if they felt that duty compelled them to do so.

In fact the episode makes nonsense of the whole idea of the Federation as the peace-loving virtuous high-minded entity that we’ve been sold on throughout the series. In this story the Federation is clearly in the wrong. Unfortunately D.C. Fontana’s script makes no attempt to explore any of these potentially fascinating aspects in any depth. The assumption seems to be that the Federation are the good guys so therefore whatever they do must be right. This is a missed opportunity but in 1968 the network was probably not going to allow the show to explore those aspects even had the writer wished to do so. And I suspect that Gene Roddenberry would not have been pleased at the idea of the Federation being exposed as hypocrites.

We also get an intriguing view of the Romulans. The Romulan commander (played by Joanne Linville) is also prepared to practise a certain amount of deception although she still comes across as being less immoral than the Federation.

There’s also an angle to this story that you could never get away with today – the Romulan commander is undone by her own female vanity. In fact we see a female commander who, unlike most such characters in later science fiction movies and TV, does not behave at all like a man. It would be enough to get a writer burned at the stake today.

All in all it’s quite an interesting episode even if it pulls its punches a bit.

There’s also a reasonable amount of action and excitement.

Had this story been done in one of the later Star Trek series I suspect it would have been handled much less successfully.

The Paradise Syndrome by contrast is a bit of a disaster even though there are a couple of good ideas. The Enterprise has to deflect an asteroid that is about to destroy an Earth-like planet. Before that can happen Captain Kirk manages to get himself lost on the planet surface and in the process he loses his memory.

It is a very Earth-like planet indeed. Inhabited by people who are not just humanoid but very obviously human. In fact they’re American Indians. They’re not just similar to American Indians, they’re identical to American Indians. Of course in Star Trek we get lots of Earth-like planets populated  by humanoids who really seem pretty human. What’s interesting here is that The Paradise Syndrome tries to explain that curious fact and does so in a reasonably convincing manner, and a manner that offers potential for future story ideas. That’s the most satisfactory thing about this episode.

We also get Captain Kirk falling in love. OK, it’s not the first time that has happened, but this time things go much much further than in any previous episodes. Unfortunately the love story plays out rather predictably.

The supporting characters are totally two-dimensional and behave in utterly predictable ways.

The pacing is leaden and although the story should have plenty of suspense and excitement with its race-against-time element if all falls a bit flat.

The episode’s best assets are the performances of Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. Spock and McCoy spar, as usual, but the sparring has some emotional depth to it. Spock has to make some very tough decisions, he’s under real pressure and feeling the pressure, and McCoy is making a real effort to see Spock’s point of view and understand the reasons for those decisions.

The Paradise Syndrome is an exasperating and not very well-executed mixture of good and bad.

And the Children Shall Lead has the reputation of being one of the worst, if not the worst, Star Trek episodes ever. And how well it deserves its reputation.

The Enterprise arrives at the planet Triacus to find that all the members of the scientific team there have killed themselves. I have to say that after watching this episode you’ll probably want to kill yourself as well. Actually it’s only the adults who committed suicide. Their children are still alive and seem extremely happy. In fact they seem pretty pleased that their parents are dead.

Dr McCoy thinks the children are suffering from traumatic shock but it soon becomes evident that they’re possessed by some kind of evil. They try to take over the Enterprise. They do this by paralysing the crew members with their worst secret fears. OK, that’s a reasonably OK idea but it’s very clumsily executed. The fears conjured up are just silly and totally unconvincing. Kirk and Spock have the strength of character to resist and they realise that if they can’t free the children of the evil they’ll have to kill them.

The children are being controlled by an evil alien named Gorgan. He’s perhaps the least scary villain in television history.

The special effects are truly awful. They’re poorly conceived and badly executed.

The acting is dismal. The children, except for the blonde girl, aren’t convincingly evil. The regular cast members don’t distinguish themselves. That is perhaps more the fault of Edward J. Lakso’s script than of the actors. Kirk, Spock and Dr McCoy are all put in situations with the potential for interesting explorations of their characters but the script fails to exploit the opportunities and the actors are left floundering.

The script has a couple of almost interesting ideas that aren’t developed. The pacing is leaden and the ending is feeble.

This is about as bad as television science fiction could ever get.

So three episodes, one very good and extremely interesting, one not so good and one terrible. Which sadly tells the story of the third season of Star Trek.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea season 3 (1966-67) – part 2

I posted on the subject of the first half of season three of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in January. This current post is basically just an episode guide for the second half of the season.

The Brand of the Beast is the kind of episode that, for better or worse, gained season three its reputation for fairly silly monster stories. The Seaview is racing to save a group of scientists on a sinking ship. The reactor overheats and Admiral Nelson has to risk radiation poisoning to fix it. Now of course the great fear that haunts everyone who works with nuclear energy is that if they get a heavy dose of radiation they’ll turn into a werewolf. In fact of course this can only happen if you’ve already been exposed to the werewolf virus. On the other hand on a vessel the size of Seaview it’s pretty much a certainty that there will be at least one crew member who carries the werewolf virus, and of course in this case that person is Admiral Nelson.

So we get the admiral running amok and smashing all kinds of vital equipment and almost sinking the Seaview. Which is fun even if it’s kind of silly. What makes this episode more interesting than you might think is that both Captain Crane and Chief Sharkey are put in positions where their loyalties conflict with their duties and they have to make agonising decisions. And the actors really do try their best to carry it off. The ending is ludicrous but it’s ludicrous in a fun way.

The Creature is typical season three stuff. A somewhat unhinged scientist has created an artificial life form and (perhaps unwisely) released it into the sea. Now this seaweed monster has grown huge and it’s decidedly unfriendly. Admiral Nelson wants to destroy it but that’s not easy as the monster starts taking over the minds of the Seaview’s crew. This is all pretty much stuff that has been done before. A very weak episode.

In Death from the Past the Seaview finds a strange structure on the sea floor. Inside this structure Captain Crane and his men find – Nazis! Live Nazis, who think World War 2 is still raging. The structure is a weapons lab, full of secret weapons. The Nazis, who don’t seem to be aware that 35 years have passed (and who haven’t aged since 1944), want to take over the Seaview for the Führer. Not a very impressive episode.

The Heat Monster is not entirely a bad idea. A foolish Norwegian scientist guides an alien entity to Earth. The alien is a heat creature and it’s obviously not friendly. The script is fairly pedestrian which is a pity since the special effects are reasonably good and the Arctic setting is terrific (and is used to good effect).

The Fossil Men is another monster story. The monsters are rock men, as in men made of rocks. Naturally they have evil designs on the Seaview and its crew. This is one of a number of season three episodes in which Richard Basehart and David Hedison give the impression of playing things, part of the time at least, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Amusingly the episode starts with Nelson reading sailors’ tales from the 17th century about  horrific events after ships are destroyed in a maelstrom. The Seaview is about to encounter exactly the same fate. The rock men look pretty good, even if they are guys in rubber suits. This is a thoroughly enjoyable episode and even its weaknesses have the effect of adding to the fun.

In The Mermaid a secret mission has to be delayed because Captain Crane is off chasing a mermaid. This is the kind of story that all too often brings a science fiction series to shipwreck. It’s extremely difficult to get the tone just right. It has to be a bit whimsical but kept within limits, there has to be a touch of humour but it can’t be played for broad comedy and it has to have a slight suggestion of a dream-like atmosphere but without going too far. They almost pull it off. The first half of the episode works perfectly. Then it disappointingly turns into another guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster episode. On the plus side Diane Webber makes an adorable mermaid, John Lamb’s underwater photography (including footage from his odd but interesting feature film The Mermaids of Tiburon) is gorgeous and David Hedison’s performance is excellent. This should have been a terrific if  offbeat episode. Despite its flaws there’s still a lot to like about it. I don’t think writer William Welch can be blamed for the way the episode loses its way – by this time the network had made it pretty clear that they wanted monsters and that’s all they wanted so he probably didn’t have much choice about throwing in the monster stuff.

The Mummy starts intriguingly enough. The Seaview sneaks into the port of New York, Nelson and Crane use the Flying Sub to steal ashore incognito and they return with a 3,000-year-old mummy in a case. Even before the opening credits we have reason to believe that the mummy may not be quite dead, and something odd is happening to Captain Crane.

Strange things start to happen. Things like sabotage, and crewmen getting attacked. It’s as if someone or something is determined to prevent the mission from being accomplished. Mind you, the mission itself sounds rather unlikely anyway.

The mummy itself is pretty dismal but the story is fun if you don’t try to make sense of it. In fact you can’t make sense of it – most of the questions you want answered don’t get answered. And at the end Admiral Nelson tells Crane that some things are best left unexplained, which pretty much sums up this episode. For all its faults I enjoyed this one.

Seaview is on a mission to exercise control over the launch of an interstellar space probe when the submarine is engulfed by what appears to be a black void and one by one the crew gets taken over by an alien entity in Shadowman. It’s an idea that had already been used once too often. This episode is drearily unimaginative and is made worse by its all-too-evident cheapness. It’s not that the special effects are poor. They’re non-existent and it’s an episode that desperately needed special effects.

Is No Escape from Death the worst-ever episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? It certainly has to be a contender for that title. The Seaview sinks (which is no big deal since it sinks in nearly every episode of the third season) but this time it sinks really badly. This episode is mostly a succession of clips from earlier episodes, many of them in black-and-white just to make it more insultingly obvious what has been done. It was a way to keep the budget at absolute rock bottom, and by this stage that was obviously all that mattered.

The best thing that can be said about Doomsday Island is that it doesn’t look as cheap as the episodes that preceded it. In fact there are things about it that look quite impressive. Unfortunately the aliens themselves are very poor guys-in-rubber-suits monsters. This is your standard space aliens taking over the world story, with the first step naturally being to take over Seaview. One or two good ideas in this story, and an enormous amount of silliness.

After a succession of disappointing episodes things get back on track with The Wax Men. The Seaview takes on a strange cargo – crates filled with wax statues reputedly from the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Only that’s not what’s in the crates. They actually contain robotic wax dummies of every member of the Seaview’s crew, plus one small but very malevolent clown. The clown is actually a diabolical criminal mastermind and the robotic wax dummies take over from the crew and allow him to gain control of the submarine. The clown has made one miscalculation – the real Captain Crane is still at large and he wants his submarine back.

This one has a genuinely creepy atmosphere. The wax robot crew members are wonderfully but subtly sinister. There’s also terrific paranoia – Crane is entirely alone and has no way to fight back. He’s just waiting until he gets hunted down. The effects are very good. David Hedison does well as Crane starts to crack under the pressure. Michael Dunn (best remembered perhaps as the evil megalomaniac Dr Loveless in The Wild Wild West) makes the clown convincingly deranged and menacing. And there’s a nicely surreal feel to proceedings. This is enhanced by the wise decision not to over-explain things (and not offering an explanation adds to the terror and mystery). One of the best episodes of the season.

Deadly Cloud is another alien invasion story that utilises too many tired ideas that the series had used too many times before. The aliens have the ability to take control of members of the crew and turn them into obedient robotic zombies. Even with the threat of the world ending in 20 minutes’ time this story can’t work up any real suspense or excitement.

Destroy Seaview! again relies on plot devices that were becoming all too familiar but at least there are no monsters. We also find out how to deal with a nuclear reactor that is about to go critical – you just shoot it, with lasers. An OK episode.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about season three is that Richard Basehart and David Hedison continue to put real effort into their performances. With the increasing silliness of the stories there must have been a temptation either to lose interest or start hamming things up but by and large they resist those temptations, although Basehart does occasionally succumb. Basehart took himself quite seriously as an actor and wasn’t especially happy making the series, and was also drinking rather heavily. David Hedison seems to have taken a more realistic and more philosophical view – the series was fun to do and it paid well.

The real problem with season three is not that it had become locked into a Monster of the Week formula, but the fact that the budget was woefully inadequate for following such a formula successfully. Some of the monster stories (such as The Mummy) might have worked quite well with a bit more money spent on them. I also get the impression that the writers were starting to accept that no-one really cared about the series any more and as a result they were not exactly motivated to produce dazzling scripts.

Season three does have its moments but it’s heartbreaking to see the sad decline of what had been the best American sci-fi series of the 60s.

The Time Tunnel (1966-67), part one

The Time Tunnel was less successful than Irwin Allen’s other 1960s TV sci-fi series, running for a single season on the American ABC network from 1966 to 1967.

I wrote about The Time Tunnel a few years back but I’ve now had the opportunity to watch a lot more episodes and my views on this series have changed somewhat so I think it’s appropriate to take another look at it, and in a bit more depth.

The premise is a good one – a top-secret U.S. government time-travel project. Although the technology is very advanced in theory in practice it doesn’t work so well and our two unfortunate time-travellers are hopelessly lost in time, shuffled from one historical era to another but with no way of returning to the present. So it’s a bit like Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space but with the heroes lost in time. It is however notably lacking in the high camp excesses of Lost in Space. In fact as time-travel series go it takes its subject more seriously than you might expect. There is for example a much greater awareness of time paradoxes and the inherent limitations of time travel that you don’t find in Doctor Who.

One of the things for which The Time Tunnel is sometimes criticised is the very extensive use of footage from various 20th Century-Fox historical movies. I don’t really see this as too much of a problem. It’s done quite skilfully and in any case a series in which every episode takes place in a different historical period and always at a time when major historical events are unfolding would have been astronomically expensive to make without the use of existing footage.

Of course this technique means that the series is limited to dealing with historical events for which 20th Century-Fox had suitable colour footage from their movies but since the studio had made a lot of movies by 1966 this was not a major constraint.

All American science fiction television programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s had budgetary problems. Science fiction television is expensive to make and there’s really no way to avoid spending a lot of money if you want decent results. This tended to make the networks very nervous, and tended to make them fairly hostile to science fiction. Network execs figured that if cop shows and westerns could be made dirt cheap then why risk big money on science fiction shows? Most American TV sci-fi series in this era had limited runs, not necessarily because of poor ratings but simply because the bean-counters were unwilling to continue spending money on series they considered to be risky to begin with.

The usual pattern was for the first one or two seasons to be fairly visually impressive and then the producers would find themselves having to deal with sharply reduced budgets in later seasons. The most successful of all Irwin Allen’s series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, suffered rather grievously in this respect in its third and fourth seasons. The use of existing footage helped to keep The Time Tunnel’s budget within reasonable limits but it was still inevitably a lot more costly to make than a cop show. It’s therefore not entirely surprising that the series was cancelled after a single season despite very good ratings.

Doug and Tony, the two heroes of the series, always seem to arrive at a particular time and place in which something incredibly historic is about to happen. It’s a bit unrealistic but after all the aim is to provide entertainment so it’s forgivable.

Science fiction writers tend to agonise over the dangers of time paradoxes and to take two different approaches to the question. One approach stress that time travellers would have to be very careful not to change history as this could have disastrous consequences in the present. The alternative point of view is that even if you tried to change history the Universe would not allow it to happen and history would stubbornly follow its allotted course. The Time Tunnel seems mostly to adopt the latter approach. Doug and Tony do on many occasions try to change history but they seem doomed always to fail. In some episodes they seem oblivious to the problem while in others they seem to be very aware indeed of the impossibility of changing history.

There is one curious unexplained aspect of this series. What exactly is the purpose of the Time Tunnel? Obviously it’s time travel, but for what purpose? It’s established very early on that any attempt to change the course of history is doomed to fail. So why is the U.S. government spending billions on the project? We do get a tantalising hint in the episode Secret Weapon that the CIA might have an interest in the project.

It’s also interesting to compare this series with another Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which began its run two years earlier in 1964. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a celebration of American scientific and technological prowess, with the Seaview being a shining achievement. The technology in The Time Tunnel on the other hand is ambitious but it’s a fiasco. The tunnel is supposed to be able to send people to a specified time period but it doesn’t work properly and can send them anywhere. It’s supposed to be able to bring them back again but it can’t. There’s supposed to be a mechanism that will allow the controllers to contact the time travellers but it doesn’t work. The controllers are supposed to be able to pinpoint the time travellers’ exact position in time and space but it only works intermittently. This is a seriously unsuccessful piece of technology!

Rendezvous with Yesterday was the pilot episode. The DVD release of the series includes the unaired extended version of this episode. Irwin Allen himself directed it and shares the writing credit as well.

An ultra-secret US government project is getting very close to unlocking the secrets of time itself and making time travel possible, but when the pesky Senator Leroy Clark (played by Gary Merrill)  turns up to find out exactly how the many billions of dollars poured into the vast project have been spent they have to admit that they haven’t done any actual time travel yet. They’re sent mice back in time, or at least they think they have but they can’t be sure because they’ve never been able to get the mice back to the present. Senators being annoying creatures Clark wants to close the whole project down unless they can demonstrate some real results right now. As in today.

Horrified by the thought of seeing the project shut down the young and headstrong Dr Tony Newman (James Darren) volunteers to be the guinea pig. He is told that such a thing is out of the question. It is much too dangerous. He goes into the time tunnel anyway.

He ends up in 1912. That’s not so bad, especially when he meets a charming and friendly young Englishwoman, Althea Hall (Susan Hampshire). And he’s on a passenger liner and it’s a sunny day and the sea is calm. This is not bad at all. He doesn’t start to worry until he sees the name of the ship. It’s the Titanic.

The project is supposed to have a way of keeping track of time travellers but despite ten years of work and billions of dollars the whole time tunnel thing still has a lot of bugs in it. They do locate Tony but his buddy and close associate on the project Dr Doug Philips (Robert Colbert) realises that the only way to rescue him is to go into the time tunnel itself to bring him back.

So we now have two scientists hopelessly lost in time.

In One Way to the Moon Doug and Tony are transported ten years into the future, onto a spaceship bound for Mars. The difficulty is that with two extra passengers the spaceship is now dangerously overloaded. There’s plenty of action and excitement and there’s the neat twist of an important character in 1968 watching his future self in 1978.

End of the World is a clever idea. Doug and Tony are in the middle of a mine disaster in 1910 but no-one wants to help rescue the trapped miners because there’s no point – Halley’s Comet is about to hit the Earth and everyone is doomed anyway. Doug and Tony have to find a way to convince the townspeople the world isn’t going to end, which means they have to convince the great Professor Ainsley that his prediction is wrong and that the comet is not going to hit.

Crack of Doom takes our intrepid time travellers to the year 1883, to a little island named Krakatoa where a volcano is about to erupt. In fact the whole island will blow up, the explosion making the most powerful H-bomb seem like a toy. The explosion was heard 3,000 miles away. And the Time Tunnel has dropped Doug and Tony onto the island the day before the eruption. Apart from trying to save themselves they also hope to save a curmudgeonly vulcanologist and his daughter.

In Massacre the two time travellers find themselves at the Little Big Horn just in time to see Custer lead his men to disaster. This episode gets a bit heavy handed at times.

Devil’s Island takes Doug and Tony to the infamous French penal colony in French Guiana. Naturally they arrive right at the time that the prison’s most famous prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, arrives. Doug and Tony are mistaken for prisoners and have to endure various horrors at the hands of the sadistic French commandant and the brutal French sergeant of the guards. There is an escape plan afoot but could it be a ploy by the evil French government to kill Dreyfus? The writers of this episode seem to have a few issues with the French! Not a great episode.

In Reign of Terror those dastardly French are up to evilness again! This time it’s the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette is about to have her head chopped off and Doug and Tony are drawn into a plan to save her (which of course they know is impossible). In any case they have enough trouble trying to keep their own heads on their shoulders. Quite a good episode.

Secret Weapon is a spy thriller episode set in eastern Europe in 1956 and Doug and Tony find out that the time tunnel is not as unique as they’d thought. This is the first episode that really plays around with the time travel concept in a creative way rather than just as an excuse for adventures in other historical period. It’s also the first episode that gives us a hint as the actual purpose of the Time Tunnel. It’s intended as a weapon. It’s a weapon that both sides in the Cold War are trying to develop. This is the best and most interesting episode so far.

The Death Trap has quite an amusing setup. There’s a plot to assassinate Lincoln, in 1861, and the would-be assassins are Abolitionists!

As far as The Alamo is concerned the title pretty much explains it. The trick for Doug and Tony is to get out of the Alamo alive. A reasonably good episode.

Night of the Long Knives takes Doug and Tony to India, to the North West Frontier, in 1886. Naturally they run into Kipling, and they get mixed up in a planned rebellion. Lots of stock footage in this episode (from King of the Khyber Rifles) but there’s also plenty of action and excitement even if the plot is totally unoriginal. I happen to be fascinated by this area of history so I loved this story.

It’s rather surprising that we get to episode fifteen, Invasion, before we get our first conformed Nazi sighting. Nazis were everywhere in 1960s action adventure TV series. In this story Doug and Tony are in Cherbourg, two days before D-Day, and the Gestapo is convinced they are spies. Doug gets brainwashed into believing he’s a Nazi. This is an OK episode.

That takes us up to the halfway point in the series. There’ll be another post at a later date covering the rest of the episodes.

Thunderbirds (1965-66)

It’s a bit of a challenge trying to find anything new to say about Thunderbirds. It’s one of the truly iconic 60s TV shows, has maintained a loyal cult following for half a century and has been endlessly written about. All I can do is offer a few personal impressions, plus I’m going to talk about a few episodes that I’ve watched recently that have some interesting aspects to them.

One of the secrets to the success of the Gerry Anderson series of the 60s was that both Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had major input into the formats. Gerry knew all the stuff that boys were going to like (gadgets and action) and Sylvia knew what girls would like (a beautiful glamorous female secret agent). They had all bases covered.

And with Thunderbirds they really went all out to make sure they had all those bases thoroughly covered. It truly was a remarkably clever idea. The exploits of a rescue organisation had obvious potential for proving action and suspense. But this was to be an ultra-secret rescue organisation, so immediately you have the potential for some spy series-type intrigue. Add the aforementioned lady secret agent and you have even more excitement plus some glamour. To make this ingenious formula work they needed scripts that would provide the right mix of science fiction, spy thriller and crime thriller elements (with occasional dashes of humour and romance) and that’s what the writers came up with.

There was also Gerry Anderson’s determination to make each new series look more impressive than the preceding one. Thunderbirds is definitely a major step forward from Stingray. It’s visually more ambitious and it has a much more lavish and at the same time more realistic look. The action sequences are bigger and better. The miniatures are better. The puppets have been improved.

Compared to Stingray Thunderbirds definitely has more of an epic big-budget feel, it’s more cinematic. The hour-long format also of course lends itself to a more expansive and complex approach to plotting.

Stingray could be very exciting but there were many episodes that had a very whimsical feel. Which is fine, since it was essentially a kids’ show. Thunderbirds still has moments of whimsicality but overall it has a more sophisticated more grown-up tone. The whimsicality is kept strictly within limits.

While it was the spectacular rescues that were the series’ main selling point the spy/crime/ international intrigue angles actually dominate quite a few of the stories. In Brink of Disaster Lady Penelope, while out driving in her Rolls-Royce (unusually she is driving herself and is alone) is menaced by a couple of hoods. They take a few shots at her car with a submachine gun. At this point she decides the two men are a problem that needs to be disposed. So she kills them, ruthlessly and efficiently and without fuss. There’s no moral problem here. She is clearly acting in self-defence. It is however quite clear that Lady Penelope accepts that her job as a secret agent will sometimes require her to kill people, and it is clear that she has absolutely no problem with this. It’s a slightly surprising attitude to find in a kids’ show. What’s even more noteworthy is that in this case the violence is fairly realistic and not cartoonish.

There’s a definite attempt to avoid giving Jeff Tracy and his sons too much of a bleeding heart vibe. Obviously they are dedicated to saving lives and to doing good but they’re hard-headed and realistic about it. It’s also interesting that a rescue organisation employs a secret agent (Lady Penelope) and that it’s taken for granted that her duties will from time to time involve killing people. Jeff Tracy clearly understands how the real world works and that an overly sentimental or naïve approach won’t get you very far. It’s a remarkably clear-sighted and realistic view to come across in a children’s television program.

Brink of Disaster is an interesting episode not just for its insights into Lady Penelope’s ruthlessness. A major challenge for the writers was that Thunderbirds has a large cast of regular characters. There are ten major characters and a couple of other recurring characters. They all need to be given something useful to do. So in this episode there are two interconnected plot strands, one of which gives Jeff Tracy, Brains and Tin-Tin the rare opportunity to be personally involved in a rescue while the other puts Lady Penelope and Parker at centre stage.

Attack of the Alligators! is another interesting one. While Thunderbirds is science fiction the science fictional elements are generally quite restrained. Most of the technology consists of what would have seemed like fairly conservative extrapolations on the technology of the mid-60s. Space stations, hypersonic aircraft like Thunderbird 1, high-speed monorails, supersonic airliners, advanced cargo ships requiring only a skeleton crew, all these things would have seemed very plausible indeed. Attack of the Alligators! is a rare example of a Thunderbirds episode that involves rather fanciful science fiction elements (alligators grown to several times their normal size by a new miracle drug). In fact this story has the feel of a 1950s monster movie.

We also make a surprising discovery in this episode. International Rescue’s hoverbikes are missile-armed! And Thunderbird 4 carries missiles as well.

Martian Invasion involves not an alien invasion but a movie about an alien invasion. An accident on the set leaves two actors trapped in a cave that is rapidly filling with water. But that’s only part of the story, the real story being that it is all part of a plan by the nefarious super-spy The Hood to steal International Rescue’s secrets. And International Rescue does not take kindly to any threats to its security. It turns out that Thunderbird 1 and Thunderbird 2 are also very well-armed and Scott and Virgil are quite willing to resort to extreme measures to keep the organisation’s secrets. The combination of a race against time to rescue the trapped actors with some remarkably well-filmed action scenes (the chase scene involving Thunderbird 1 is particularly impressive) makes this a very entertaining episode.

The Duchess Assignment is a crime thriller episode with a rescue thrown in at the end. This one could easily have been an episode of The Saint, with Lady Penelope trying to extricate an old friend from the clutches of crooked gamblers and trying to foil art thieves.

The Cham-Cham is a spy thriller, with Lady Penelope and Tin-Tin going undercover to investigate a possible link between a pop group and the mysterious loss of several military transport aircraft. This episode demonstrates the growing confidence of Anderson’s team of puppeteers – we see puppets playing musical instruments, skiing and dancing and doing so fairly convincingly. They even do stunts! So far as puppeteering is concerned this may be the most ambitious episode yet. And with a bit of a Bond movie feel to it (not surprising in 1966) it’s also great fun.

Operation Crash-Dive is a more conventional rescue-oriented episode. The loss of one of the highly advanced Fireflash supersonic jetliners was bad enough but now a second Fireflash has crashed, in almost the same location. International Rescue are on the scene but there seems that there is little they can do until Brains comes to a startling conclusion. The Fireflash may have crashed into the sea and it’s possible that the flight crew could be still alive, trapped deep beneath the sea.

International Rescue do a bit more than just carry out a rescue though. For the next Fireflash test flight they take over the whole process of investigating the cause of the air disasters. There’s plenty of excitement to come in this story.

In Edge of Impact that villainous super-spy The Hood is sabotaging the test flights of the advanced new fighter the Red Arrow. There’s also the matter of two men trapped atop a television transmitting tower, and that’s due to The Hood as well. The rescue method is certainly different and it involves a bizarre gadget, so all in all a good episode.

Cry Wolf is an episode that threatens to get a bit too warm-hearted. A couple of boys in the Australian Outback are playing at being International Rescue but their radio message is treated as genuine by the real International Rescue and Scott sets off in Thunderbird 1 to rescue them. When he discovers it was all a game Scott decides to take them back to the secret base on Tracy Island, hoping that this will persuade them not to send out any more fake distress calls. But what happens when soon afterwards the boys really need rescuing?

Dennis Spooner throws in some spy thriller elements, with the boys’ father being involved in an ultra-secret government satellite tracking project and masterspy The Hood determined to steal the project’s secrets. After a slow start things pick up and there’s a double race against time as the climax. It gets a bit whimsical at times and it’s not a classic but it’s an OK episode.

Thunderbirds really is great entertainment. There’s the occasional dud episode but the good episodes (and there are plenty of good ones) are significantly better than anything Anderson had done before. Highly recommended.

The Prisoner (1967-68)

There’s probably no British television series of the 60s more highly regarded than The Prisoner, at least among fans of action/adventure/spy/science fiction series. Certainly no British series has ever engendered such fierce debates about its meaning.

A British spy resigns, for reasons that he refuses to reveal. Upon arriving home he is drugged. He wakes up in The Village. The Village is remarkably picturesque and could be regarded as a perfectly charming place in which to live, apart from one thing – it is a prison. There are no walls or fences surrounding The Village and nobody is locked in a cell and life is extremely comfortable and even pleasant but it is still a prison.

The problem for the British spy (whose name is never revealed), or at least the most perplexing problem, is that he has no idea whose prisoner he is. It might be the Soviets. It might be another foreign power. It might even be the British Secret Service. He has no idea where The Village is.

He does know what is wanted of him. Information is wanted, and more specifically his captors want to know the reasons for his resignation. Partly because he doesn’t know the identity of his captors, and partly out of sheer stubbornness, he has no intention of telling them. It quickly becomes apparent that he is a man who does not deal well with authority figures and who does not like having his rights or his privacy infringed (which is rather ironic given that he is a spy and spies are not renowned for respecting other people’s privacy).

All the residents of The Village are spies. No names are used. Everyone has a number. The new arrival is informed that he is Number Six. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes him even more stubborn. He does not like being a mere number.

The first episode, Arrival, sets up the basic premise (and does it very well). It also introduces Number Two. There must logically be a Number One but this mysterious personage is not in evidence. Number Two has the task of getting the vital information out of Number Six.

In fact there will be numerous different Number Twos over the course of the series. Number Twos who fail to persuade Number Six to talk get replaced and it seems quite possible that the fate of an ex-Number Two is not a happy one.

The Chimes of Big Ben introduces the most celebrated Number Two of them all, the great Leo McKern. McKern will be seen again later in the series. Number Six has planned an elaborate escape attempt with another resident.

In A. B. and C. Number Two has formed the strong suspicion that the reason for Number Six’s resignation was that he was intending to turn traitor. But to whom was he going to sell out? Number Two has narrowed it down to three possibilities. The interactive dream idea is quite cool.

Free for All was written and directed by Patrick McGoohan. An election is to be held for the position of Number Two and Number Six decides to run. He discovers that democracy in The Village does not quite live up to the propaganda. Of course that may well be true of democracy in general (which may have been McGoohan’s point).

The idea of the double, having the spy hero encounter a perfect doppelganger, was perhaps the most over-used cliché in 1960s spy television. The Schizoid Man is one of the better examples. In fact it may be the cleverest ever use of the double idea. There are now two Number Sixes but even Number Six doesn’t know if he’s the real Number Six or not. An excellent episode.

The General is one of the weaker episodes. Speed Learn is the latest craze sweeping The Village. It offers a three-year course in modern history in just three minutes. Unfortunately the two surprise twists at the end are much too predictable.

I must confess that I have no idea what the point was of Many Happy Returns although It’s clever enough in its own way. Number Six wakes up one morning to find The Village deserted. Now surely nothing can prevent his escape but of course it’s not going to be quite so simple.

Dance of the Dead involves a dead body washed ashore that may give Number Six a chance of escape. He also encounters an old intelligence agency colleague who is not coping well with life in The Village. Like other episodes written by Anthony Skene (such as A. B. and C. and Many Happy Returns) it has good ideas but doesn’t make much sense. Of course The Prisoner is supposed to be a series that is puzzling and ambiguous but it works best when the stories at least have some internal logic.

Checkmate sees Number Six trying to escape again. The escape method is a bit too reminiscent of the methods he used unsuccessfully in an earlier episode. This one has the feel of more or less a straight spy thriller and it has a nice twist at the end.

In my personal opinion the episodes that focus on the battle of wills between Number Six and Number 2 (and the unseen forces that are really controlling things) are far more interesting than the episodes that focus on Number Six’s escape attempts. An excellent example of the former is Hammer Into Anvil. This is more than just the usual battle of wills. It’s a duel and it might well be a duel to the death. Number Six blames the new Number Two for the death of a prisoner and this time he is determined to strike back. One of the strengths of this series is that the ongoing battle of wills and wits between Number Six and the various incarnations of Number Two is fairly evenly balanced. Sometimes Number Six loses, but sometimes he wins. Patrick Cargill gets to demonstrate his acting chops as a nasty but perhaps slightly unhinged Number Two and Patrick McGoohan gets the chance to show us a side to Number Six that we haven’t seen before. A superb episode.

It’s Your Funeral involves an assassination which Number Six has to prevent although he’s not really sure if he believes it’s a real plan or another elaborate mind game cooked up by Number Two.

In A Change of Mind it’s Number Six’s mind that is going to be changed, permanently. He has been declared unmutual and disharmonious. Fortunately there’s a cure for these faults but the cure is rather drastic.

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling is unusual in that it’s pure science fiction – transferring personalities from one body to another. It’s not exactly an original science fiction idea but it has a nice twist at the end. Since identity and individuality are major themes of the series as a whole it’s an idea that was worth exploring but this episode is less than a complete success.

In Living in Harmony Number Six finds himself in the Wild West, and Harmony is a violent town and he’s the sheriff. Of course it’s not hard to figure out what is really going on. This episode is an interesting anticipation of what would later become a standard science fiction trope. This one is a lot of fun.

It was probably a mistake scheduling The Girl Who Was Death straight after Living in Harmony. It’s a bit too similar in the basic premise. This episode tries to be a light-hearted spoof combined with a surrealist dreamscape feel. It’s visually quite impressive and inventive and Kenneth Griffith is a delight as Napoleon (!) but it doesn’t quite work and the ending is infuriating. Despite some amusing moments I’d pick this as the weakest episode of the entire series. It’s the sort of thing The Avengers could  get away with (Patrick Macnee would have had a wonderful time with this script) but it seems out of place here.

This series reaches an emotional crescendo with Once Upon a Time. Leo McKern returns to the role of Number Two and this time he’s decided that extreme measures are called for. His plan is exceptionally risky. Using drugs and hypnosis he will regress Number Six to childhood. He will act as father figure and psychoanalyst. It will be a psychological roller-coaster ride for both men with the probability that only one of them will survive.

McGoohan wrote and directed this episode and he achieves an extraordinary dreamlike intensity. It’s quite disturbing at times. McGoohan and McKern pull out all the stops and give superb performances (which apparently took their toll on the actors). Getting into the realms of psychoanalysis in movies and TV can be risky. The results can easily turn out to be embarrassing but McGoohan knows what he’s doing and it’s a great episode.

Then we get to the final episode, Fall Out, also written and directed by McGoohan. Don’t worry, I’m not going to offer any hints at all as to what actually happens. It was always going to be a tricky series to write an ending for and it’s probably fair to say that no ending would have satisfied everyone. I’m not overly fond of Fall Out, partly because stylistically it’s everything I like least about the 60s.

The Prisoner is unique in television history. It was entirely Patrick McGoohan’s baby. He came up with the original idea. No-one, no star and no producer, has ever had the degree of creative control that McGoohan had over The Prisoner. In fact he had too much control and in some ways the series was an act of self-destruction. The series was a huge hit but he burned himself out and gained a reputation for being impossible to work with, and his career never recovered.

So what is The Prisoner actually about? What does it all mean? The good thing about this question is that you can discuss it quite openly without spoiling the series since no two viewers have ever agreed on the matter. It was always McGoohan’s intention to make the series open to multiple interpretations.
It could be a political allegory. Interesting enough it can be interpreted equally convincingly from either a liberal or a conservative perspective. Or a left-wing or a right-wing, a libertarian or an authoritarian, or a democratic or anti-democratic perspective. McGoohan seems to have regarded all political ideologies and systems with a certain scepticism, and to have both the loss of freedom and the consequences of too much freedom. Most of all he was profoundly suspicious of the 60s and the simplistic utopian visions that were so popular at the time.

It could also of course have a purely psychological meaning. The Village could be his own mind.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that McGoohan was a devout Catholic, and presumably viewed questions of freedom through the lens of Catholic doctrines on free will. Most critics  seem to overlook the possibility of religious meanings in the series, which may be a mistake.

I suspect that the key is that Number Six is a spy. His whole life has been based on deception, on living a lie. The perfect spy is a man with no identity. Number Six famously declaims that, “I am not a number, I am a free man.” The irony is that being a spy he has always been a number, he has never been an individual, he has never been a free man. In a way, he has always lived in The Village, and always will live in The Village. Even if he escapes he can’t really escape. We never do learn his real name, because he’s a spy and a spy doesn’t have a real name. He is trying to discover his own identity only to find that he doesn’t have one.

Which of course could apply to all of us, not just to spies. We’re told we’re free but are we really? Is The Village a vision of a nightmare totalitarian future or is it just the world we already live in?

But that’s just my theory, there are countless others!

And is Number Six really John Drake, the spy from Danger Man? Again it hardly matters. After all, John Drake is a spy and his real name is probably not John Drake anyway. There are a couple of Danger Man episodes that do anticipate some of the themes of The Prisoner – The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove and even more especially the superb Colony Three.

The Prisoner is exasperating, often incoherent, wildly uneven, always fascinating and despite its flaws undeniably brilliant.