The Avengers often seemed to be a series that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. It started off as fairly gritty espionage thrillers, and soon became a show that wasn’t taking itself very seriously. It’s perfectly normal for a series to change as it finds it feet, but there is still a weird sense that it is still trying to find its feet during the sixth and final season, and has never quite settled down into much of a pattern. It has never really been one thing rather than another. During the Emma Peel era, when the silliness really kicked in, it was sometimes a sci-fi show, but frequently not. The Tara King episodes so far have been an odd mix of stories that would have fitted perfectly into the Cathy Gale era, with Tara the equal of Steed, and Emma Peel episodes with a damsel in distress to be saved by Steed, the comedy fun turned up to eleven and the realism turned down to zero. I suppose variety is the spice of life, but it’s hard to believe this is actually the same show as last week. You couldn’t find two more different episodes if you tried, and they are consecutive. The reason for that, as is often the case when things get weird in a television show, is behind-the-scenes turmoil.

A new producer originally took over for the sixth season, and Tara King was introduced in a 90 minute special called Invitation to a Killing. After making that, plus two other episodes, the previous producers were asked to return. I think what happened here is that somebody had obviously realised that the silliness of the Emma Peel era had gone to far, and a “return to realism” would be a good idea at this point. That seems perfectly logical. Most fans will disagree, because Diana Rigg was so popular, but after a promising start her episodes quickly became a mess. The show was unfocussed and was clearly prioritising spectacle over story. Basically, it was entertainment, not drama. There’s a place for that, without a doubt, but following on from the Cathy Gale era, it was hard to shake the feeling that something far more valuable had been lost. The problem is that you just can’t go back to the past, most of the time. It rarely works to simply try to turn back the clock, in any walk of life, and certainly not in a television show. Once the genie is out of the bottle, that’s it. Viewers expected Avengers to be fun, by this point, and although a return to a more serious kind of storytelling is an admirable aim, when you compare most of this episode to the previous one, it’s simply boring in comparison, and that’s after a significant amount of rewriting and reshooting of scenes. Invitation to a Killing was chopped up, and something new was made from bits of the carcass.

The end results aren’t too bad, although it’s clearly a continuity nightmare. The whole problem of Tara’s ever-changing hair began here (it was bleached blonde, which was always a bad idea anyway, and that damaged Linda Thorson’s hair so she had to wear wigs). Something had to be written into the story to explain her changing hair, between the original footage and the reshoots, and that results in an aspect of the story that is seemingly there for no reason at all.

The most entertaining bits of the episode are the ones that were presumably added in later. The opening sequence is great fun, accidentally calling back to the theme of the previous episode, but an even more sinister subversion of performance arts. Those masks really play havoc with the uncanny valley response. The villains wear a uniform of turtle-neck pullovers, which is odd (why do they need a uniform, and if so, why that?) but having tried to wear one of those once and found how irritating they are around the neck, I can indeed confirm that they are an evil form of clothing. The best bit of the episode is the auction, despite the unfortunate addition of Tara to the auction lot. There’s something strangely compelling about an auction. Daytime television is full of programmes showing antiques auctions, for a start (I used to love Storage Wars – now that was quality television), but it works within drama just as well as reality television. The sublime Detectorists built one of the best episodes around an auction, for example. The battle between Steed and Nsonga to win the auction is surprisingly exciting, even though we know Steed is never going to let him keep the guns anyway, and we also have to wonder why he’s even bothering with all that nonsense, rather than his usual way of handling problems: just punch everyone until nobody else is left standing. After all, they are stolen weapons being auctioned by a mercenary. He doesn’t exactly need to play fair.

In the end, this is a partially obscured window into what a return to the storytelling style of the early days of The Avengers might have looked like. Whilst it would probably have been an intrinsically higher quality series, that would have been at the expense of a lot of silly fun. At this stage in the game, that does actually seem like too high a price to pay, so the decision to abort the attempt at a “return to realism” was the right thing to do. Who wants realism, anyway, when you can have villains on trampolines instead?   RP

The view from across the pond:

Interestingly, I didn’t feel Have Guns – Will Haggle was of the same low caliber (pun intended) as most episodes because it’s based on a less-than-caricature idea.  This could just as easily have been a plot from Mission: Impossible.  I was hoping for more of last week’s absolute craziness, but the more important criteria was that it didn’t fall back into the standard trap that most every episode falls into; namey, the idiotically complex plot by villains that are utterly unbelievable with story points that make zero sense.  We nearly get there too.  Oh, sure, has that overuse of baddies getting the drop on Steed or King and epically failing to dispatch them but the rest of the plot makes sense to me.  That’s a big step in the right direction, but it still falls short.

We have an arms dealer trying to outfit a would-be president with enough weapons to guarantee his presidency.  Wow, that was easily summed up.  It took 140 episodes before I came to one that I could explain so easily.   The lead villain, Adrianna (played by Nicola Pagett) is just a conniver looking to make money any way she can.  She’s charismatic and evil in nearly equal measure.  Her warehouse explosion is well deserved.  However the real win for the episode is Colonel Nsonga (played by Johnny Sekka) who is utterly charming and is brilliant in every scene.  I’d go so far as to say that this class act steals every scene he’s in even when he’s up against Steed.  Their interaction is phenomenal, and bears certain similarities to me to the wonderful interplay between Holmes and Moriarty.  He even steals the scene during his final knockout by a flying piece of shrapnel.  I would love to have this guy back for more.  Shame they killed his aide because that dude was Toberman from Doctor Who’s Tomb of the Cybermen. 

Sadly, I was watching the clock for a lot of it but mostly because we knew the good guys had to win.  Yes, the bidding war was strangely fun to watch but there are things that just annoy me and I start looking to see how much time is left.  I mean, it makes no sense that the good guys would win besides the fact that villains in the 60’s had glass jaws.  Tara literally kicks a guy’s ass into unconsciousness.  No, no, I’m not being crude!  She chases him, pushes him, and then kicks him in the bottom where he falls unconscious on the auctioned rifle.  That wouldn’t knock out a 6 year old, but we’re to believe it knocked out the best marksman in the world? And it wouldn’t be The Avengers without some level of silliness like we get with a gymnastic heist that works as the opening “gotcha” to the episode.  I mean, how do you turn away as a group of villains take the time to setup a big trampoline outside a building, then use it to leap over the high gate?  There’s also the ever-present baddie when Steed or any of his colleagues is investigating a case.  Do they ever think to investigate without having the bad guys in the room with them?  How coincidental must life be that the bad guys are always present for these moments?  Yet I’d happily ignore that if not for moments like when an assailant pops out of a building with a gun and … runs at Tara would promptly throws him over a car, and she escapes, nearly running him over.  Here’s my suggestion, for the little it’s worth: if you don’t want to kill the heroes, don’t write scenes from which they have no escape.  If the attacker came out without a gun, that would be all it would have needed to enhance the sequence without making such a joke of the moment.  It’s such an irritation of mine seeing how, time and again, the bad guys – who kill freely, I might add – decide not to kill the very people who could bring about their downfall.   In.  Every.  Single.  Episode!!

I’d turn a blind eye to the villainous organization that gives its members blue turtlenecks if we could get past the bad writing.  I mean, I’m far from a genius but I know that if I don’t want a certain thing to happen, I’m not going to write that thing in.  I do appreciate this episode for being more believable than most though, despite my complaint.  I even found a few scenes very funny.   I loved Steed’s observation about how tricky it must be to get recruits when working for the organization means possibly being in a gunfight to the death.  My guess is people join for the turtlenecks.  I laughed a lot when Steed managed to knock out two guys simultaneously with a large rock to their jaws.  One swipe and both were down!  But I can’t stand the abject stupidity of the armed villains who don’t use their weapons or worse, capture the heroes but don’t kill them.  Why not just have them escape so it doesn’t look so phoney?!

Yes, I’m nitpicking because I want one of two things from this show: absolute off-the-wall zaniness like last week or a good thriller.  This comes so close but does a lazy… no, ignorant is the right word … ignorant thing of writing something you don’t want to use.  One-time writer Donald James almost pulled off a really good thriller, but fell into the same trap as so many of his predecessors.  But I will say this: it’s the first episode in a long while that I looked forward to watching since I really loved the previous week’s story.  I can’t say I’m as excited about the next one, but I’m also not dreading it.  I don’t expect this series will ever climb out of the hole it’s in by my estimation, but every now and then I’m reminded that there’s still hope.  It’s a needle in a haystack, but just knowing that needle is there makes it worth continuing.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: They Keep Killing Steed