Let’s face it, the plots of many Avengers episodes don’t hold together particularly well, but this one is excellent. Although the villain’s plan is convoluted, you can really see how it might work in real life to get secrets from spies, if you can look past the moments of silliness. They are fooled into thinking they are taking part in a training exercise to withstand interrogation. Once they have passed the test they relax in the bar afterwards and spill the beans after they are plied with drink. Makes sense.

Quite a few factors make this work really well. Firstly, Mother clearly runs his organisation along military lines, and we all know the military ethos of following orders without question. That leads to a culture in which a person will obey a tape recording of a superior officer, a ruse that would collapse with any questioning in reply, but the bullying and angry tone is sufficient for even an independent thinker like Tara to do what she’s told without question.

Having convinced the victim that they are undergoing a test, the key is to make it severe enough that it is an ordeal, but also to have moments that remind them it’s all pretend. There’s a great scene where Colonel Mannering offers his victim a cup of tea, and becomes really chummy with him. At this stage in the episode, we don’t know what’s going on, so it sets up the mystery very well, but it also reinforces the con trick. By the time the victim gets to the bar, he thinks he has won a significant victory, the test is over, and he can relax. He is exhausted (note that sleep deprivation is an effective element of the torture), and has been conditioned to believe that the bar area is a safe space, and will never be part of the test. Some alcohol helps to loosen the tongue. The only mistake here is that the dialogue for the conversation where the secrets are revealed is far too simplistic. It’s not chatty enough. It’s too obvious that Mannering is trying to extract information, and his victim isn’t drunk enough to fall for it. That scene needed more carefully crafted dialogue and a more obviously inebriated victim, and then it would have been perfect, but the idea is sound.

Importantly, this never quite works on Tara, although we are denied the whole process in her case. This is almost a moment to restore the gender balance in The Avengers, which has been largely lacking since the Cathy Gale era, but has seen a revival at times since Tara replaced Emma. Tara doesn’t need much rescuing, dealing with her captor herself, although the distraction of Steed’s arrival obviously helps. More importantly, she is much more of a difficult case for Mannering, because his chummy, men’s club, boozy scam is far less likely to work on Tara, who would normally have been excluded from the kind of scenario we see in the bar area in the 1960s, on account of her gender. I used to belong to a “working men’s club” (useful for the snooker tables), and even 40 years after this episode aired women were not allowed into one of the bar areas and the snooker room. Mercifully, that changed soon after I joined, but there is a culture in play in this episode that aids Mannering’s scheme in a way that simply wouldn’t work with Tara. It’s just a shame we don’t get to see that play out to its conclusion before Steed shows up, because it could have been even more of a victory for Tara and a lesson that manipulation has its limits.

The effectiveness of the storyline is undermined a little by some of the usual Avengers silliness. As much as I enjoy the fun of the over-the-top approach that has been a part of this series for the last couple of seasons, it does go too far at times, and it’s hard to see how the murder victims could be any use to anyone as secret government contacts. One of them is very conspicuously playing football by himself in a park, while the other is a one man band in the middle of a quarry. Is that what they do all day? They could hardly bring more attention to themselves if they tried, and they are easy targets for their enemies.

Although some of Mother’s tactics seem questionable, and he clearly presides over a culture that creates just the kind of unthinking obedience that makes his team vulnerable to manipulation, I did like his pragmatism when things go wrong:

“Sorrow is a negative, after-the-event emotion.”

He doesn’t want apologies or regrets. He only focusses on dealing with the situation as it presents itself in that particular moment. Maybe we could all do with a little more of that attitude in our lives. As Ted Lasso says, forget the negative, and be a goldfish. That’s probably not too difficult for Mother. Last week, he was living in a river.   RP

The view from across the pond:

What just happened?!  Am I in a parallel universe?  Did the Large Hadron Collider just deposit me in a universe where The Avengers makes sense?!

According to Wikipedia, this is episode number 142, which means I’ve sat through the better part of 140 episodes (excluding a few missing ones during season 1), and have only just now come to a story that makes sense.  Wait a sec… nope, I have some confusion: I don’t know why Mannering (Christopher Lee) was gathering intelligence, but the plot is actually pretty genius as far as mad schemes go.  Colonel Mannering poses as a high-ranking agent of the same organization Steed and King work for, then takes them out to “endurance training” to see how long they can be interrogated before they break and give up vital secrets.  This is all really brilliant stuff.  He has the credentials, the bearing, and the knowledge.  It’s no surprise agents fall for it.  But how are they being made to break when they all swear they’ve given away nothing?  Is it hypnosis again?

Thankfully, no!  That’s where it gets even more clever.   The agents all pass the tests.  It actually works so well because he allows them to succeed.  It’s not until they are in the bar, enjoying the spoils of their rewards that they casually give up the secrets, having now proven to their “superiors” that they had stayed strong against it all.  It’s all so wonderfully clever that I totally bought into this episode.  I know I have something to bash in nearly every episode because I get annoyed by little things when the writing often fails at key points.  Yet, the worst offender I came up with in this story was “follow that pigeon” because, you know, pigeons would never fly into trees where a helicopter couldn’t follow.  And the helicopter wouldn’t scare the pigeon or anything… maybe make it fly into a group of other pigeons.  The thing is, I honestly didn’t care, because the rest of the episode is so good.

The moment the story opened and the very first sound was a cry of agony before a man walks out of what appears to be a dentist’s office, I knew this had potential.  That could be that I just came from the dentist two days before watching this and know what that’s like or it could simply be the comedic way the cry was made.  Either way, I was hooked.  Then Christopher Lee came on the screen, and I became even more hopeful.  But it wasn’t until the interrogation took a pause for tea that really won me over.  I have this image in my head of the polite British society and the idea that in the middle of an interrogation, the parties might pause, have a cup of tea, talk cordially, and then go back to where they left off afterwards.  It’s about the most brilliant thing I could imagine.  This is the very epitome of British comedy in my mind!

Mannering: “Afternoon, Johnson!”
Johnson: “Afternoon, Sir!”

This dialogue takes place as Johnson is being dragged away nearly unconscious, but passing Mannering, they still have a simple but polite exchange.  I have found the episode that sums up my love of the British culture!  Then there’s the Who’s Who from Who that we get to play.  Wasn’t that the poacher from Spearhead from Space?  Yep, Norton is played by Neil Wilson.  Then I would wager your life on it… lucky you!  That was who I thought: Neil McCarthy was in The Mind of Evil.  This is a “Neil-heavy” episode, it seems!  I also enjoyed the secret door inside a phone booth to get to Mother.  Sometimes they do have clever ideas.  Maybe I’m biased: I grew up watching Get Smart.   And perhaps the best spy in the history of spies – you thought it was Austin Powers?  Nope!  Izzy Pound and His Incredible Marching Sound.  The nutcase wanders around a quarry playing multiple instruments at the same time making the most god-awful cacophony since they let a madman into a drum factory in the earlier seasons – but it was absolutely delightful to witness.  I was bummed to see him die!  Just watching him tramp around the quarry in his own happy place made me smile.

The biggest victory for the episode was the denouement where Mannering convinces a room of agents to shoot Steed.  Convinced all of the guns have blanks, they see no reason not to gain points by shooting but Steed actually has a suggestion that makes complete sense: if they’re blanks anyway, point the guns at Mannering and pull the trigger.  One of them thinks it’s a good idea, so Mannering flees.  The gig is up!  Mannering is captured and the episode ends.  I thought Grand Inquisitor Torquemada was behind this series, having been subjected to nearly 140 episodes of torture, but we get to an episode that’s actually about torture, and I end up loving it.  Go figure.  Life is full of these little quirks.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: The Rotters