Nearly every review about Killer on the internet mentions that the producers didn’t like Linda Thorson and/or Tara King, and decided to write her out for a week, sending the actress and the character off on holiday. I don’t know if this is true or not, because I’ve found no evidence to back up the claim, and just because it is widely repeated doesn’t mean it has to be true. Wikipedia also mentions that Brian Clemens said that this script wasn’t an attempt to replace Thorson on a permanent basis, which adds weight to a much more logical explanation: lead actors routinely had a week’s holiday on a long season like this. We have already seen that happen with Patrick Macnee, so I see nothing out of the ordinary about Linda Thorson missing an episode, and no real reason to build a conspiracy theory around that. Even if Clemens did state somewhere that he decided to write Thorson out because he didn’t think the character was working, we do have to take those kinds of anecdotes with a pinch of salt, because the memory cheats, and can be skewed by opinions formed after the event. Taking the most well-documented British television show in history as an example, having watched just about every Doctor Who documentary ever made, and listened to all the commentary tracks, it’s pretty obvious that behind-the-scenes recollections often conflict with one another, and sometimes also conflict with contemporary documentation. So until I see evidence, I’ll work on the assumption that the most boring explanation is usually the true one: Thorson simply had some holiday time booked.

In any case, if the producers really were trying to get rid of Tara for a week, then it spectacularly backfired on them here. Jennifer Croxton is awful as her temporary replacement, Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney, who is just a really boring toff character, perhaps an attempt at a wannabe Emma Peel. If we are going to speculate on the producers somehow deliberately replacing Tara with somebody more like Emma, then that’s foolish. The best of the season 4 and 5 episodes were not great because of Emma. They were great despite her. Cathy Gale was Steed’s physical and intellectual equal. The characterisation of Emma was nothing but a carbon copy of Cathy’s fighting talents, but the intellect was replaced by a weekly damsel in distress, no longer Steed’s equal, and needing to be rescued at the end of each episode. The worst of the season 4 and 5 episodes were never elevated by the character of Emma. They were made more watchable by the silliness of the scriptwriting actually being quite fun. Dropping an Emma-like character into the mix of a faltering season wasn’t going to fix anything. It’s not even a sticking plaster over a wound. It’s just a bit of salt. The greatest season 6 episodes have been great because of good writing and the bad ones have had weak scripts. That’s no different to the previous seasons.

If anything, the absence of Tara has the opposite effect to that which was allegedly intended, if it were all about getting rid of an unloved character and replacing her with an almost-Emma. It’s a reminder of how good Thorson actually is. I didn’t need that reminder, because I’ve ranked her above Diana Rigg all season, second only to Honor Blackman, but if you are one of those weird Thorson haters who probably thought Rigg was brilliant because you fancied her (most of the praise for Emma on the internet seems to centre around her looks), then this episode might just make you realise that the series is actually much weaker without her, at this point in the run. I wonder if it had the same effect on the producers. After an episode of Lady Posh-and-Boring, they must surely have realised that they should be making the most of what they already had. The episode springs back to life right at the end.

You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned the actual story, and that’s because it’s just another silly exercise in 60s technophobia, with a killer computer. The mystery works really well, so that’s good, but we have to watch a succession of foolish agents rushing off on their own to get themselves killed, with the writer repeating the same plot beat over and over again until its time for Steed to battle the real villain. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of effective moments, and it’s not actually a bad episode at all. There’s just nothing that really justifies discussion. In fact, the story I really wanted to see was the one right at the end: extreme miniaturisation. Tara gives Steed a tiny box, which contains a dinghy that inflates to fill the room. Compressing things that small could be really useful. This repetitive story could have done with a bit of shrinking down too, but mainly what it needed was Tara. If the producers weren’t satisfied with their work at this point, perhaps this episode made them realise that they didn’t actually have a scapegoat, and their problems lay elsewhere. In the end, the thing that matters the most is always going to be the script.   RP

The view from across the pond:

After two strong episodes followed by a semi-good one, The Killer is a massive let-down in quality.  I can’t overstate that enough: massive in the way Jupiter is massive by contrast to Earth.   It starts off, like most episodes, with a strong hook.  A man is sent into a room where a killer lurks.  Then we set up the mystery: who is Rimmer… Remar… Rimmart…Remeck…Remmick… Remak!!  Well, the first mystery for me was what were they saying.  It’s not until someone finally writes it down that I knew.  It’s not made much better with the final reveal that it’s an acronym for Remote Electro Matic Agent Killer.  (It’s not remote, if the agent has to come to you.  Think about the TV remote you use, you don’t have to go to the TV anymore!)   The next mystery is captured best when Steed asks the coroner how the first dead body was killed.  “I alphabetical order he was clubbed, poisoned, shot, spiked, stabbed, strangled, and suffocated. And his eardrums are damaged.”  Ok… all good hooks.  I want to know more.

And then it becomes above-average stupidity.  I was told recently that I should be nicer in the way I rip into my media viewing.  Maybe, but when something is utterly idiotic, I can’t just let it wash over me and calmly accept it.  I watch TV with my brain turned on most of the time, so I think about things.  I don’t pick up on everything, of course, but some things are so blatantly obvious that it would be impossible to overlook them.  And yet writer Tony Williamson seemed to forget how reality works.  The only thing The Killer was really killing were brain cells!

When we learn who the killer is… or more to the point: what it is… there’s little surprise.  It’s the machine in The Cube.  (For those who haven’t seen The Cube, it’s about a handful of people who wake up in a gauntlet where every room is a deathtrap – it’s actually quite good.)  I don’t have an issue with the idea of a gauntlet.  I have an issue with the logic of the dead body.  The first body was clubbed, poisoned, shot, spiked, stabbed, strangled, and suffocated.  When we learn that Remak is effectively a death trap, I have to ask who moved the body from room to room just to make sure it hit all the possible triggers?  Surely the man who was clubbed, poisoned, shot, spiked, stabbed, strangled, and suffocated didn’t walk from room to room having each of these things happen to him!  Unless this was a Time Lord and he regenerated after each death, making it the shortest-lived Time Lord in the history of Gallifrey, this premise is utterly nonsensical.  Furthermore, the idea of wiping out an agency of top spies by luring them to a room in an office in Lower Storpington is about the lamest way of killing them imaginable.  It’s also based on the notion that those highly trained agents don’t notice the lack of blood on their informants’ bodies and have no ability to check for a pulse and can’t tell a mannequin from a real person.  The main baddie who lures all the agents to their death is found stabbed in the back with a knife, harpooned in the chest with an arrow and stabbed through the heart by a huge sword.  You think the agents that find those bodies would call the police to pick up the body?  Imagine how funny that would be if the agent stood there waiting for the paramedics to come to take the body and he got up and had to say sorry, I was bluffing?  “Sorry, ol’ chap, thought you’d realize I had a pulse, was still breathing, didn’t show the first sign of bleeding from the wounds and oh, by the way, aren’t you trained for this sort of thing?  No?  Ok, here’s a wrench to the skull, but rather than kill you in this out of the way place, I’ll lure you to my death trap, a la The Cube (1997)!  Don’t worry, that’ll make more sense in about 30 years, but we’ll have killed you by then, haha!”  After all that, he gets knocked out when he’s slapped in the face.

Not to mention, Mr. Bleach walks into the house of his “former colleague” and instantly knows the next place to go, then attempts to blackmail the lead villain, who I couldn’t get out of my head, looked like a slightly younger Donald Trump.  This goes spectacularly badly for him but the fact that he could solve where to go while our lead man Steed couldn’t, is just exacerbating an already bad issue with this claptrap episode.  It’s subtle but Tara might also hold a key to my annoyance with Steed: she says she’s going on holiday but didn’t tell him because he might use his influence to stop it.  While this is really just a way to get Linda Thorson off the set for a while to make way for a new female companion, it illustrates that Steed is selfish.  Meanwhile Merridon (the Trump looking villain) can’t tries to type while holding a gun and screaming at his machine.  He can’t type “abort” because Steed told it to self-destruct… oh you know what, just watch this episode and think about everything you see.  It’s so bad it’s dizzying.

However, not to be outdone, the writer – or in fairness, maybe the director – should really rethink a line like, “there was no time to call to check-in” when the man saying it is sitting in a pub having a drink.  That’s what we call: “having time to call to check-in”, friend.  And the ancient Chinese trick that Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney uses is what we call: “the same trick everyone uses”.  She uses a decoy, but the shooter is the next problem because he shoots at the hats of Steed and Forbes, but then sits there!!  If he thought he killed his quarry, maybe he should go check, call in his win, you know, not sit there like he’s on the loo.  If you know you didn’t kill your quarry, you’ve just given yourself away so sitting in one spot like you’re having a particularly bad time on the loo, again, isn’t a good idea.  Mind you, this guy “Austin Powers it” when he stands there as a cart is pushed at him from a mile away and he just waits there to be taken out.   Hint: you can move – you have something we call “legs”.

No, I am so disappointed I can’t even believe it.  There is precisely one good scene in the whole miserable affair: when Mother is getting information from one of his people, the guy keeps changing what side of Mother he will be on to whisper into his ear.  The look on Mother’s face made me laugh.  Definitely not enough to redeem this rubbish episode.  This show had a spark of life for 2… maybe 3 consecutive episodes, and then lost it.  Williamson has two more episodes in this interminable season of one quintillion episodes.  I hope he puts a little more thought into what he writers in his next one.  In the meantime, you’re up, Brian Clemens!  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: The Morning After