In another attention-grabbing opening sequence, a man wearing tropical clothing is being hunted by tribesmen in a jungle until he is shot with a poison arrow. You would assume this is taking place in Africa, until he collapses beside a milestone: London 23 miles. The Avengers writers certainly knew how to set up a bizarre mystery and draw us into the story.

It turns out that the jungle is a manmade environment, a sort of fake biome, a bit like the magnificent Eden Project but on a much smaller scale. It’s all part of a convoluted plot that seems to involve using a mad old colonel as an excuse for committing pretend crimes which are actually real crimes, while helping him to live a lie. Colonel Rawlings thinks he is still in a former British Empire country named Kalaya, and the fake jungle around him is there to maintain the illusion for him. I’m not quite sure it makes a whole lot of sense, but in any case it’s all a load of window dressing for the big, crazy, horrible plan, which is to do with genocide and reconquering a lost colonial territory. Rawlings therefore simply adds a bit of entertainment value to the episode, while being fairly tangential to the narrative. He isn’t even one of the bad guys. Well… he is and he isn’t, but we’ll get to that. Rawlings is played by the magnificent Bill Fraser, and he manages to make the character quite likeable, despite Rawlings basically being a mentally ill, deluded old fool with foul views about “natives” and Empire. It’s a big performance; he speaks all the time as if he’s got a tennis ball in his mouth, and as if he’s only allowed to use one half of each lip.

We are in the fourth season of The Avengers and so far it has been a show that has rarely put a foot wrong in terms of the “isms”. Almost without exception it has been a series that you could put on television today without offending anyone, and that’s remarkable for a 60s show. Even the largely inoffensive Doctor Who has the very occasional story that you probably couldn’t screen today without some kind of a warning about “outdated values”, or something of that nature. As soon as this episode started to be about “natives” with painted faces shooting arrows, I was sure this was going to be an unfortunate dirty mark on the clean slate of The Avengers, and to some extent that’s true. It’s a little bit uncomfortable to watch, nowadays. Having said that, its heart is most definitely in the right place.

The key moment comes when Steed is faced with one of the tribesmen, who we assume (or at least a viewer at the time would have assumed) will be some kind of a bloodthirsty savage who will try to kill him. Instead he has even more of a posh voice than Steed (admittedly a slightly awkward way to represent his civilised attitude), he is fiercely intelligent and has figured everything out. He doesn’t get much screen time, but he’s probably the cleverest person in this whole episode. So that subverts expectations and displays a very positive attitude to a different culture, but that’s not all. When I said Rawlings “is and isn’t” one of the bad guys, he isn’t actually involved in the genocide plot, but his opinions on Empire are clearly shown to be bad opinions. He is an insane old idiot, clinging on to a past that is never coming back. Harkening after the days of Empire is shown to be not only a very bad thing indeed, but also extremely silly. Then we have the genocide plot, which is uttely abhorrant, and takes the commentary on Empire a step further. These are people who are not just trying to cling onto their perceived glory days; these are younger men who are trying to rebuild the Empire, and that idea is shown to be horribly, revoltingly murderous, and a perversion of nature at the same time, something that has been a running theme in this season. The writer even offers up a judgement on hunting that would not have pleased everyone watching at the time. The bad guys champion somebody who killed an elephant from an impressive distance, while our hero Steed is proud of shooting only in a different sense of the word:

“I once shot a bull elephant myself.”
“Really, what did you use?”
“F8 at five hundreths of a second and a small roll of film.”

It’s a clever little pun, which forms part of a bigger picture of a story that rejects traditional views of how the British should interact with foreign countries, and instead promotes the idea that a “native” can be the cleverest person around, and the only kind of shooting we should be doing is with a camera. Once again, The Avengers demonstrates that it was perfectly possible for a 1960s television series to be built on the principles of equality and decency, or at least to try its very best.   RP

The view from across the pond:

After two weak episodes in a row, I was thinking this should be called Small Chance for Big Improvements, but contrary to my cynical expectations, this episode hit a lot of the right marks.  The opening was a bit Prisoner-esque to me finding once again that this tropical island hunting scene was just 23 kilometers from London.  Interesting indeed.  A big success for the episode is that it takes place in what appears to be an isolated part of town where Steed and Peel stay literally right next door to the bad guy’s place of residence… or rather place of hunting.  There’s the wonderfully eccentric Colonel Rawlings who is just delightful to listen to.  And there’s the hint of voodoo cults.  Call me old fashioned but a good voodoo story can still chill the blood.

Alas, it’s rare that The Avengers is doing any blood chilling, short of the occasional moment but there are some great moments that come close, especially when Emma wakes from a nap and thinks she sees a native in the room with her.  Happily this felt like a rare episode when Emma is utilized well.  Of course the biggest moment comes at the end when she’s dressed as the native servant and spins around only to help Steed, but it was contrived as anything we’ve seen so far.  Why go through the trouble of dressing up the way she does?  When did she do it?  Did no one see this happening?  Granted, she looks fantastic, but it felt so desperate.  That said, it shocked me when it happened!  Steed also comes off better in this one than usual.  His interactions with Rawlings is the heartbeat of the episode to me, but I can’t fault him when he whips out his sword cane!  On the other hand, he did step in a trap where he is promptly knocked out.  Kudos though: we hear his head hit the tree limb which was a marked improvement from the standard “glass jaw” approach that has people passing out from an idea.

Unfortunately, the episode does still suffer some of the weekly trappings I’ve come to dislike so much.  For one, the main baddie, Professor Swain, has come up with an idea: tsetse flies to take over a country.  Sure it’s using that same compound I talked about in Silent Dust: Moronicus ploticus sleepus inducus.  This is where the idiotic plot involves flies that will infect people with a sleeping sickness.  Are you kidding?  I fully expected Vince Ricardo to come out and discuss the dangers of tsetse flies.  (“They have tsetse flies down there the size of eagles.” – You’ll have to look it up.  It’s too good not to know this movie, but I won’t spoil it.  Use the comments section if you want to discuss!)   There’s also the terribly inept use of a file Steed leaves in his convertible, as spies would never do.  So when it’s ransacked and the files are exposed, it’s abundantly clear that it says “Pzev” which was the enemy in Two’s A Crowd.  Did no one actually notice this?  Was it that hard to have random papers without a reuse of old ones from another episode?

So this episode was slightly above what we’ve been seeing lately, but would I give it just a 3 star rating?  Maybe.  “My arithmetic is shocking!”  Ok fair point: Steed has an absolutely perfect delivery with this line and I busted out laughing deeply with it.  He is convinced Trent has fired off his last shot and makes a comment to that effect. Trent lets off another to which Steed makes that fine comment.  Ok, so it’s only one line but it gave me a lot to like about Steed in that split second.  Now, is it enough to help me understand the fandom around this series?  No… and I don’t know if that understanding will come from Steed anyway.  Mrs. Peel, perhaps.  Or another creepy story.  It certainly won’t come from those ridiculous endings of Steed and Peel riding off in the most formulaic way possible.  Who told them this was the only way to end an episode?  (Surely that can’t go on into season 5, can it?)   ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: The Girl from AUNTIE