A funny drunkard laughing in a graveyard sees a ghost rise up out of a grave and ring the church bells. It’s another great opening, although the messages Steed is sending to Emma each week are getting silly now. How exactly did he manage to mess around with those traffic lights so they read out a message for Emma, and was it really worth the effort? He does look very pleased with himself, I suppose.

Once we get past that bit of silliness, we are into a creepy story, with plenty of the action set in a dark graveyard and inside a church where the bells keep mysteriously ringing. We also get a villain (played by Julian Glover) who genuinely seems dangerous, the second time this has happened in two weeks, previously an unusual occurrence in The Avengers with its generally unthreatening eccentrics with madcap schemes. The first murder is a striking image, with a man hanging from the bell pull rope, a sword sticking out of his back.

The unfortunately victim is George Spencer (Vernon Dobtcheff, Doctor Who: The War Games fans) from SMOG, the Scientific Measurement of Ghosts, an organisation that fights “legend with logic, folklore with facts”. Also poking her nose around is Mandy McKay (Pamela Ann Davy, also seen in Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks), whose opening words to greet a stranger are “the vibrations are marvellous.” Her organisation (which I suspect is just her) is FOG, Friends of Ghosts, and she doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in inconvenient things like logic and facts, as long as she gets her marvellous vibrations.

Mandy is actually a lot of fun, especially when teamed up with Emma, providing us with a rare episode of The Avengers that passes the Bechdel test. But as soon as Mandy is kidnapped, and she thinks she has seen a ghost, Mandy suddenly becomes extremely irritating, thanks to the overacting of Davy. To be fair to the actress, though, any script that demands a comedy stutter to denote fear is asking a lot:

“G g g g g g g g g g ghost!”

When the action moves underground, we are treated to a very impressive set. It’s quite a sight to see those buildings under the ground, although it’s a bit of a stretch to ask us to believe there is an entire town beyond them. The plan is as crazily ambitious as most villains’ plans are in The Avengers, although a bit more believable than the antigravity boots from last week. It’s just that the scale of the achievement is astonishing, and would seem to require attracting much more attention from above ground than the occasional misunderstood ghost sighting.

We are used to Steed and Emma resolving their problems with a few punches, and then walking away, but this takes that approach to a whole new level. Firstly, Emma guns down an entire firing squad. That’s nine deaths on her hands in seconds, and the mass killing doesn’t seem to bother her one little bit. Then we are left to speculate what happens next, after Emma and Steed trap everyone else underground. We see at least 14 people, and there are presumably many more around the underground town, so what happens to them? Are they entombed and left to die? If so, that’s quite the massacre from our heroes. My guess is that they contact a higher authority who turn up to make arrests etc., but there have been many occasions where the plot is really left relatively unresolved other than a big fight, so it would be interesting to have some clarification on what happens next on at least one occasion. The alternative is to assume that Steed and Peel find it a jolly jape to gun down nine men and then leave a lot of people to die slowly underground, before going back to their flirtation, quips and messing around with road signs. A strange pair of heroes.   RP

The view from across the pond:

The Brits have always had a knack for good horror, especially back in the 60s.  I remember countless (pun only slightly intended) Hammer horror movies that captivated my imagination as a child.  When an episode of The Avengers opens up with creepy, Hammer-style horror, it’s got my attention.  I’m invested and ready to go.  Have you ever watched crash test dummies when their crash-car hits a wall?  That’s what happened when I was roped into the Hammer Horror episode only to instantly hit the wall of whimsy.  Bam.  I’m flung out of the car and lying broken on the floor wondering how it all happened.  It’s not that The Living Dead is a bad episode, but the series just can’t decide what it wants to be.  Is it Get Smart?  How can you go from instant classic to instant crash-ic in so little time?  The answer: play whimsical music while showing Steed magically making traffic lights say “Mrs. Peel, We’re needed.”  It’s a gimmick that fails and it’s there for less than a cheap laugh.  Surely the audience wasn’t laughing, and I can’t imagine the kids in the playground running up to their friends saying the line.  When we put something on screen, surely we’re considering that it adds value to the production.  What value did that line add?  In an episode that starts off in the dark and ominous category, that silliness undermines everything.  Surely the writers would have picked up on that, no??  The past truly was another world!

Now if it were just the opening gimmick that brought the episode down, I’d not have even bothered mentioning it.  It’s brief and gone in a flash, but then we meet Mandy who might as well have been a mannequin when Emma first encounters her lying on the floor of the crypt as no person on earth would, before getting up to do her silly inhalation that’s also done for a laugh.  Yes, this show revels in “characters” but sometimes it’s outright embarrassing.  Then we meet the next caricature with the representative from SMOG.  It’s all just so cliché.  I mean, go with comedy then, don’t go with horror.  There’s almost never been a successful horror/comedy mashup and even when there are good ones, they turn up more infrequently than the proverbial blue moon.  This series is not written by people adept enough to have pulled it off in the 60s so this episode was a real loss for me.

I will say that I did enjoy Steed’s reaction to being manhandled with his comment “You’re in danger… of ruffling my feathers” before brushing off the hand that was holding him.  His witty banter after being shot at is also loads of fun but it manages to irk me yet again because there is absolutely no logical reason that the bad guys don’t shoot and kill Steed.  There’s one particularly annoying moment where Steed is standing with the town drunk, Kermit the Hermit.  The baddies shoot the hermit, but leave Steed to work out what’s going on.  It’s not like Steed dove for cover; he not only stands there, but he also moves closer to where the shot came from.  It would have made far more sense to kill the outsider and leave the town drunk so none of the other locals would get wise to what was going on.  It’s as if the writers were daring the audience to call BS.  I guess at the time this was airing, there were too few channels to surf over to.  Imagine this in todays hyper-saturated market!

If that’s not enough, let’s dig into the motive.  Julian Glover, typically an awesome villain (but I’m biased since his role in Doctor Who’s City of Death) has a plan to use an underground mine to build a city to house an army that will eventually take over England.  Captain Genius then destroys one means of getting in and out of his underground lair and is trapped by Steed in the end.  Considering what Emma does, which I’ll come to in a minute, I’m wondering if Steed just left them down there in the end.  However, all my whining aside, the reality was when this episode ended, I was amazed that an hour had gone by.  So for all its stupidity, I was clearly enjoying the romp.  Maybe that was helped by the creepy death of George Spencer, the SMOG representative.  Maybe it was having Dr. Watson, H. Marion Crawford, back in another episode, or watching the latest ill-fated plot of Julian Glover, but whatever it was, I found the episode went by very quickly.  So it had to do some things right, right?

But let’s not leave out what was absolutely the worst part of the episode: it’s the ending when Steed is about to be shot.  There’s an unnecessarily ridiculous choreography to a 10-point count before…  Emma guns down all of the bad guys.  No joke: the hero guns down a bunch of people in cold blood then stands over their bodies and jokes around with Steed.  Yeah, they left the people underground to suffocate, I’m sure of it.  Probably over a joke about “airing their grievances” or something.   I understand that this series is a spoof, or a farce, or whatever variety of comedy you want to call it, but it’s also meant to have some degree of reality; it’s not a cartoon.  When the heroes of the piece gun down at least 10 men and then joke about things nonchalantly, you realize it’s definitely a product of its time.  This series has fallen woefully behind the times, considering how much promise it showed at the start.  At the end, the only living dead was me.  I was physically conscious but lying broken on my couch wondering how I could possibly get through 50 more episodes of this nonsense.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: The Hidden Tiger