With a friendly slap of Tara’s bottom and a comment about wearing her gym slip, all hope of The Avengers recapturing the gender equality it once possessed is finally gone. Tara is a damsel in distress, easily captured by one of the villains, and needing Steed to rescue her.

“You want her, you must win her.”

But we will have to reluctantly stop harkening after what we’ve lost, and look at what this show has become instead, which is a huge amount of fun. The big idea this week is a villain who creates life-size versions of board games, and uses them to kill people. Some of the set design is superb, although inevitably with something this ambitious there are a few elements that fail to convince. Mercifully the fake snake is only on screen for about half a second, but the thought that went into all this is admirable. Even the jigsaw puzzle shop, which is only there to serve the needs of a couple of quick exposition scenes, is a masterpiece of innovative set design, if somewhat impractical for an actual shop. Did they really used to call jigsaws “jiggies”, by the way? I’m not sure that’s what Will Smith meant when he rapped Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.

There are two elements to this story that are knitted together surprisingly well: a man holding a grudge for many years and serving up his revenge very cold, and the same man creating his deadly board games to carry out his revenge plan. The reason they work so well together is they both tap into a childlike outlook on life. Bristow was punished for breaking the rules, a long time ago, and instead of accepting his punishment and moving on, he has held a grudge against the men who caught him out and held him accountable. That’s a very childish response to a situation like that, and some adults never move beyond feeling aggrieved at the people who expose their wrongdoing, rather than ever feeling ashamed by what they did. Some of those adults end up running countries, but that’s beside the point. But Bristow also embodies another element of the human condition, because he’s “an excellent example of the self-made man”. He took a setback in life and used it to spur him on to achieve greatness. It’s an interesting example of how a person can take adversity and use it as a tool to motivate them to do amazing things, but also it’s an example of how the same motivation can become twisted, and the drive to do better than the people who were once your enemies can become an unhealthy obsession. Note that the men who court-martialled Bristow don’t even really remember him. It was a fleeting, insignificant moment in their busy lives, but in contrast it has shaped Bristow’s entire existence. This shows how an event that might seem unimportant can be life-changing to some people. The way we interact with our fellow human beings can leave behind a scar, after we have moved on, oblivious.

The board games element of the story works brilliantly within the context of Bristow’s grievance. Some advice for parents: don’t throw games to let your kids win. It does no good at all. Learning to lose gracefully is an essential skill. There will be a lot of losing in life, and the sooner anyone learns how to handle that, the better. When they do win, fair and square, they will feel a sense of achievement that is undermined if their parents have handed them the victory for free. Bristow lost in life once, and couldn’t process it. Also, have you ever seen kids playing and making up a game as they go along? The child who creates the game makes up the rules, and will often skew them to their own advantage and introduce new rules if things aren’t going their way. Bristow is that kind of a child, grown up into a man-child. He sets the rules, but he doesn’t like to follow them. In the final game, note how reluctant he is to give Steed the reward he has earned, with his henchman reminding him that he has to follow the rules he created. By the time he is defeated, he has basically regressed to a sulky child. Steed, on the other hand, is the first player to win a game because he’s the other kid in the made-up-game equation. He’s the one who pushes back against the invented rules, and makes up some of his own, firing the single bullet at the glass that imprisons Tara instead of at his enemies. The surprising lesson from The Avengers this week is as follows: sometimes, you just have to cheat.   RP

The view from across the pond:

Back on December 14^th, one of our commentors provided me with something to think about when watching The Avengers.  He said that the show “would ultimately reflect the splashy spoof ridden and farcical upbeat nonsense of the 1960’s.”   At the time of reading that, I had already completed my viewing of all but the final season and wasn’t able to apply that thinking until the last season.  (Granted that should have been with The Forget-Me-Knot, but Amazon had that bunched with the previous season.)  The thing is, I don’t know if it was his words that struck a chord with me or the fact that I saw this so close to Doctor Who’s The Giggle but whatever it was, I liked it.   I think it’s that I found the plot fun all by itself but do want to keep things in perspective.

The Game has a villain, Bristow, who kills people by playing games with them.  Sound celestial?  The thing is for that farcical, upbeat nature: it hits its mark.  It’s silly fun and works with Steed being the recipient of jigsaw puzzle pieces that lead him to a killer.  (It’s a bit like an escape room really.)  Steed and Tara King are a fun pair although she’s definitely the lowest on my list of Avengers girls so far.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing considering she’s barely had 2 episodes to work with, and she shared the stage with Emma Peel for her first run.  Anyway, Tara does come off far too ditzy for my liking but that could still be the result of early days.   I was happy with the variety of fun lines, and let’s be honest, Steed does get away with saying and doing things that 60 years later wouldn’t be well thought of, so let’s have fun with it while we can!

My problem is one I can’t seem to pry myself away from no matter how much I try.  I want my brain to work, not be turned off by the shows I watch.  (It’s probably why I never took to sitcoms!)  Think about it: Tara finds out that Steed is a target so she puts chairs around him and sits on the couch with a gun to guard him?  She’s played as a cute airhead because everyone loved Emma Peel, but this follows Venus Smith and Cathy Gale – we had a track record of intelligent females who could be sweet and loveable (I mean, Venus was impossible not to like, as I remember it) but for some reason they further dumbed down the female role?   Did Tara have to be depicted this way to make people like her?   How about the brilliant spy, John Steed who has to wait to finish a picture to have an idea that it’s a house he needs to look into (and presumably one that would have fairly easy access to the park where all the bodies are dumped)?  And that’s just our leads!  We have a puzzle “master” who shows off how fast he can put together a puzzle designed for an 8 year old.  Ooh!  (It’s compounded by the fact that you can clearly see it’s filmed in reverse, so it was actually even easier than it appeared!)   Ok, how about the big bad of the piece, who rolls a die to determine how long his victims get to play a game?  Had he rolled a one for Steed, how was Steed ever supposed to get to the second challenge: diffuse a bomb in 60 seconds?  And worst offender of all: the sets.  Bristow has a big house but does he really have a black room with a 100 foot ladder going all the way up to a snake cage just so he can have someone climb and get bit?  And climbing a ladder past a certain height takes time too… And then I think about the hiring of the Japanese wrestler.  How does one go about hiring for that role: “Want to beat a random ex-army man in hand to hand combat?  Apply within.  We have dental insurance!”

Look, I won’t get into the minutiae of it.  It’s very hard to take 161 episodes of farce in any way seriously.   This is where Science Fiction would have been the superior genre for this show because had writer Richard Harris been doing a SF series (as someone named Newman was doing),  a lot of this could have been explained away.  But our Junkyard commenter isn’t wrong with what he said!  Here’s the actual definition of farce: a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.  Well, check, check and double check!  The Avengers succeeded!  I just had no idea that was what I was getting into 130 episodes ago!

I did like the episode despite hating so much of the farce of it.  There are still 31 episodes to go, which seems preposterous to me, but I will be viewing them with “farce” in mind.  Maybe I’ll develop more of an appreciation knowing what they were striving for.  Considering my favorite era of TV was the 60s, I’m amazed this is the first time I’ve been taken out of a series by it, but I’m going to force myself to keep an open-minded approach to the next 31.  Maybe I’ll be converted.  Who knows; it’s anyone’s game!  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: Super Secret Cypher Snatch