Just like the previous episode, the villains in You’ll Catch Your Death exploit aspects of everyday life to commit their crimes. Who can we trust, if not nurses? And yet the Anastasia Nursing Academy is a front for a criminal organisation, creating a deadly allergen that nobody is immune to, which they intend to sell to the highest bidder. In the last episode, window cleaners were used as a way to invade private property. This week, another point of vulnerability is utilised to get inside people’s homes: their letterboxes.

We all have them, and we never stop to think about the problems that might happen if people use them for illegal activities, unless we have to, but they are actually a little access point for criminality. The most obvious misuses are hate mail and scams, but as a small business owner who used to rent a property close to a pub, we had to have the letterbox sealed up to avoid food leftovers and even more unpleasant things coming through in the night. Sorry if I just put you off your breakfast. But the clever thing the Avengers writers were doing with recent episodes was to take something mundane as a basis for crimes being committed, and that works really well because it grounds their stories, which otherwise exist in the realms of the absurd, or at least the highly unlikely. Instant death by sneezing is cartoonish, but death being delivered via the letterbox brings that much closer to home for the viewers.

I’m not sure the storyline works all that well apart from that. The medical science will probably annoy people who have more of a knowledge of that kind of thing than I do, but even for a layman in that field, it doesn’t seem realistic that a virus would be so powerful that it can kill the person opening the envelope almost instantly, but is completely harmless to somebody who enters the same room almost immediately, or is even standing within a few feet of the dying victim. There are other aspects that don’t quite add up. The clue that leads Steed to the Anastasia Nursing Academy is a bulk purchase of envelopes, which seems quite Holmesian, but the writer glosses over an insurmountable problem with that clue: the purveyor of fine envelopes is only going to be able to remember who purchased them from him, if the purchase was for an unusual quantity. However, there is no reason for the criminals to buy 10,000 envelopes, when their scheme consists of killing off the few experts who might be able to formulate an antidote. After that, they plan to sell the germ warfare to the highest bidder, but surely they would be selling the formulation for the virus, not the entire process of posting it out to everybody, so why would they need all those envelopes? If they intend to carry through the entire scheme themselves, including carrying out their murderous threat, then 10,000 envelopes is not enough to wipe out the population of any country of strategic significance, considering that the virus is so selective that it doesn’t even extend to people in the next room, when an envelope is opened.

So it’s all a bit odd, but as usual for The Avengers, style triumphs over substance. The cast is magnificent: Fulton Mackay, Valentine Dyall, Charles Lloyd Pack, Hamilton Dyce, all great actors. The set design is superb, with the secret passageways (you’ve got to love a wall that spins around), and that giant nose that connects to them. The best moment of the episode has got to be Tara sneezing when she’s trying to hide, and falling through the giant nostril. She literally sneezes herself out of a nose. It was also a step in the right direction to see Tara escape from confinement (and a Bond-like slow execution with the killers absent), by using her intelligence, although it did eventually lead to recapture and the usual damsel in distress role, with Steed arriving to save her just in the nick of time.

So what’s the moral of the story here? Maybe we should all get rid of our letterboxes. Do we really need them any more, anyway? People can just email instead. At least the viruses that arrive that way don’t make us sneeze.   RP

The view from across the pond:

Well, well, well, what have we here?  An episode that actually connected to me on a cellular level.  (I hope that pun hits its mark!)

I am a self-confessed germophobe so an episode about a killer cold really makes me worry.  I took a vitamin C right after watching…  Having had covid just a few short weeks before I watched this gave it even greater impact. However, I’ve been around long enough to remember the scare with anthrax being sent via snail-mail.  The recipient would open the envelope which contained white powder.  That fear gripped my area for a while and it’s startling what an effective weapon that could be.  So when people start dying after opening their mail, The Avengers had my full attention.  Steed and King have to identify the cause of death of a number of individuals, and then figure out how to stop it.

It’s perhaps a bit too fast-acting for believability, bringing about “violent sneezing” and a slow motion death.  (That latter symptom is hard to explain to your doctor but if you tell him the sneezes are out of sync with the facial contortions, your doctor will understand.  It’s Avengersitis!)

As is often the case with this series, the characters are outstanding.  Dr. Fawcett shows up at Steed’s house and just waits there, inside the unoccupied house as no one ever would then has a wonderfully cordial discussion before Steed learns who the man is.  Tara knows her Sherlock Holmes and has some fun analyzing envelopes in much the way the Great Detective would.  And the Colonel wants to protect himself from “other people’s germs”, a sentiment I can understand perfectly well, I just fail because I’m too extroverted to hide away like he does.  There are even some great dialog moments like the perfume made of chloroform, “It’s called Blivion.   I think you’ll fall for it.”   However the funniest dialogue works very well considering the gravity of the situation…

Colonel: What are we looking for?
Steed: A tall attractive brunette.
Colonel: Aren’t we all?

Unfortunately, like the ice cream cone that Mother eats, there’s more cone than ice cream.  The episode has to pad out some scenes, like Steed’s pacing his house as we build the suspense around the envelope that he has clearly stepped over; no Sherlock Holmes in Steed’s flat, eh?  We know he’s not going to die, so the threat level is weak for the heroes.  It’s everyone else that helps keep the tension high, so why bother with the threat.  Although one of the victims finds an envelope in his car and he opens it which simply made me wonder why anyone would do that, unless they expected to find the envelope there.  I know no one has keys to my car, so if there were a mysterious envelope in there, I’d be hesitant in the extreme to open it outside of a police station.  Regardless of minor quibbles, I could accept all that as part of the price of the 50 minute format.  What was harder to accept is Steed choosing to murder the main baddie of the episode.  As he’s trying to escape, Steed opens an envelope and literally drops the virus on the fleeing villain.  It’s done for the laugh of seeing a man being sneezed out of a nose on the wall, but let’s not ignore that it is murder, and our hero commits it.  (Of course, the nose on the wall with a ladder inside is typical Avengers craziness.  I liked it and hated it in equal measure.  On the other hand, the secret wall that leads into another room was outstanding!)   Let’s not get distracted though.  Steed could have apprehended the criminal with the standard Avengers Knockout Punch that is as pervasive in this series as the flu.  Instead he goes all out “early days of covid” and kills the guy.  Hero much, Mr. Steed?  How does he write this up for his superiors, I ask you?

Overall, this is a very strong story with a villain that chose a very scary murder weapon, but it still suffers from the Avengers just not thinking through all the steps.  Steed murdering a man is not the action of a hero.  He deserves the cold he gets in the end, but I think his confinement should have been a bit more of the lifetime sort after that.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: Split!