When I saw who wrote Legacy of Death, I was expecting a couple of things: a character called Tarrant, and not a very good episode. I was half right. If you are a sci-fi fan, you will probably understand the expectation of a Tarrant in a Terry Nation script, but not so much the low quality. This is, after all, the writer of the Doctor Who story that was the reason the series ran for over 800 episodes and counting, rather than just 13. Dalekmania was the main reason for Doctor Who’s original success, and Terry Nation created the Daleks… well, sort of. The thing is, an episode of television is always a collaboration. It’s about so much more than the script, and the real reason I think the Daleks were so successful was the work of an inspired designer, who never got as much recognition as he deserved. For Legacy of Death, Nation offers up a parody of The Maltese Falcon, something with which I am not hugely familiar, but when you’re parodying something within another show, it does actually need to work for viewers who are not au fait with the thing that’s being spoofed.

That’s just about the case here. This is a fun romp of an episode, so it does work reasonably well, but it also suffers the same problem of laziness with several other Avengers episodes. A funny idea gets repeated over and over again, until it’s not funny any more. This happened, for example, with Whoever Shot Poor George Oblique Stroke XR40?, with endless scenes of people treating a computer like a human being, or False Witness to a lesser extent, with people saying the opposite of what they mean to say. You reach a point where the joke starts to wear thin. It reminds me a bit of some of Rod Serling’s episodes of The Twilight Zone, where he would come up with one good idea and then hit the viewers over the head with it until it was time to end the episode. This is similar. Villains keep trying to steal a dagger, and dying comedically in the attempt. Rinse and repeat. Life is cheap, in the world of The Avengers.

Have you ever really wanted something, and then been a bit disappointed when you got it? There’s a sort of a poisoned chalice message going on in this episode, although Steed never asked for the dagger. The interesting bit, I suppose, is that the men who covet the huge wealth that the dagger could bring them all die, or fail to get what they want, while the man who owns it just finds it a nuisance. Could this be a reflection of the pursuit of wealth as a whole? Those who want it can ruin their lives trying to get it, while those who have it are often miserable. Possessing something that lots of other people want is probably something of a poisoned chalice in reality. I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to find out for myself, but being rich is not necessarily a path to happiness. In fact, it frequently seems to be the opposite.

The message seems to be, therefore, that Steed has the right idea, when he is unimpressed by the dagger or the wealth it could bring. He is never tempted for a second, and maybe that’s one of the qualities that make him a hero. When he is offered half a million dollars, then three-quarters of a million, and then a million in quick succession, he never even flinches at the idea. Financial gain is the motivation of others, while Steed just wants to stop the madness from happening all around him, and find out what on earth is going on. However, it’s not easy to put Steed on a pedestal for being unswayed and unexcited by a man offering him a huge amount of money for a weird object he just inherited. Yes, he’s a cool customer, but from everything we’ve seen about Steed, he enjoys immense privilege in life and almost certainly always has done. It’s a lot easier to be blasé about the trappings of wealth if you already have them.

But this is never really an episode that invites the viewer to think much about anything, anyway. We are just expected to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of villains dying cartoonish deaths, with a bit of casual racism thrown in for bad measure, with white actors pretending to be shifty foreigners. There is at least a rather clever and surprising subversion of that, when a white actor pretending to be Chinese actually turns out to be a white man pretending to be Chinese within the story, but if you stop and think about that then the ruse only works in a culture where people can be convinced that an Asian man and a white bloke pretending to be an Asian man are the same thing. Yeah, I know. I get the context. The past is a foreign country. They do things annoyingly there.   RP

The view from across the pond:

Orange Alert!!!  ORANGE!  ALERT!!  This episode was a game of Connect the Series.  It’s written by Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks.  (NB: Not to be confused with Davros, creator of the Daleks…)  It stars Richard Hurndall (the first Doctor in The Five Doctors), John Hollis (Lobot from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), Ronald Lacey (Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Peter Swanwick (the supervisor from The Prisoner).  If you forget who The Supervisor was, beware!  We’ll send Rover after you!  (But here’s another hint…)

Orange Alert!!!  ORANGE!  ALERT!!  This episode is also a repeat, but not of another Avengers episode.  Rather, it’s a retelling of The Maltese Falcon.  It doesn’t even try to hide the fact, calling the mysterious dagger The Falcon Dagger, and at the end, Sidney talks about going after another Maltese treasure.  Not to mention, anyone who knows Peter Lorre will be aware of what he sounds like and how he acts, and Lacey was the spitting image… well, the spitting sound?… of Lorre in this episode.  Even Sidney, played by Stratford Johns, shares a name with the character Sydney from The Maltese Falcon.  (He’s the best villain in a while, and only because he’s so over the top in his smarmy performance that it sticks with you.)

Orange Alert!!!  ORANGE!  ALERT!!  If you’re bothered by the 1960’s portrayal of Asian people, get ready for this one.  “Where you get this?”  The Asian shopkeeper is about as close to Asian as Pluto is to being hot.  He just fails to use words in a sentence but that’s enough to convey that he’s Asian, because as we all know, one of the smartest cultures on the planet didn’t know how to complete a sentence in the 1960s…  But hey, they know what Chinese Water Torture is and Tara King, super spy, is on the verge of breaking after 12 drips!  Don’t worry, she gets the upper hand…um, foot… when she uses another Chinese torture: the foot tickler.  (There are times I don’t know what to say about this series!)

The funny thing is, I actually was into this episode, sinking into the story and enjoying it despite the flaws, of which, like so many Avengers episodes, there are many.  There’s the moron – and believe me, I’m being kind – who throws peanuts at his face with his mouth open and misses every single one of them, because, clearly, he has no idea where his face is, let alone his mouth.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a peanut allergy and doesn’t know it because he’s never successfully managed to get a peanut into his mouth.  I want to know what the script looked like too: throw peanuts randomly in the air but keep your mouth open so someone somewhere might think you’re actually aiming to catch them.    Here’s another question: when the final fight breaks out, Humbert (Lacey) is pushed out of the way whereupon Tara starts tickling Sidney.  Where did Humbert get shoved to exactly?  Narnia??   And what was the bit about shoes with holes in them?  If that was a carryover from The Maltese Falcon, I do not remember it, but in fairness, I saw that when I had my first job at a video store so it’s possible I forgot the reference.  (To all those too young to know, a video store was a Netflix in a building where you had to get your movie and walk out with it!  In other words, it was a long time ago!)

That said, it was nice seeing Tara’s house and learning that Steed has a nephew.  That latter point could be a silly line he says because he plays with toys during his time off and doesn’t want us to know, but if he does have a nephew, that’s the first bit of data I recall getting about Steed.  I mean, about his family, that is.  It’s nice to learn that these characters have some depth because they don’t always have any brains.  For instance, when Gorky is shot, Steed instantly dives to the window to look out just so that, if the shooter is still out there, he gets a perfect shot of Steed’s face.  Ah, genius in action!  It’s a lovely thing to see.

Again, despite all the things that are now just nails on a chalkboard for me, I did like this episode and credit Terry Nation for a good script even if it had elements of Mission to the Unknown on Earth.  That’s a reference to the Doctor Who episode Mission to the Unknown because the image of all bad guys standing around having formed a coalition really reminded me of the images I’ve seen of that lost classic.  I also have to say this episode has one of my top ten attack moves of all time, when a guy leaps off a rooftop to jump on Steed but misses, knocking himself out cold upon impact with the ground.  I love when this show makes me laugh because when it does, it’s usually of the deep belly style that I remember for a long time.

I noticed Nation has another episode coming up soon.  Considering how good this was, I’m hoping that will be even better.  I’d even take equal if we could get rid of some of the idiotic things.  But then this is The Avengers, so you shouldn’t expect miracles.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: Noon Doomsday