If it weren’t bad enough having to watch an episode written by Terry Nation last week, Noon Doomsday is another Nation episode, but it’s also trying to be a Western, the genre of television I will cross the road to avoid, and then switch off all the neighbours’ television sets on that side of the road too. Luckily the Western influence doesn’t extend far beyond some annoying incidental music, a couple of villains arriving on horseback for some inexplicable reason, and some stylistic choices for the fight scenes. Oh, and it’s also a parody of a film which I’ve never seen and almost certainly never will, because it hails from the genre that glorifies machismo, guns and whiny music.

Oddly, then, this is also an episode that restores the gender balance that existed during the Cathy Gale era more than almost any other episode for the last couple of years. It very much continues the good work of All Done with Mirrors, which I feared was simply a blip caused by Patrick Macnee going on holiday for a week. That often happened during long-running series. An actor took a week off, and the script was written around that problem. It looked like that might have been the only reason for Tara being able to break away from the damsel in distress role that has been a disappointing feature of The Avengers for more than two seasons, but here we have another episode where Steed does almost nothing useful and Tara is the hero. Being as Terry Nation was also the script editor, this is starting to look like a deliberate choice, which is admirable if that’s true. Like All Done with Mirrors, Tara does need a little bit of rescuing right at the end, but only after she has got almost everything wrapped up by herself, including defeating almost all the bad guys. It’s forgivable that Steed still gets the big moment, considering the story is about a vendetta against him, and his hidden weapon is a funny twist in the tale. But apart from that, this is very much Tara’s episode, and she’s brilliant. Linda Thorson even manages to achieve some moments of chemistry between Tara and Steed. There is an attraction and respect there this time, that looks genuine, and I’m not sure that has happened before.

It’s a little concerning that the rediscovery of the magnificent gender equality that existed during the Cathy Gale era could still be accidental. All Done with Mirrors wrote out Steed and featured Tara strongly by necessity. Noon Doomsday requires Steed to be convalescing in order for the story to work. On the one hand, the gender balance looks like it might be a convenience rather than an aspiration, because elsewhere in the same episode we have misogyny, with Mother’s treatment of his assistant, whom he likes because she doesn’t talk much, a quality he describes as rare in a woman. That’s pretty nasty stuff. But on the other hand, Nation does seem to deliberately subvert the helpless female stereotype. One of the villains says, “it’s only a girl”, and soon discovers there’s nothing “only” about being a girl, as Sarah Jane once said in Doctor Who. A more compelling piece of evidence is the way Steed tries to protect Tara, because he considers her to be vulnerable simply because of her gender, and Tara turns the tables on him. He was trying to make decisions on her behalf, in textbook chauvinist behaviour, and she does that to him instead, knocking him out to take him out of the action and keep him safe. It’s about as female empowering as a 60s television show could possibly get, perhaps with the exception of Doctor Who bringing in a female astrophysicist as a companion who is more intelligent than the Doctor, and then having her beat a superhero in a fight.

Last week I compared Nation’s writing with that of Rod Serling, whose Twilight Zone episodes were often about one idea, stretched to fit the running time. This is similar, in that it’s simply about villains who are going to try to kill Steed at a specific time, so we just have to wait until that happens, and being as we know they aren’t going to succeed, it’s really just a matter of waiting for a big fight (which is admittedly spectacular). In the meantime, Tara tries and fails to secure much help from anyone, further advancing her as the hero of the episode in the eyes of the viewers. In the end, she has to stand alone, pretty much.

If you can get past the idea of the security services putting all their damaged eggs in one basket, housing all their injured secret agents in one remote facility, and the silliness of the security arrangements surrounding a farm, there is a clever feeling of being trapped to all this. The traps that are designed to keep the wrong people out end up keeping the right people in, instead. The villains use security to their own advantage. There’s probably some truth in the problem of security being taken too far, and backfiring. To give a silly little illustration of what I mean by that, when I got my car it had a feature where it locked all the doors automatically as soon as you start driving. The first thing I did was find out how to turn that off. Things that we design to keep people out can come at a price: sometimes they imprison us at the same time. I’m not advocating for leaving our houses unlocked, but there is something thought-provoking in the way that this episode shows how security can backfire so spectacularly, particularly when it’s taken to extremes, and I think it’s actually the extremes that are the problem. There are wider implications, about the fallacy of dangerous things keeping us safe. We all live in a world that fell into the trap of making as many weapons as possible to be as safe as possible, many years ago. You might be reading this from a country with many citizens who think that owning a gun keeps them safe, despite all the evidence that makes a nonsense of that argument. As we see in Noon Doomsday, security might be useful, but as soon as it has the power to hurt other people, it will probably end up hurting ourselves.   RP

The view from across the pond:

“We kill John Steed at 12 noon!”

With a hook like that and a title that screams “High Noon”, I was actually looking forward to this episode of The Avengers.  It’s written by Terry Nation which also got me excited, although in retrospect, I can’t say why.  I think the mere association of him with the Daleks made me look forward to it, but then the more I considered it, the more I remembered that the original Dalek episodes were often my least favorite of the classic era of Doctor Who.  Nevertheless, I was excited, going into the story with an open mind.  The catch was certainly good…

And then we wait.  And wait.  And wait.  We watch the baddies sitting around taking target practice on cans with both bullets and knives.  We hear one of them talking about his niece and if she’d like a teddy bear or a music box for her birthday.  If this was meant to humanize him, it failed.  He’s still just a cardboard character who is dispatched in the end – rather creatively though, but I don’t think talking about his niece had anything to do with it.  Meanwhile, to pad out the tedium, Mother is borrowing Steed’s flat while he’s in a home recuperating from a broken leg.  This means he gets to raid Steed’s liqueur cabinet and the amount of bottles would make an American bar look empty.  I was never clear on why Steed was nursing a broken leg, barring to show that Mother is as big a drinker as Steed himself.  Even the IMDb trivia page doesn’t indicate anything about Macnee’s leg, so this was just a plot device that served no real purpose beyond keeping Steed out of the action and giving the action to Tara.

The episode is a massive waiting game with Tara wandering around looking for bad guys while Steed is in a “base under siege” … except without the siege being particularly effective.  It’s all about Gerald Kafka, the head of Murder International, coming for revenge against Steed, but I couldn’t remember Kafka from any previous episode.  Wouldn’t it have been better to bring back a villain?  There were 1000 episodes to choose from!  Besides, surely Kafka would know: you don’t try to kill a man on crutches if that man is John Steed.  I confess, I did get a giggle out of this for different reasons: by the end of 2023, Doctor Who would introduce us to Shirley Bingham, a woman in a wheelchair with missiles built into it.  I couldn’t help but wonder if Steed tested the prototype: crutches that fire off harpoons.  That’s one of the better things about the series: like a Q sequence in a James Bond movie, we are introduced to a wide variety of special weapons.  The harpoon crutches were a nice touch but let’s not ignore that Steed gets to use a homing knife on a villain.  He’s clearly behind a wall so Steed’s knife-throw would, at best, hit said wall.  Instead, it whips around the wall and kills the villain.  Where can I get one of those?

Meanwhile there were some funny moments like the sundial that was 2 minutes off or the sound of Charlie Brown’s teacher: “wawawa wawawaww”.  I was also glad to see Tara do something that gave her some character.  Knocking Steed out to protect him, then going against 3 enemies was a big deal.  I know I’m not a good judge with this show because I really feel it should have ended when Emma left, but I find Tara about as cardboard as the Amazon boxes coming to my office every day.  For her to do something like that really gave some depth to a character I find as dull as an eraser.  Unfortunately, this show offers zero character development so it won’t mean anything, but it was nice for this one story.

I think a western themed episode had real potential but the director didn’t have a script that could pad out nearly the running time needed to fill the hour.  I think this episode sums up the series fairly well.  There’s a good idea buried here somewhere but it plods on and on.  This series works the same way: there’s a good idea here but it just keeps going, often with just too much sound and fury.  With just over 20 episodes to go, I’m hoping we get a “homing knife” episode; you know, something that might hit a bullseye despite being blocked by a wall of tedium.  I don’t think hoping will do any good, but I’m an eternal optimist.  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: Look – (Stop me if you’ve heard this one) – But There Were These Two Fellers…