07.00 It Takes A Thief
08.00 The Avengers
09.00 Kolchak: The Night Stalker
It Takes A Thief. Episode 3. "When Boy Meets Girl" SUPERB. In tone this is a lot more serious than the earlier episodes, but it is nonetheless superb. I've been watching '60s spy shows since I was kid. I've seen I Spy, Man From UNCLE and Mission: Impossible and everything in between. But this third episode of It Takes A Thief is one of the best spy stories I've ever seen. While retaining some of the escapist trappings of the genre (spies are always wearing tuxedos and running around cocktail parties!) it still manages to tell a story that feels like a realistic take on the world of espionage.
Al gets sent behind enemy lines to retrieve information. He is told who his contact is, but is told nothing else. This is refreshing. Usually, sixties TV spies are told everything by their boss at the start of a mission. Not Al. Al is a wheel in a much larger machine. Al, you feel, is expendable.
Once behind enemy lines he meets his contact (a typically superb Donnelly Rhodes) and the two men work together without sharing much information and without really trusting/liking one another. This, too, is refreshing and oddly realistic. Al learns that their target is a woman who previous defected and she is to be kidnapped, questioned and released. Al is told what his part in the mission is and nothing else.
All of this very covert and exciting, and the script reminds us on several occasions that Al Mundy is a very, very clever man. Watching him scam his way around this foreign country you understand exactly why the SIA hired him: he is a bloody clever guy and he's able to pull off some amazing feats.
When the two men have the woman some truth serum is administered and - once again, refreshingly - the information she gives them is totally believable as top secret data. It's about various tech specs on a missile defence system. It sounds rather boring and unexciting and - to the show's considerable credit - it's exactly what you feel a mission like this should be about.
When his contact is unexpectedly killed, Mundy has to use all his wits to improvise and get out of the country. Assuming that the girl is a victim in all of this, Mundy takes pity on her and works his magic to find a way to smuggle her out of the country. It's simply delightful to watch him in action. Every single time you think you are ahead of the script and there's a logic flaw of some kind, Al Mundy has thought of it first and is ready for it.
It's delightful. When you watch a show like this you are taking a leap of faith. You suspend disbelief and allow Napoleon Solo, or Kelly Robinson, to get away with things that would never work in the real world. You enjoy the cleverness of the script, but in the back of your mind you are thinking: "Well, in the real world that would never work because..." It's nothing major, just a tiny voice of reason in the back of your head, and it never stops you enjoying the show. Unless what happens on screen is blatantly stupid.
This ITAT story has several moments like that. Particularly at the end as Mundy does cartwheels to stay ahead of his pursuers. Every time I thought the script was being too kind to the hero to let him escape there was a twist that told me the writer had already thought of that and was ready for it.
As Al Mundy made his final escape I was thinking to myself: "Well, in the real world that would never work because the authorities would make the plane turn back." Cut to inside the plane and Al holding a gun on the pilot! Man, I laughed at that. He took an entire plane hostage to get himself out of the country. Guy has balls, that's for sure.
Even better, the closing seconds of the story reveal that the girl is not a victim at all. And, while Al is basically a decent guy who assumes the best in people, the world he operates in is cynical and hard.
I love it!
The Avengers. Episode 132. "Split!" An episode with a great gimmick... and little else. The central story idea is that a foreign agent has found a way to imprint his brainwaves/personality onto good guys and make them commit murders. It's a cool idea. Typical of The Avengers. However, once the story establishes what is going on it tends to repeat the performance with character after character without telling us much of a story. Steed and Tara do a lot of driving back and forth in this one. Driving to a suspect's house. Leaving. Driving back later for more of the same. Driving to a hospital. Leaving. Driving back later for more of the same. 50 minutes of this is a bit tedious.
Never mind, the rest of the show's elements are very enjoyable. Steed and Tara make a great team in this one. Not a full partnership, mind you. You can see that Steed is very much the solo agent and Tara is a novice. Their friendship hold them together, not a formal partnership. When bad news comes Steed dashes off alone to deal with it, while Tara is relegated to more mundane tasks (ferrying important people from place to place, for instance). Theirs is a tutor-pupil relationship. Which I love. However, while Steed tends to let Tara take a back seat, the script does not. She gets just as much screen time and many of the major deductions/observations come from her not Steed. While she does get taken prisoner at the very end, she proves herself to be a capable and dangerous agent once Steed has set her free.
Best scene: Steed overpowers an evil nurse at once point and gives her a jolly old smack on the bottom for being such a naughty girl. Wonderful! They (sadly) don't make 'em like this any more.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Episode 3. "They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be..." There's only one bad episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and this is it. I tend not to watch it very much because there's little or nothing to redeem it. It's genuinely bad. An example, I suppose, of what Kolchak could have been had it been thrown together without any attempt to give it depth and meaning.
There are many flaws in the episodes. So many that it is hard to know what to write about first. Animals are dying in the zoo, a cranky man is complaining about strange happenings in his neighbourhood and the police have a fight with an invisible entity that flings them around, creates explosions without sound and can make things vanish in thin air.
Kolchak hears about these unconnected events in rapid succession. Goes to the scene of them and is able to... connect them and set out to investigate the aliens responsible.
Huh?!
It's crazy. Nonsense. Daft-as-a-brush storytelling. Aliens and UFOS are perfect fodder for the storytelling style of KTNS but - on it's one attempt to deal with the subject - the show makes a complete mess of it. The events on-screen never ties together in a logical fashion, no matter what Kolchak maintains. The invisible enemy idea is a disaster, and a great come-down from the four genuinely scary foes that Kolchak has faced up to this point in his adventures.
Every Kolchak story features a cop of some sort. A police captain who tries to get in Kolchak's way. James Gregory is the best of the three featured in the series so far, but he falls short of the great characters to come. Even the comedy moments fall short of what will follow. Nothing that happens between Carl and his supporting characters is very funny this time round. Usually, the exchanges/antics are pure comedy gold. Not this time.
It's a tired, plodding episode. It gives the impression of a badly made series, running out of ideas. Yet this actually came at the very start of the run and there are many, many classic hours of television to follow. Go figure.
Highlight? It Takes A Thief (one of the best spy yarns I've ever seen)
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Fri, Nov 7, 08 - It Takes A Thief, Avengers, Kolchak
