For the last several years, I've been slowing working my way thru a massive Gerry Anderson marathon. I started out watching the earliest stuff of his I could find online for free, which included the entire runs of
FOUR FEATHER FALLS (which I'd never seen before) and
SUPERCAR (which I hadn't seen since the mid-60s), and a number of even earlier things. But a few episodes into my beloved
FIREBALL XL5, I realized that the entire series wasn't online for free... so, I went ahead and bought my first regular DVD player, and the DVD box set. What a wonderful time that was, being able to see the show that first introduced me to sci-fi, which I had not seen since August 1965!
I followed it up with
STINGRAY,
THUNDERBIRDS,
CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS,
JOE 90 (which I'd only seen 4 episodes of earlier), and
THE SECRET SERVICE (which I'd never seen before). The first few shows, I was watching every day of the week, but with
THUNDERBIRDS, which was an hour, I decided to drop back to one story a week, so I could really appreciate each one more fully. I stuck on that schedule ever since (at least, for the first time around with the DVDs-- I watch them a 2nd time whenever it suits my mood).
All that time, I wasn't sure if I wanted to upgrade my
UFO collection, since it was the only Anderson series I had EVERY episode of, taped off the Sci-Fi Channel. But, MAN, was I glad I did! As I said, the tapes were severely cut, totally out of sequence, and as it turned out, recorded on a defective machine in the 90s where the heads were so far out of line, those specific tapes refused to play properly on my current machine without almost non-stop visual technical problems. Yeesh. And seeing the show so completely intact, it turned out to be way, way better than it ever seemed before.
In truth, while several of the early episodes (and some of the later ones) were NEEDLESSLY, excessively downbeat and depressing... there's really on
one-and-one-half episodes I REALLY don't like. It's the 2 episodes involving Mary Straker.
"
A Question Of Priorities" (episode 8 ) has 2 plots running side-by-side. One involves an alien who goes thru absurdly-complex methods trying to contact SHADO, because he's apparently considered a traitor to whatever it is his planet's people are up to. The other involves Straker's ex-wife, who doesn't like him seeing their son, and her son John getting hit by a speeding car. Straker announces he can get the rare medicine needed to save him, and diverts a cargo plane to faciliitate this. But Alec Freeman doesn't know this, and HE diverts the plane to the area where the UFO landed. The medicine arrives JUST too late to save John, and Mary screams her head off saying "
I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!" As if it was HIS fault.
It's SO G**-D***ed contrived! There was absolutely NO reason for things to turn out that bad. To have the alienb killed at the last second was a downbeat ending I could understand, but not to have that AND John also get killed. It's just pointlessly downbeat because Gerry wanted it to be pointlessly downbeat, because-- PROBABLY!!!-- Gerry & Sylvia were having problems in their marriage and he had to shove that at viewers.
I figured out my own alternate ending to the episode. Which would be, the medicine arrives JUST barely in time, John's life IS saved, only because Ed was able to use SHADO to deliver the medicine. And after, he would tell Mary,
"He's MY son, too. And from NOW on, I'm going to see him AS OFTEN AS I'D LIKE." That would have been so much better.
The last time I watched this, I fast-forwarded over all the "Mary" scenes and just watched the "alien traitor" scenes. I once did the same thing with "
The Paradise Syndrome" on
STAR TREK, watching only the "Spock" scenes and skipping over all the "Kirk amnesia" scenes.
The other one that bugs me is "
Confetti Check A-OK" (ep. 13, just about the halfway point). Straker's marriage falls apart mainly because his NEVER-SEEN MOTHER-IN-LAW hires a private eye to follow him, an act that should have gotten the detective and his mother-in-law arrested on espionage charges.
Only the "framing device" part works for me, where Ed orders a SHADO HQ operative who just had a new baby to take a 2-week vacation. He KNOWS how important this is, and it shows that Ed really does have a caring, human side.
I've seen Suzanne Neve (who played Mary) in 3 things, and what a contrast. I absolutely hated the character of Mary, she seemed selfish and uncaring about Ed and his job, or even about her own son's feelings at the beginning of "
Priorities". I've also seen her as Mina Harker in the 1968
MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION adaptation of "
Dracula", and she was terrific in that. But even better, she played Violet Hunter in the 1965 adaptation of "
The Copper Beches". She's the girl who takes the job of governness, who Holmes is SO impressed with, he reccomends her for a position as headmistress of a school, while Watson mistakenly thinks his friend may be thinking of asking her to marry him. She was my FAVORITE woman character in the entire 1960s BBC
SHERLOCK HOLMES series.
