Another sleeper agent, another super-TV-hypnosis, another one of Steed’s best friends, played by Terence Alexander, bites the dust. Nothing in “Angels of Death,” written by Terence Feely and Brian Clemens, is really all that new, but I still thought it was pretty entertaining. Purdey is as odd and weird as ever, and as Marie pointed out, only Purdey would break into the villains’ secret base at night wearing neon.
Our son was very, very restless for the first half, and I can’t say that I blame him. It is a bit by-the-numbers for a spy show, with perhaps the added bonus that these particular villains – led by Dinsdale Landen and Caroline Munro – have been breathtakingly, irrationally, effective for superspy bad guys. Their body count before our heroes start looking into the possibility that many recent deaths-by-natural-causes have an unnatural origin: 47.
I did think there were a couple of missed opportunities. Part of the bad guys’ programming is a huge, white, indoor labyrinth with locking doors and closing walls. Unfortunately, I think the studio simply wasn’t large enough to give a proper overhead shot looking down into the maze, which I kept waiting to see.
I also think they could have linked to the past of the show in a fun way. Dinsdale Landen had played a veteran agent called Watney in a very good Tara King adventure called “All Done With Mirrors.” Obviously the character he plays this time, Coldstream, is just a new-to-the-series villain who’s been killing people in the government and the military for years. But I kind of wish that once Landen was cast, they had changed his name to Watney, so he could be that guy from “Mirrors,” gone bad.
The episode opens in Paris, with the show’s first use of overseas filming. We’ll see a good bit more of France in the weeks to come.
