The Avengers: The Joker
A favourite of the fans, this one, so I won't have anything new to add to the discussion, I'm sure. It is of course a remake of the series 3 episode, Don't Look Behind You, and this fact is largely the criticism you wil read on the internet. It has also been linked to The House That Jack Built, with its theme of being lured to a sinister house and subjected to strange things.
I only discovered while reading up for this post that the German record which features in this episode, Mein Leibling Mein Rose, is nothing of the sort, and in fact was written in English for this episode before being turned into German and recorded for the show. They were a bit surprised at the demand for a release, and so a record was hastily pressed and you can hear it on the internet in full if you want. I don't speak German, and apparently the German isn't very grammatical, but it has taken me in completely and I imagined it was some actual song from the thirties. The record label is even completely fictional, although obviously based on Deutsche Gramophon.
It will sound like I'm doing a hatchet job on this, because I'm rather going to focus on some problems with the episode or with its reception.
To get it out of the way, in my opinion the main problem with this episode is that it has a plot hole that you could drive a tank through. I'm afraid I'm going to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds because later I'm going to say that there is a lot of unrealism in this episode but my main criticism is that it is somewhat unrealistic, or perhaps I should say not credible.
The problem for me is that if you discover there is a chess grandmaster called Sir Cavalier Rusicana, you laugh and give him no credence, assuming it to be a humorous pen name. If he writes to you and invites you to his place for the weekend, you look him up in Debrett's to double check and treat the invitation with caution. If you have to drive half way across the country to get to his house and discover that everything is blanketed in fog, you ring him with your apologies and stay in London. If you are unwise enough to get there, one glance at someone with such an obvious sociopathic personality as Ola Monsey-Chamberlain should really send you scurrying off back down the drive even if you have to spend the night in the car, if you have any sense at all. The further discovery that your host isn't there should certainly remove any reason for you being there and you should make your excuses. The bizarre decor of the dining room should certainly be a warning that things aren't right in this household, and if you haven't paid attention to all these warnings, the discovery that your room contains a whole trunk of records all the same, should certainly make you think that there is at least some sort of obsession going on here and you'd really better not be there.
Yet strangely Mrs Peel, who you'd expect to be more than a little canny, isn't discouraged by any of these warnings and while she is obviously aware it is strange, she just stays there and appears to go along with what Ola says. It's absolutely bizarre, and positively uncharacteristic.
The episode successfully completely knocks us off our feet with the introduction of the 'strange young man'.
Which brings me nicely to the first of the problems of reception with this episode. You will read in the commentary online that there is a continuity error in that we get a glimpse in the opening scene of the man cutting up Mrs Peel's picture, who is of course supposed to be Prendergast, and he doesn't look like Peter Jeffrey who plays Prendergast. I think this is to miss the point, since he does actually look like Ronald Lacey who plays the Strange Young Man. I think this is a deliberate blind, setting us up to think that a blond man is the one with the violent obsession with Mrs Peel, ie the Strange Young Man. Of course you could say it is unsuccessful if apparent misdirection has gone wrong enough for people to assume that it is a continuity error.
This misunderstanding is confused by two other things about this episode. The first being that it is actually chock full of continuity errors, sightings of the boom and shadows of stage hands (you can see a full like on the Dissolute site), so it is natural to expect to see bloomers.
The other is that this episode is very heavily reliant on the magical realism so characteristic of the later series of The Avengers, and unfortunately I think some of the examples of this have tended to be seen as plot faults. One example is that in the scene where Steed rescues Mrs Peel, when the record starts playing again, the only person who could have started the record is Steed, but there is much criticsm online that he couldn't possibly have done so! Another example is that a man who was supposed to be too unwell to go anywhere can suddenly also drive across the country to rescue Emma (are we supposed to believe there was nobody else in the Ministry he could have involved?). I'm also rather unhappy about the poison-infused razor blade left with a card under Steed's hat by the front door. I'm finding it difficult to visualise how Prendergast could have placed the card when he set up the trip wire, without Steed noticing something so obvious, in which case this is distinctly magical as well.
I suppose what I'm saying is that the real problem with this episode is that its dependence on magic and lack of reality, combined with a number of actual continuity errors, has left everyone not being sure what situationally wrong thing is intended to be magic and which is just a mistake. However I think the major problem with this episode is that I really don't think anyone who was even remotely cautious would have spent any longer in that house than enough to find out her host was absent before bolting.
Now I don't want you to run away with the idea that I think this episode is rubbish: it's a very slightly flawed very characteristic later Avengers episode which is still great viewing, it's just confused the fandom no end.
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