The Guardians: Part 6 - Appearances
I can only reiterate what I said in a previous post and have read in online reviews of this show, that it seems to change tack somewhat from now on. The earlier episodes were perhaps a little worthy and stodgy, containing lost of serious stuff about political subjects and philosophical discussions, but it now includes more human interest.
In this one much of the human interest is in the fact that Mrs Weston's husband is reintroduced to the show, having been missing presumed dead for most of it up to now. It turns out that he is being held in a 'hospital' for special - I'm not sure what the word is - let's say programming, to stop him being a naughty little Communist. In other words torture him to the point where he loses all independence of thought. When I say torture, what I really mean is being held in a room with no windows, forced to watch Coronation Street (I'm not even joking) and experiencing mind games played by the world's most annoying psychiatrist.
Helpfully, the doctor pops round to see Mrs Weston, just casually to tell her that her husband is still alive and incidentally we all know you've been shagging the Prime Minister's son and how are you going to deal with this nice little quandary. Therefore quite a lot of this episode is about that, and her chatting with the PM's son about the meaning of life. She also has a whole session with her psychiatrist about what's going on and whether it's possible to love two people at once.
Of course you knew that Dr Benedict wasn't going to go quiet, having casually murdered someone with his bare hands at the end of the last episode and so some of the human interest is that his wife has, naturally enough, left him and taken the children because she doesn't want to be married to a murderer. She's just vanished and the Guardians haven't come knocking on the door, which frankly doesn't seem that plausible.
The main political interest is that Benedict and a lady who is another member of the resistance group Quarmby, make an explicit plan to make their resistance actions more dramatic, which they do by planning and carrying out a bombing on Guardians headquarters. I'm quite prepared to admit that I'm getting very confused by this show's ability to introduce new characters and give existing ones different roles without explanation, but as far as I can tell all the members of Quarmby in this episode die, either shot by the Guardians, each other, or by suicide capsule. This may of course just be the impression I'm intended to get because it leaves me puzzled as to what is going to happen next, unless some of them survive or the show introduces a whole new raft of Quarmby members, which would be quite something. We do, however, see that Dr Benedict is not dead, right at the end of the episode. Goodness, this show is confusing.
The bombing takes little time just after the middle of the episode and the rest of the time is depicted in quite a lot of talk in the 'hospital' where Weston is being held and between Mrs Weston and the PM's son. Quarmcy then approaches another of the cast right at the end of the episode, which frankly comes as no surprise because all their other members are dead and they'd have had to pick someone familiar to us in the cast.
I think I have identified this show's difficulty which is making it so difficult: it started off by trying to be a political thriller, but it's not possible to fill thirteen hour-long episodes with political discussion and terrorists events without the state actually being overthrown in the third episode, so it's forced to use what feels like a lot of padding. Even given the slower pace of the TV of the time it feels plodding at times and over-talky. I think it would be been better with fewer episodes or even half-hour instead of whole hour episodes.
My main criticism of this episode specifically is that so much time is given to chat about relationships and yet there is absolutely no discussion of the ethics or legality of keeping an adult human prisoner in a hospital and subjecting him to psychological programming or deprogramming, in the name of drilling the 'Communism' out of him. I have noted before that this show tends to do this and just depict some things while endlessly discussing others. It's really strange, especially as it could quite easily have been worked into the episode by having the PM discuss it or having a questioning Guardian wonder what was going on.
What I like best about this episode is that the Guardians headquarter is very oviously a 1960s-vintage office building, dressed to be the Guardians' headquarters by barriers and some sand bags in front of it. When Quarmby throw the bomb at it the explosion very obviously happens behind the sand bags without injuring the building and an already-alight Guardian staggers into view from the other direction. I am not criticising this, but praising the amateur theatricals standards of 1970s TV.
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