The Persuaders!: Someone Like Me (Tony Wright Season)
The Persuaders! possibly doesn’t feature on this blog as much as it could: as so often these series of themed posts bring something to my attention, even if it’s only something I’ve been missing. Certainly this episode is a very meaty one for me to get my teeth into.
The Persuaders! (1971 to 2) does have the disadvantage for me personally of having one of those titles ending in -er that so many series of this date have, and which confuse me hugeley. There are two series called The Protectors, for example. And then we have The Avengers, obviously, The Adventurer and The Persuaders, all setting out to get me confused. The later ones all have the same sophisticated ‘continental’ globe-trotting setting that The Persuaders! does which makes them even more confusing. The Persuaders! is of course about two millionaire playboys initially commissioned by a judge to investigate mysteries or crimes that are otherwise unsolvable.
Someone Like Me is a bit different because Lord Sinclair stops in a wood before being clunked on the head and finding himself waking up in a hospital which turns out to be a fake in a derelict building, before going back to sleep and waking up in his own car. He sees some surgeon’s reference photographs which make him think that a double of him has been created, and he thinks that the double is going to be used to kill yet another millionaire, a businessman called Sam Milford this time, since Lord Sinclair is one of the few people he will allow near him. It turns out that he has actually been programmed by hypnosis to murder his friend on the use of certain words and Danny Wilde stops him doing it. It turns out it was a plot by the millionaire businessman’s much younger wife and business associate.
There is much made on the internet of the similarity of this plot to The Manchurian Candidate and Roger Moore’s recent film The Man Who Haunted Himself, in that they both feature doubles. There are also possible inspirations closer to home in British television: for example The Avengers episode Split! involves putting one person’s thoughts into another person; Who’s Who features swapping people’s personalities; and (of most relevance) in Stay Tuned, Steed is planted with the idea of killing Mother upon hearing certain words. It is perhaps of relevance that this episode was written by Terry Nation, creator of The Daleks, and the science fiction interest shows.
It’s interesting, this episode really brings out the capitalist and power slant of this show. Two millionaire playboys (representing capital) are commissioned by a judge (presumably not poor, and representing the state power of the law) to do various jobs and in this case it means preserving the riches of yet another millionaire. The wealth and power imbalance of the world remains intact as a result of their intervention, the law is proven to defend the wealthy and powerful and we can all go home.
Tony Wright’s role is limited to apparently being a guinea pig at the start of the episode: he enters the millionaire’s office saying that he has been in hospital (presumably the fake one where has has been hypnotised) before apparently shooting him, although it seems the bullets must be blanks because he gets up again. His character is then seen making a call related to the set up where Lord Sinclair gets clunked on the head and taken to the pretend hospital, and then we don’t see the character again.
The reviews online of this episode are almost unanimously wildly positive, except for one which shares one of my two criticisms, so I’m going to feel free to do a hatchet job on this one. The episode is a really good experiment in science fiction, in a vein clearly very popular at the time. However there is a plot hole you could drive an Aston Martin through. This is that the idea of a double is completely unnecessary and creates a complication which doesn’t develop the plot in any way. You could say that the whole idea of this episode is that we’re not supposed to know what is going on, or that Brett and Sinclar would have likely suspected the rather unlikely possibility of a double. However the reason they suspect it is Sinclair finds photographs of himself in the fake hospital which look like they would have been used for plastic surgery and concludes there’s a double. The reality is that he was hypnotised so there was absolutely no need for the photographs to exist at all. Sinclair could have been introduced to the idea that all is not well by the scene where he turns up to the garage and the mechanic tells him he has already been there: the natural interpretation would be that you’re not well after your bump on the head and have forgotten; concluding that a double exists is definitely not an obvious conclusion!
The other problem with the plot is that Sinclair’s old friend Sam Milford is so security conscious that Sinclair is one of the few people ever allowed to get through his security, but we’re supposed to believe that he married a much younger woman who is plotting on his life in a very science fiction way. Yes, you will rightly tell me that even millionaires get married, although the ultra-rich don’t tend to live marriages like anyone else, but I think it more plausible in this case that the pursuit of indecent wealth and (almost, although it turns out to be a true worry) paranoia about someone being after him, would tend to militate against Milford actually getting married at all.
Otherwise, it’s a very interetsing, atmospheric episode, with a small role for Tony Wright which you could miss if you blinked.
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