Reply Box No. 666

DVD, The Champions (Reply Box No. 666)

The stand out for me in this episode was the quality and collection of the assorted villainy. In the first episode our champions of law, order, and justice were up against soldiers of a foreign power, while in the second it was a crooked surgeon and his associate. This time it's a gang of four with the impression they're part of a larger organisation intent on retrieving a special device that can make planes invisible to radar. I wasn't entirely clear if they were working for a power or wanted to get their hands on it to offer to the highest bidder, but they were an interesting bunch, not exactly cutthroat enemies that would be a match for Craig and his fellow super-humans, but not without threat. Corinne, the cold female pilot is able to dispatch Craig when she learns his alias is false and he's not the real contact they were expecting, and the story makes a good use of the fact they haven't yet mastered their powers, and shows the human limitations they're still under: Craig is still vulnerable to a well-aimed bullet (fortunately to the arm rather than the heart), and Jules, the heavily accented, womanising Frenchman can bundle him out of the airplane to what would be almost certain death for the average man. Except Craig exceeds that title and is able to swim however far he has to with one arm in a buffeting sea until he makes it to land.

The villains are rounded out by Nikko, the proprietor of a gift shop on Jamaica where the adventure takes place, a jolly character who gets his own catchphrase ("Enjoy your holiday in the sun, enjoy it!"), something that actor George Murcell would have in his next role on the series, so either it was the way he said it, or they liked giving him a little extra character to suit his performance. He's a fun guy that looks like a Klingon who's escaped from 'Star Trek,' though quite different in temperament. I'm pretty sure he was artificially darkened in skin tone, so that's probably the main reason I drew the connection, as I think in 'The Iron Man' he was light-skinned! The final member of the group is Bourges, the real contact sent to meet them on Jamaica, though at first I thought Jules called him 'boss' because of his thick accent! Jules was quite fun to see as I recognised Anton Rodgers who'd been in a lot of films (I only recently saw him in 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,' made twenty years later), and I get the impression they were often comedies unless I'm getting him mixed up with Clouseau. He didn't learn the vital lesson of this episode, which was propounded early on: don't let women interfere with your job! The episode begins with a James Bond character, Semenkin the explosives expert, whose weakness is women, and who gets knifed for his lack of professionalism. I wondered if this was a sly dig at 007, showing what was more likely to happen with such shenanigans, after all, the Bond films were highly popular at this time and 'The Champions' must have some in its DNA. Semenkin's mistake was not to have an author writing multiple books about his character!

As I said, Jules doesn't learn from Semenkin's mistake and is quick to fall for Sharon's relatively sober routine in order to get him alone and mesmerise him so she can get information about what's going on and where Craig is. The fact she has a case of differently sized rings makes me wonder if she was already into the dark art of hypnosis when she hovers over and selects the biggest, rather than an ability she'd discovered since her Tibetan operation. That's one thing slightly frustrating about the series, harking back to its time, when there could be next to nothing carrying over from episode to episode: we don't get to see them discover each power and first learn to use them. Either way, it proves effective at subduing Jules' amorous attentions (only just), but his mind is too well trained to give anything away. If it shows the limits of Sharon's power, Richard getting stuck in Nikko's storeroom does the same for him, as he has no way to escape until the big man's had his big lunch and gone off to sleep, an ironic position for Richard considering all the resources he could call on if he needed to batter his way out. But brute force and speed are only one set of tools, and the professionalism and experience of these agents is just as important in their successes. Yes, they often have shortcuts and can take on tasks a normal person could not, but they were very good operatives before their powers, and those powers are almost incidental to this story.

I don't think there was even a scene at the end where Tremayne shows confusion over how this or that could have happened, and it's all played very realistically, it seemed to me. Another example of their limits is when Sharon gets a feeling Craig's still alive, though under immense stress, while Richard senses nothing - she is able to draw a direction on a map, but they have to go to another part of the island before she can make a cross-reference and narrow down the exact island Craig must be on. Apart from rugged survival and the easy besting of the villains in a fight at the end, the only other ability on display is Craig's super-hearing, able to pick up the conversation Corinne has via radio with Nikko, so he knows the game is up and is ready to fight. Dodging bullets would have been a good skill to have, but he isn't Superman and remains vulnerable, which is one reason the series works: they need to have dangers to face that can be just as deadly as they would to an ordinary person, yet the edge they possess adds something different to the spy genre. Another example of the trio not having a full grasp of their powers is when Sharon visits Nikko's shop and her concern that the real Bourges shows up is communicated to her associates. She didn't know she'd communicated until later when Richard mentions it, though he didn't know exactly what was up, only that she was concerned. When Craig closed his eyes after looking at the map of the area the villains had covered I thought he was sending a message, but he must have been merely memorising it.

The quirky title and the reason for it is a little sketchy. Did they use the devil's number on purpose, or was it just an easy number to adjust to another? It all sounds a bit 'Avengers' to me, having an advert in the local paper, the Jamaican Daily Gleaner: 'Wanted: a parrot that speaks Greek.' Craig gets to show off a little of another tongue with his Greek and I think a bit of French, but the connection between it all was a bit slight. I also felt the villains were dealt with too easily, but the mystery was more in finding out what they were actually up to than any question of not being able to stop them. Craig gets a buddy called Clive, a native visiting the island where the original plane that contained the device had crashed, miraculously the vital equipment all in one piece! I'm not sure it made sense for Clive to ask if Craig had been in that plane, since the crash must have happened some time before, perhaps a number of days when you consider that two-thirds of the area had been searched already by the time Nemesis get involved. Craig wouldn't have survived several days lying on the bank the way Clive found him, but maybe he didn't know when the plane had crashed, although I'd have thought he would since he knew about it, and how else unless he'd heard it? It's a wonder he didn't go to it to find survivors (maybe he did?).

I must say the production values were particularly good, the use of stock footage, whether it be the plane, the views of the islands and the sea, or the speedboat Richard and Sharon use to get there, coupled with crewmembers lashing the windscreen with foliage to simulate their passage into jungly rivers: it all sold the effect and made the episode feel bigger, as if they really were on location. I sometimes couldn't tell if the scenes were shot outside or on a set, the foliage was that good! Even the fact that some sets were reuses or would be reused many times throughout the series weren't a problem at this stage. The plane set was the obvious one, already seen in 'The Beginning,' but I think this marks the first appearance of the room with the large staircase which would be in tons of episodes, this time dressed as a Jamaican bar where Sharon lures Jules. The kettle drums and the musicians wearing dark glasses, coupled with Semenkin's similarity to a double-0 agent made me think of 'Dr. No' and I half expected them to pull out pistols or sing 'Three Blind Mice'!

Although they are separated for most of the episode, a common device on the series, the team were all working towards their common goal admirably and I liked how the dynamics worked, so all things considered everything came together quite well. I think perhaps I couldn't rate it higher because it's all just fairly good rather than being thrilling or genuinely tense like the first couple of episodes. It wasn't really doing anything different enough, and though I liked the villains, the setting and so on, it wasn't quite there. Nothing wrong with it, just not doing as good a story as they might. I did enjoy the post opening credits scene with Craig locating a girlfriend's lost watch in a field, his sensitive hearing able to pick up the tick easily, though I mentally amended the triumphal opening narration to: '…allows them to use their powers to their best advantage to impress girlfriends'! I'm not sure the Tibetan race had that in mind when they passed on these amazing abilities, but it adds a human touch to the characters, far from boring, po-faced superheroes that never have any fun.

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