Operation Deep-Freeze

DVD, The Champions (Operation Deep-Freeze)

Opposite in just about all respects is this to previous episode, 'Happening.' That was in the desert of Australia, this is in the ice and snow of Antarctica; that had two of them split off and the other trapped alone in a compelling way, this has the two on their own and the other allowed a minor scene as contribution; that ended with the aversion of a nuclear bomb, this begins with the accidental explosion of the same as if the tension is let out right from the start (and ends with another blast!). They do share similarities, with extensive use of stock footage and indoor sets to represent the natural environment. The post-credits scene establishing their powers is also another to feature a solitary Richard, so the parallels between the two episodes are surprising. It's a shame this one didn't have the dramatic weight of the former, and could be the weakest so far. Sand is far easier to replicate than snow, because sand can be used as sand, but clearly snow isn't going to be actual snow, so it ends up looking like white sand and behaving in the same way, so when Craig and Richard are building a mound to stick a flag marker in, it looks wrong, like they're finding rocks in sand rather than digging out blocks of ice, not selling this environment. The same is true when you see specks of 'snow' on their clothes or sleeping bags in the tent when it should have melted. They can't be faulted for ambition on this series, but this may have been pushing too far. If they'd kept to the constructed sets like the secret base with its log huts and ice-hewn tunnels, the illusion would have worked, as those were very well done, it was purely the trudging through fake snow that showed their limitations.

The villains are a nondescript group representing some neo-fascist regime, they assume, with nonspecific foreign accents and insignia. I suppose it shows what even a small country with ruthless ambition can do in the 'modern' world of the nuclear age - as General Gomez says, a small man with a gun is as powerful as a big man with a gun. The sheer number of the bad guys doesn't help them become interesting players in the events, the closest being Captain Jost, played by Walter Gotell, famous for being the Russian General in multiple James Bond films across the years. Gomez is just a thug, but his subordinate, Colonel Santos has something more to him by his shocking suicide in the wake of failure, though even that is a bit stereotypical. There really were too many characters to keep track of, and for once we get two pages of guest cast credits due to the large number of speaking roles, though even then some are left out. Mills, the bearded guy at Scott Base for one, and Joiner, the bald scientist, is another that aren't credited, and possibly one or two of the soldiers. I was surprised that even the 'Ship's Captain' was credited, though I don't remember who Margoli, Mendoza and Hoffner were from the credits - I thought there was a Lieutenant Beaver, but I could have misheard.

I wonder what the reason was for practically excluding Sharron from the episode, as this is the Richard and Craig Show for almost the entire time, Sharron only getting in for the last few minutes, and then only in Tremayne's office where she sees the danger her comrades are in (people always end up getting shut in cold storage!), and tries to insist on her boss taking action to send a search party for them. Obviously Tremayne isn't going to take any notice of her hysterical pleadings so once he's left her alone to calm down (exiting through the door just along from the automatic main entrance, which I don't think we'd seen before), she goes over his head and rings up to authorise a search. Conveniently there's no end scene for the episode in Tremayne's office, so we never hear what he made of her actions or whether she was punished. You can imagine he'd let her off as she turned out to be right, but with a stern warning not to do it again! Perhaps Alexandra Bastedo was kept busy filming another episode during the production of this one so as to save time and money, a canny way of netting a lot of episodes by splitting up the main cast, I imagine.

Apart from Sharron's one starring moment sensing danger and seeing an image of Craig and Richard freezing to death in a cell, the main use of powers inevitably comes from them: the post-credits sequence has Richard braking on an intuition, before a little girl runs out into the road chasing her ball. The only problem with that scene was that he stops for a few seconds before she appears which makes it seem if he'd kept driving he'd have been past her before it happened, but distances are hard to judge on a screen so perhaps she was further away than she appeared - who am I to doubt the powers of the champions? Richard displays this intuitive power again when he's compelled towards a spot in the snow to discover one of the murdered rescue parties to the amazement of Hemmings, their guide. I didn't remember exactly what happened so I was expecting him to turn out to be working with the villains, perhaps because Jost doesn't attempt to shoot the trio when he can, and because Craig and Richard are concerned that they won't be able to operate as smoothly with him along, but it proves not to be the case. Craig also has a sense that tells him they're being followed, and reminds us of their limits: he says that if their pursuers were camouflaged even their improved senses couldn't see anything. He also hears the sound of skis as the enemies approach. They both use their strength by leaping further than any normal man in order to take down an opponent. Richard pushes in the door to the storage room and Craig rips off the lid of a container of tactical atomic shells, so they had plenty to exercise their abilities.

It's just that there wasn't anything really cool (aside from all that ice and snow, of course), the way they went about things was matter-of-fact. They did get out of range of the radiation blast quicker than they should have according to Gregson, the Commander of Scott Base, but it wasn't a spectacular thing as some of their powers have been in other episodes. There is a bit of violence, such as Jost strangling Hemmings with some rope, the sight of a frozen murdered body with some blood on the front, and Craig head-butting someone, but it's more acrobatic than brutal in general, and things like Santos shooting himself is only implied, we see his subordinate (Major Zerrilli?), walk down a corridor and hear a shot ring out. It's more brutal that Gomez doesn't even inquire further into the suicide or show any surprise, and in fact says he was right to do it, implying a fate worse than death would have been his portion had he been alive.

As usual there is the occasional questionable logic such as the order to dress the 'dead' Richard and Craig in their outdoor clothes to drop off somewhere as a delaying tactic for the authorities to find and put them off course. How were they going to dress them if they were frozen solid - even a corpse would go into rigor mortis, so a frozen corpse would be impossible to manoeuvre into clothes, surely? The other big thing was, on the face of it, a clever way for the pair to blend in at the enemy camp, joining in the general confusion and hubbub of people running around, except Richard ruins it by saying loudly there's 'no sign of them here' as he looks underneath a jeep, but in a British accent! There's also the stock footage of the icebreaker played backwards for the scene where it reverses, but that was just a sensible budget saver - I like the fact that the script has Tremayne and his agents talk of penguins just so they can get in some stock footage of them! In fairness the stock was generally good - the dogs didn't really match up to the ones on set, but it wasn't a big problem, it's just that whenever it cut to the flat, snowy expanse characters were supposed to be travelling through, that the illusion didn't hold up.

This time Tremayne actually takes his men over to the gigantic world map for the briefing about the South Pole - I liked seeing him walk past the other end of the map where you can see the Arctic and wonder if that will be another episode one day! Tremayne was right about the joint venture being a remarkable example of cooperation between nations because this was made during the cold war, so anything that had the US and Russia working together on was special, and I wish they'd played that aspect up, perhaps having a team of different nationalities that Craig and Richard can direct against the one small country that's decided to strike out against the world. The plane set gets yet another outing for the journey into and out of Antarctica, and it's in these scenes that Craig and Richard are most enjoyable, bouncing off each other, though for much of the episode you don't get as strong a sense of friendship and banter. I wouldn't say Sharron is especially missed, but it isn't quite right without her being a big part of the story, even if it does make sense for the three not to be working together all the time - they're three separate agents, just like any others in the eyes of Nemesis, and it makes you wonder what it would be like to see them paired with other agents of the organisation on occasion. As with Hemmings they'd have to be careful how they operated, adding a new level of caution to proceedings. Not that they were particularly cautious: Richard couldn't have looked more strange being drawn to the dead bodies hidden in the snow, and Sharron was melodramatic in her efforts to influence Tremayne, so little wonder if anyone did get suspicious!

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