The Survivors

DVD, The Champions (The Survivors)

After owning the first 2 DVDs, what a delight to find, on going through the Complete Series set that the first episode on a disc I hadn't seen was one of the best, and boded well for the rest of the series! For once all three champions are in close proximity, and while the usual trope of some getting captured and imprisoned is once again played out, it isn't quite the same and it's not long before Sharron is onto them. It's just nice to see the three going off on a mission together (although I'm not sure if a Pan Am flight would get them from Geneva to Austria - isn't it short for Pan American, so doesn't that mean across America? Never having flown, my ignorance of airlines is obvious, but the stock footage stuck out to me). In itself that isn't enough to make this one of the best in the series, but it helps, even though Craig and Richard go off and do boy's stuff on their own for much of the time and Sharron gets to go and chat up the Burgermeister Hans Reitz. Or was he Franz Reitz, I couldn't keep up? I think I was confused because the voice giving the orders on the phone to Richter was called Hans. Which seemed to be the Staff Colonel Hans Reitz whom the evil brother was pretending to be, when he was actually Franz. But in that case why would he pretend to Richter that he was called Hans, or perhaps he wasn't in the know about his true identity, just a hired gun of some kind? I don't know!

The whole idea of Nazi's maintaining a secret stash of soldiers and equipment after the war in some Austrian mines, buried alive until such time as they should be excavated and return the Third Reich to power, was a good one, and had the element of plausibility because of the relatively short time since the war, only ending twenty-odd years before the episode. Such things would have still been fresh in the minds of viewers, a ripe subject to pick from, whereas nowadays everyone who was involved in World War 2 is pretty much dead and gone, no one in any shape to bring the Nazis back. The distinction between the evil SS and the ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht is something else touched upon, adding fire to the brotherly discord between the two Reitz', one on the side of honourable warfare, the other on the side of evil, and the rotten one is in the position of power having entombed his own brother, and the other soldiers, and stolen his identity to make a successful life for himself. It's a great idea, a good twist, and the use of an actor to play two characters, something common as muck in later TV decades, feels fresh and a surprising masterstroke you wouldn't expect in a Sixties drama. It also helps that he was so good as both, conniving and intense as one, apparently marble-less and tired as the other.

You feel for the real Colonel who spends his years wandering the tunnels, barking out orders at imagined soldiers, the war still living in his mind, the sound of artillery and the busy noises of active conflict surrounding him. The tragedy of these two men, last survivors of such an unpleasant order, trapped until they, too, finally fall prey to the ravages of time or madness, is what turns the episode from a peculiar and simplistic search for Nazi bullion, into a sympathetic story of human survival. It's almost unimaginable that Schmeltz (I assume that was the name of the other soldier down there, from the credits), lived for over two decades underground with no natural light or relief, and only the task of burying the others as his occupation, an undertaker forever cursed to remain with his dead in their grave. When he finally escapes into the night air of freedom you can see the joy and wonder on his face, a great moment. Sharron's interaction with Colonel Reitz is equally as compelling as he still insists the war is live, his mad plans up on chalk boards, threatening her with the prospect of a squad of troops available at the touch of a button. But she calls his bluff and I like that he doesn't then press the button - he says eventually he thought he knew the war was over.

Sharron gets some good stuff this time, going from interviewing the false Reitz to showing off her physical prowess in beating him up when he comes to the hotel to take her prisoner, and breaking into the mine or lifting heavy rocks, but also in talking with the real Colonel. She's as integral as her colleagues - they get to go diving and exploring the mine. Craig and Richard always work well as a pair, though it's surprising they never had a sense of danger at certain points: at the Austrian lake where the three students were gunned down in their search for gold, Richard has no sixth sense about Richter using a sniper rifle to shoot at him, but fortunately the villain shot the metal water bottle out of his hands, prompting a huge thirty-five foot leap for cover, baffling the killers. Craig never sensed anything either as he doesn't know about what had just happened on returning to the surface. The same when Richter shows up at the hotel later and Richard opens the door without any premonition of danger. It doesn't matter, because he takes out both Richter and his two accomplices in a dramatic brawl, hurling one through a window and dealing with them in stylish fashion! Craig and Richard also don't appear to use their powers when hearing Richter and the gang approaching in the mine - they do hear them, but there's no zoom in on an ear with the twinkly bell music, so I'm not sure if it was improved hearing or just that Richter was making so much noise. It even extends to Sharron who has some sort of intuition that Emil, the proprietor of their hotel (later shot by Richter for hesitating to kill Richard), reacted to seeing her flippers when she arrived.

If the success of the story is partly due to the team working together, or closer than they sometimes do, and also to the good characterisations of the guest stars, as well as the sensitive portrayal of men left underground for so long, the quality of the production also played its part. When we'd just had a couple of studio-bound episodes in 'Happening' and 'Operation Deep-Freeze,' it makes a huge difference to return to location shooting. It just makes everything that much more real. I must say I was especially impressed with the caves - they're so real I can't imagine they weren't because the production wouldn't have gone to that much trouble to strew the floor with rocks and a textured surface, they'd have been happy just to have sand under foot as we see with the cave entrance where the Attendant hands out flashlights, which looks like a set, so it must have been a real cave. You can also hear the actors voices echoing, an authenticity suggesting reality. Obviously there are fake rocks too, unless the actors had really been working out and Bastedo's tiny wrists could have managed such hulking blocks of stone! There's also some uncharacteristically sensitive music squeezed in between the usual bombastic stock series scoring, when they're travelling through the mine and discovering the graveyard, some of what was left of the fifty-six soldiers said to have entered the mine.

There are the usual selection of mistakes or inconsistencies, the biggest being the old man (Schmeltz?), seeming surprised when he's told the war has ended, yet a few moments later when he tells them his story he begins with 'when the war was ending.' Being stuck in a cave for so many years probably would make you a touch confused, in his defence. What seemed to be a mistake at the time was the Colonel saying the SS have no courage and talking of the Wehrmacht fighting a 'clean war,' not to mention wearing the normal German uniform, when his brother had said that he was a member of the SS. It turns out to be a clue, however, that the evil Reitz switched identities to save himself from trial or consequences. And while at other times no sense of danger is felt, Sharron does get a picture of the explosion Richard and Craig are caught in, yet didn't get anything when Richard was shot at. Generally though, the powers were used very well: I already mentioned Sharron slapping Reitz over a table, hefting rocks and using her brain (instead of snapping the chain and padlock she just rips out one of the wooden slats of the gate barring entry into the mine). Craig also shows greater strength when lifting a heavy rock so Richard can pull his leg out after the explosion. Sometimes strength isn't enough, as Craig pulls the handle off the door in the underground headquarters in a frantic bid to escape the activated death switch. He uses a crowbar and mashes up the wooden doorframe until he can get the door open. I was so sure the fire axe hanging on the wall behind Sharron in the scene where she talks to the Colonel was going to play a part at some point, but it never did!

Sharron also gets to show off her artistic skills with a highly accurate sketch of Reitz after he destroyed all photos of himself, which enables him to be stopped at the Swiss border, and allows for a fun little scene to cap the episode, which doesn't make much sense, but is funnier for it. And to see Tremayne's face at the insinuation that he'd ever be trying to escape across a border! She also gets the post-credits scene this time as a bar patron lets her have a go at darts and she scores a bullseye on her first throw, then to avert suspicion she aims for a number one on the scoreboard to the side of the board and hits it right in the middle, the guy assuming the first throw was pure chance! It's always good to see the team used effectively, and with a touching story and good ideas, everything works really well. There's even a logic to proceedings, such as the baddies using silenced pistols to threaten Craig and Richard who can't fire in the mine in case they bring down the shaft on themselves; or the compass being useless because of all the iron ore down there; or the villains' explosion being the manner in which the older part of the mine is finally opened; or the clue being in a map of the regimental positions in the last month of the war. There's even a nice new shot of the fountain in Geneva!

The only thing I wasn't clear about were all the characters in the credits. There were less speaking roles than in some episodes, but although I knew that Pieter was one of the students exploring the lake (played by Stephen Yardley who would later be Beckett's Dad thirty years later in 'BUGS'!), there was another student named as Klaus not in the credits, yet I didn't know who Heinz was, nor Hans, unless it was a different voice on the telephone to Reitz. Or was Hans the other old soldier in the mine, but if so, then who was Schmeltz? I felt I recognised the Mine Attendant, but maybe not. At least the cast was easier to keep track of than some recent episodes.

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