The Mission

DVD, The Champions (The Mission)

All three of them get to play characters this time, with Craig as ex-mob member Bruno Canelli, a short-tempered high-flier with $2 million, Sharron as his airhead glamour girl, and Richard as a down-and-out, complete with greyed hair and stubble. There's also entertainment from Richard's fellow tramp, an Irishman with a penchant for the bottle, creepiness from Boder, a war criminal with nasally voice, and a plastic surgeon with a past, assisted by his nurse, a woman that isn't quite right, and a henchman. The ingredients are all there in the right proportions, but it doesn't quite succeed in baking that cake just right. It has moments of comedy with Richard's new friend so accepting of whatever odd things happen around them, like Richard talking to his 'invisible' friend, Craig, and Sharron really getting into the part, constantly chewing gum and looking vacant (even when they find Richard hiding in the shower to make contact and they're alone!). It also has moments of horror, such as the men with bandaged hands and faces, or Craig going through Pederson's photo file of people he's done and finding a scarred face, informed by Boder, one of the bandaged boys, saying he didn't keep up the payments, followed by a shrieking laugh. Just the concept has its horror: to be augmented or 'improved' by human hands, changed artificially, is a creepy idea, especially when you consider how so many people want such things today, and hidden faces wrapped up like a Mummy is another.

I didn't think there was enough of either straying in the direction of comedy, or scares, and I remembered the twist at the end, which is good, but no longer surprising to me: Pederson's plan is to alter his old colleague's face to look like him, then kill him off. I suppose that was the plan, though he himself would still look like Dreuchman who did experiments at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II, and wouldn't be able to escape his identity. So I'm not sure what the whole plan was, except to put people off his trail and disappear off to some deepest, darkest country where no one had heard of him, and live out his life with Sophia, the woman he claims to have 'created' (though not in the Frankenstein sense). From the start you notice she looks imperfectly perfect, and when we learn that Pederson, or Sven as she calls him, had worked on her, you understand - it was good casting to find someone unsettling like that. Did she know Pederson's past? She must have, as Craig talks about it in front of her - she must have put aside any qualms for her own personal vanity, and dies when Pederson crashes their escape car: she 'lived' by his surgeon's hand, and died by the control of that same hand. Poetic.

The way they keep the audience wondering about Emil Boder's face, the man Pederson has chosen to make in his image, is effective: Boder is frantic at wanting to remove the bandages, angrily storming into the surgery and demanding they be taken off under threat of death. Sophia reacts in shock, Boder calls for a mirror and it's filmed with him holding the mirror in front of his face so we still can't see, our minds filling with imagined horrors that this evil man could have inflicted upon his non-paying customer, Boder as horrified as Sophia. The instinct is that Boder will pull the mirror away and reveal all in close proximity to the camera, but they cleverly don't show us, allowing the tension to mount - Craig and Richard rush in to find what appears to be Pederson lying dead on the floor, the chase ensues and only upon catching up with the fleeing villain do they find that he is Pederson and the plot unrolls in front of us. The area where it strays a little too far into fantasy is that Pederson doesn't merely offer a new face, but fingerprints, too, which is still something that couldn't be done as far as I'm aware. Not that changing fingerprints would help now, anyway, since DNA is more important to identifying criminals and that can't be changed.

If you take out the twist and the fun of the champions playing roles undercover, there are only really two points of interest: the blood and the theme, which also tie into each other. It seems to be as much news to the champions that they have a strange blood group, as it is to Pederson, so they must never have needed any transfusion or given blood, which would make sense in both cases as they probably heal much faster than normal humans and they wouldn't want anyone examining them in case such anomalies were found. The fact their blood is different suggests that that was how the mysterious civilisation in the mountains cured and changed them, or at least was a part of the treatment, so that's an interesting development - like Mr. Spock and his green blood on 'Star Trek,' it shows that the champions are different on the chemical level, not just in feats of physicality and mental agility we see them perform on the outside, and adds depth and fascination to their whole makeup. It's all tied up with the new identity they were given by their rescuers, and identity is the theme of this episode.

For a start, it's all about major criminals using an escape route into London and disappearing: Pederson gives them their new identity. But his own identity can't be altered. Three times in the episode this is spoken over him: "Couldn't you find nobody to do a job on your face?" Craig asks. "You can't change your own face!" Boder angrily cries. And Richard muses at the end that the only face Pederson couldn't change was his own, and it's as if some kind of judgement hung over him, the sins of the past impossible to escape from. Pederson is arrogant in his quiet way, caught up in his power to make or mar, but not to the extreme that some villains we've seen were like. He's more measured and careful, probably why he's survived for so long, and if it wasn't for those pesky champions he would have gotten away with it, too! He almost succeeded in cutting out when he had the chance, but the quick fix of Craig's half a million dollar fee was too much not to tempt him. It seems that even with the powers he had, his identity remained the same.

I'd have been happy if the episode had ended on such philosophical musings on the nature of who we are, but this was a Sixties spy drama so it has to end with some humour, this time at Tremayne's expense when his agents leave him with a present: the Irishman's home brewed nine parts alcohol. He doesn't have much to do in this episode, especially after some where he's been more integral to the plot, but he is there to start off the mission… to the mission. The title makes it sound like it's a special task, but it's actually referring to the 'flop-house,' as Craig calls it, where tramps are accepted in for a few days, providing they go through some tests. What they don't know is that they're being fitted up to see if their blood and body parts are a match for whatever latest patient Pederson has to convert. It wasn't explicitly stated, but I can imagine their faces might have been used in the process, about as horrible as you can get, but it wasn't explored and I don't think we even had definite confirmation that these victims were being killed off, except for the mention of compatible body parts. George Hopton, friend to the little Irishman, makes the mistake of exploring in the hope of more alcohol, and is finished off in retribution. The line of escape for big criminals has been narrowed down to London and Tremayne gives the team a briefing using his less seen projector screen on the other side of the map. When the large map is zoomed into at the beginning of the episode, it changes from the specific map to another, more detailed one, which I was surprised I hadn't noticed before.

The abilities of the champions are used throughout, though they tend to be small and simple. Richard leaping up into a tree branch that gave the impression of being quite high up, or several uses of their vocal telepathy to contact between Richard and the others who are inside the mission (which was probably called Winthrop House if the van they give chase in at the end, where it was written on the side, was anything to go by). All three of them use their memories of files such as during Tremayne's briefing: they seem to know all the faces he shows them, and Craig recalls Pederson's face as being Dreuchman (another Nazi villain!), when they meet in person. Their hearing allows them to know when Pederson or Sophia are approaching their room, and Sharron also senses when Richard is in the building at the end of the forty-eight hours, having returned in disguise to give blood. Henchman Maltman was most unfortunate with Craig punching him so hard he goes flying up and into a hedge, while Richard whips a scalpel at his wrist to pinion his sleeve to the wall before he can shoot them on another occasion, where Craig again batters him hard. They also barge down the surgery door before the chase. Ingenuity is shown in the rescue of Richard (yes, there has to be an incarceration and a rescue!), from his thick-walled, solid-doored cell: the plaster ceiling's bashed in using a floorboard from the room above!

Sharron also has her moments, pulling the door off a locked cabinet to get into it, and taking a large dose to put her under prior to the operation. She also shows implicit trust in her colleagues, allowing herself to be put to sleep and potentially under Pederson's knife because she believes Craig will find Richard and get back in time to stop anything being done. That's real trust, that is. She also headlines one of the more enjoyable post-credits sequences, driving along in the country, stopping for a couple of floppy-haired hitchhikers, one of which behaves inappropriately - they drive into a tunnel, the screen goes black and we hear thwacks and groans of pain, then Sharron drives smugly out, followed shortly after by the staggering ex-passengers. The side is let down a little after this by reusing a clip from 'The Dark Island' where Richard escapes from a prison hut and leaps over a high fence, and then we have a previous post-credits scene from 'The Ghost Plane' with Craig running after a delivery van careering downhill towards a group of children playing in the road. They were good moments, but I don't like repetition as it's lazy and I'd rather they had just one new scene.

Other noted items are no surprise at Pan Am being the flight which Craig and Sharron come into London on; some apparent day for night shooting for the scenes around the external of the house which held the mission (which looks like the same one from 'The Experiment'); and the rooms are sets we've seen on many occasion, with the good old staircase used yet again. The two-way mirror Richard uses to adjust his face while being observed by Pederson who shows Craig and Sharron the man who'll be providing the blood necessary for the operation, doesn't make sense: on Richard's side it's oval with an inner ring of gilding, but rectangular from the other side, while also being a much larger area to look through than should be possible! At least the cast list is pretty complete as we didn't have that many characters this time, the only uncredited speaking roles being the reporters that try to interview 'Canelli' at the airport. I couldn't work out who Hogan was, until by process of elimination it had to be the Irish tramp, though I don't remember his name ever being mentioned.

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