The Final Countdown

DVD, The Champions (The Final Countdown) (2)

They did love Nazi villains on this series ('The Survivors,' 'The Search,' 'The Mission'), as well as last minute defusing of atomic bombs ('Happening,' 'The Dark Island,' and probably others I've forgotten!), but then you have to remember when the series was made: the late 1960s was well within living memory of both the Second World War and its devastating atomic conclusion, not to mention a tension of living under the Cold War between East and West, the latent threat of nuclear attack wiping out half the world at any moment. It's not surprising that there were so many films and TV series' that dealt with that public worry head-on in a fantasy setting, a sort of catharsis to make it less real perhaps. The psychology of choice of villains at different periods of TV history would make an essay in itself, but Air Marshal Von Splitz and his gang weren't the best thought out examples - after twenty-five years in a Russian prison he's finally been released, is tailed by the intelligence services and then promptly disappears. He was of the Luftwaffe High Command, head of The Special Operations and, we discover, has knowledge of a last ditch attempt to turn the tide of the war by dropping an atomic bomb in a V4 rocket, the payload of which was lost when the Heinkel plane carrying it had to be abandoned by the German air crew when it was shot down by a Royal Airforce Spitfire. It didn't go off so now he wants it back so he can win the last battle of the war!

You can tell that there was a thought that Nazi forces were still at large in the new Germany just waiting for the right time to strike, with Von Splitz' associate, Dr. Neimann saying the explosion will act as a signal to their compatriots to rise up. It plays on the idea that not every soldier loyal to the Nazis was routed out and put on trial, and I suppose from their hindsight of both World Wars it seemed highly possible that Germany could rise a third time to strike back at the world, but it shows that simple hindsight isn't always the best pointer for what will happen - many other factors would have had to be considered, not just the events of the Wars. But it was an easy sell to a Sixties TV audience and it gives our champions an evil to face. And the Marshal is an evil man, as are his stone-faced henchmen and Herr Doktor in the half-moon specs. You can imagine him being the type to carry out experiments at concentration camps, and the men have a dangerous atmosphere around them as if violence is only a single word of command away. They're the typical Nazi soldier: cruel, cold and belligerent. We see the contrast between them and other Germans that had moved on after the war, with Flight Lieutenant Wolf Eisen, in charge of the mission to drop that bomb, and his navigator, Gerhardt Schultz, both seeming normal. The first has a daughter and is still active in the service, and shows courage in his demands to know what's going on from his kidnappers, while the second is a genial host at Unterberg Farm in Weltzbach, a town near Frankfurt.

When Von Splitz decides Eisen knows too much, he orders him dealt with, and similarly, when they've got all the information they can coax out of Schultz that the bomb must have fallen into a lake near Helmstadt, playing on his goodwill, saying they're from the government tasked with finding the bomb before the casing corrodes, people's lives at risk, they promptly and mercilessly shoot him in his own house, his wife has time to see it and scream in terror before she, too, is murdered in cold blood! They don't stint on the violence in this particular episode, as they'd done a few times before on the series - the shot of the failed experimental superhuman from 'The Experiment,' writhing in agony when he's shot in camera, springs to mind. Craig is tied to a chair and punched in the face, slapped in the face and chopped on the back of the neck by either Kruger or Heiden, and it's all right there, the camera fairly close in so you see every jolt and snap of his head. In that case it doesn't make quite as much impact because he just bounces back up like rubber, his superior endurance allowing him to mock his brutal captor whose knuckles feel the wear more than Craig's face! There's also a right royal rumble in the staircase room (again! - as soon as I saw how it was laid out with all those tables covered in sheets, I knew there was going to be a big fight), with Craig and Richard taking on the Marshal and all his men rather effectively.

There was plenty of action, but also a fair amount of detective work, and while I could have wished for more Sharron in the episode, and more of the trio working in the same vicinity, we do get that by the end and it's good to see them all off adding to the data they need to work out what's going on. As Craig sums up so deadpan after Tremayne's opening briefing, they don't know where Von Splitz is, they think he might have a secret, but they don't know what it is, and it's all rather bemusing. That changes once it becomes known that an atomic bomb is the object of the villain's intentions. The locales are once again more than just England, although Sharron and Richard do pay a visit there to meet Tom Brooks, the pilot who originally shot down the plane carrying the bomb, and which he realises through that action he effectively won the war singlehanded! The main place of action is Germany as the Air Marshal's gang track down the bomb, eventually finding it underwater in what was excellent use of stock footage. Indeed, the use of stock was rather accomplished as I sometimes found myself wondering what had been filmed for the series and what was already existing footage they'd retrieved. The biggest source of this was the murder attempt of Eisen, left unconscious in a car, then rolled down a hill. Just as in the opening to 'Mission: Impossible 2' when the pilot of a plane comes to just in time to see a closeup view of an onrushing mountain, Eisen awakes to the horror of flying over a cliff, the car smashing and rolling. The way the scenes of the car being sent on its way are cut with the actual flinging of a car over the edge after it had raced down this steep hill, genuinely made me wonder if they'd filmed it themselves, and I couldn't tell if it was a scale model or a real car the way it had been shot, though the DVD booklet gave away its origins as reuse from 'The Baron.'

If I'd seen that series then no doubt it would have taken away from this episode to realise they'd only reused it, but it was new to me and it looked very dramatic and intense! The lake seen in this episode appeared suspiciously similar to that in 'The Survivors,' so it wasn't surprising to learn that the former episode had actually been the previous episode shot and that, again according to the handy DVD booklet, they had combined location shooting on both episodes. So it really was the same lake, although I thought some of the scenes on the shore looked as if they'd been created in an elaborate 'greens' set (in other words, getting all the plants and trees in to make it look like a natural environment), with all this fake smoke to create atmosphere, but which only served to make it look like a smoke machine had belched out, or someone had lit a massive cigar nearby that had filled the area! The underwater filming of the bomb and divers around it was also something that looked very specific, though it didn't fit quite right with what they were saying about having to free it, as the scene shows a diver cutting into the casing or welding something to it rather than setting it free from anything.

As well as getting back to a slightly more international feel, another thing that improves the episode is the way Tremayne is integrated with the unfolding events, coordinating his agents and other parties via the telephone at his desk, in his best telephone voice. Sometimes you do get the impression of a one-sided conversation and that he had to do the script without someone responding, but he does it so well and it's just good to have the old guy involved when in too many episodes he's had only one scene of briefing or a humorous tag at the end of a story. It was a real wasted opportunity not to have him in on the action more often as they did in a handful of episodes, his presence always adds to scenes. Strangely, the frequent time in an episode when he puzzles over some piece of good fortune his agents have had, or some unexplained discrepancy in time or reasonable expectations, comes in the middle of the episode: he quizzes Richard on how he was able to get the required information about the bomb out of the dying Eisen, who'd been found and was lying in a hospital bed wrapped up in bandages. All the other people that had tried to get the vital knowledge out of him hadn't been able to, but somehow Richard had, and– oh, they've gone… It was both funny and useful as a reminder that Tremayne, though he may have called a truce after 'The Interrogation' and seemed more open to letting his agents have their little 'games' without questioning them, still held suspicions on how they could achieve the seemingly impossible at worst, improbable at best, feats they carry out on a regular basis!

That Eisen is said to have died shortly after telling Richard the necessary information only puts an added tension on the danger of Von Splitz' plan - men have died to stop this. And it looks like more might do so, including our champions who have only twenty-five minutes in which to defuse this sensitive old bomb that Dr. Neimann has set to go off. I'm not sure the plan had that much merit: it seems to be as simple as setting the bomb off as a signal to Nazi forces still waiting to seize power, but I'm not sure what blowing up and irradiating a section of the country would do! Shock the nation and the world, I'm sure, but I have to wonder if Von Splitz was really just another insane man intent on revenge. He may have planned it all out meticulously in the years of his internment, but thinking about this one thing may have made his mind crack, especially as he seems to be living out an impossible fantasy, aided by his men who similarly have been unable to let the loss of the war go and move on with their lives. If Von Splitz' plan shows a lack of imagination I have multiple examples of the episode itself being full of odd details or mistakes as if Von Splitz had written it himself: maybe it was all a dream he was having in prison?

Look at Schultz' dead wife on the floor and you can see she's lying on some kind of blanket or rug arranged perfectly for her head, yet we didn't see her fall so neatly and certainly the murderers didn't give her any arrangement. In real terms it would have been to give the actress some comfort for her head to lie on. I've often pointed out the painted look of the backdrops they use to represent the great outdoors from internal sets, but the one you see through the narrow door at the Unterberg farm was very good… Until the villains all troop out and cast their shadows on it as they pass, somewhat shattering the illusion of distant hills! Then there's the post credits sequence which features a snowy landscape where children find a small unexploded missile just underneath the surface of the snow! Which means it would have just been lying on the ground… Tremayne himself does an impression of Super Mario, saying that "…As far as the intelligence service was-a concerned…" It was obviously Anthony Nicholls stumbling slightly in his memory of what he was saying, and it's only a small slip, but preserved for posterity forever. Another slip was actually my hearing as I thought his secretary, speaking on the intercom, said: "Yes, dear," and "Right, dear," but it was actually 'sir' said in a slightly heavy accent! The back projection used for some of the car scenes were definitely at fault: you can see a bright greenery to the grass and plants behind Craig as he drives to Frankfurt, but when we see the external view there are the remains of snow about, and it's gloomy.

There's also the moment when the Air Marshal returns to his large country house with Craig as prisoner (what, you mean one of the champions got captured?), and when they enter into the staircase room through the main doors you can see a backdrop for the outside with its blue sky, but above the door, just under the arch, you can see the set only goes so far and from the low camera angle a sliver of 'sky' can be seen! Also, when Craig and Richard make their finely synchronised leap through the glass windows into the room where Neimann is priming the bomb, you can see it's a couple of stunt men before it cuts to the actual actors fighting inside. And the episode ends with Richard tasting some of the syrup in the grease gun, offering it to his fellow champions, who all lick their finger - I wouldn't be doing that out of a grease gun that had just been emptied of a full cartridge of grease! Another thing is that it seems like most of the villains in the series prefer exactly the same wallpaper and room layout in their houses, but I guess that's just Sixties conformist design (nothing to do with them being the same sets, oh no!).

Something the episode gets right is including opportunities for the champions' abilities and powers to be used in the story, making them essential to the success of different stages of the mission, whereas in a few recent episodes they may as well just have been ordinary agents or spies, with no special advantage about them. As ever, the post credits scene is a good place to start as Richard is shovelling snow like a madman in his efforts to extricate a Land Rover from the deep snow. It's not that he seems particularly super when he notices the child banging (typical), the newly found missile against something, but he must have been some distance away, so to recognise what this unlikely item was, then cover the ground so quickly and hurl the explosive so far away, is a good demonstration of reaction time, speed and visual acuity - plus I love that we see him protect the child, huddled on the ground, while in-camera behind them the explosion erupts spectacularly! They probably filmed the sequence at the same time as the episode because you can see snow on the ground at other times during the story, too. It's a fun scene with all these children having great enjoyment of the snow, though I assume it was dubbed later as the voices don't sound quite right. I'm not sure whether the next power was Richard reading Eisen's lips or it was his sensitive hearing that could pick up the inaudible whispers of the dying patient, but it worked either way.

Richard has another loss of control while driving, which we've seen before, because of the sudden impression of Craig's pain as he's beaten while tied to a chair. It's not clear if Sharron senses it too, since he tells her they're really working Craig over, when more often it tended to be she that felt others' pain. Fortunately, Craig can take all the beatings the Marshal's man can administer, and once he's been left alone, presumed unconscious, he quickly gets up off the floor and crushes the chair he's attached to against the wall until it falls apart, then proceeds to snap the ropes keeping his hands behind his back. Earlier, Craig had been able to use his sensitivities in the investigation, running a finger over the notebook from which Von Splitz' man stole Schultz' address, and able to read the slight indentations left behind like Braille. Richard and Craig talk to each other in their special way when the former comes to rescue the latter - one interesting and more humorous use of this power comes when Sharron joins Richard and upon asking if he found Craig, Craig's disembodied voice replies: "He found me," butting in from a distance, though the line reading was a bit off because he emphasises the 'He,' when that's what Sharron asked! The fight in the staircase room when the two men take on all of the Marshal's gang, was well choreographed, but it's noteworthy for a couple of signature moves: firstly, Craig and Richard do their combined kicking in of the door to the room, and during the fight Craig seems to move with lightning speed across the room to grab one of the men who's taking up position with a gun on the stairs, then does the usual head over heels throw to chuck him over the bannister and onto a table.

I suppose the daring leap through glass windows could also be counted among their abilities, though any spy worth their syrup would do the same, unless it's Sharron - they keep her out of harm's way again and even instruct her to get out of the blast radius because they're not sure if they can prevent the detonation, though she refuses and chooses to stay to whatever end. Sir Charles Dyson is the man from Aldermaston who's an expert with such devices (it was fun to hear of somewhere not far from where I live), and gets on the phone to talk them through the defusing process, but with phone lines unreliable they end up having to rely on Craig's knowledge. It's great to hear something else about his life, that he had an uncle in a bomb disposal unit during the war (best line of the episode goes to Richard: "You should have brought him with you"), and they sometimes used a magnet to stop the timing mechanism on bombs, or if that was unavailable, liquid sugar, hence pumping the device with syrup. As a famous starship engineer once said, 'the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to gum up the works,' or something to that effect! It's a happy ending, and fortunate the champions managed to prevent the blast since they had two more episodes still to fulfil on their contracts.

A lot of characters show up in this episode and there's a whole raft of speaking roles that don't get credited, surprisingly. At the top of the list would probably be Sir Charles, the bomb expert, since he has important input, even if he was cut off before he could do much. There's also the female doctor looking after Eisen, Detective Schneider who was with Eisen when Richard visited, and a German cyclist Craig asks for directions to the farm. Schultz' wife does little more than a dramatic scream, but at least she's on screen - Tremayne's secretary and the phone operator were both speaking roles only. And though the two main henchmen of Von Splitz were named as Kruger and Heiden, there was at least one more who had a visible role, pushing the car containing Eisen off on its merry way. Interestingly, the actor who played Neimann was called Wolf Frees, so maybe they got the idea for Eisen's first name from him? As I said, it's nice to have Tremayne remain a part of the story throughout, and this time, although there's no tag scene in his office, the defusing of the bomb was enough to round the episode out as it wasn't a quick scene unlike so many episodes that concluded so abruptly. We get to see some nice views of his office again, especially the far corner near the window when he walks under the window behind his desk to pour a drink, as well as the screen on the other side of the world map being used to show black and white film footage again during the briefing. Scenes of Von Splitz were cleverly mixed in with what appeared real filming from the time to give his historical role reality. It was also nice to see Craig and Richard using the office into the evening as you can see by the dark sky through the blinds.

Why not give this three stars, then? I still don't think it's really a good episode, in spite of strong moments of action, well integrated powers and more Tremayne, plus the greater impression of other countries than just Britain. I felt it could have been a lot better, as 'The Survivors' was, but we don't really get a good sense of a plan from Von Splitz and he doesn't seem like a man of rationality, nor an interestingly irrational one. He was a bit of a boring villain, if truth be told, his men doing all the dirty work while he just proudly strutted around, and neither was Dr. Neimann explored enough to make us feel great disgust for him. The characterisations were pretty light and if it hadn't been for the mostly silent presence of the henchmen I don't think the group's threat would have been very strong. With them there was a sense of brutality just itching to do something to someone. They could have used Anna, Eisen's daughter, better, but she didn't have much to do. The story was getting there, and certainly a change for the better compared with the last few episodes: one of the better not so good ones is how I'd sum it all up. I can't believe there's only two to go!

**