DVD, BUGS S1 (Assassins Inc)
Their first mission, and it turns out to be something of an ethical issue. At least, I'm assuming this is the Gizmos team's first mission, for all we know they may have been operating for weeks by now as there's no timescale indicated. The fact that Ros is happy to go off on some social event with an old friend while Ed and Beckett carry out a clandestine search and destroy on intellectual property bound up with a company that's just gone bust suggests one of two things: either they're confident in what they've developed and don't need all three team members involved, or, and this seems more likely to me, Beckett took the job on himself without Ros' knowledge, trying to impress her and demonstrate his leadership abilities. Oh, Beckett, what have you done? The ethics of the situation are whether it's okay to break a few laws (breaking and entering; industrial sabotage; trespass, to name a few), when the cause is just: The Client, a certain Irene Campbell, has hired Beckett to delete a 'game' concept that has been 'bought' by a 'company' and then that very same day it went bust and the cheque bounced (for those that don't know what this means… look it up), and to get back this data will be a costly and time-consuming process, so it's up to our boys to delete what's on the company system, get out of there, get paid. Ironically it's Ed, the happy-go-lucky free spirit, who calls into question the veracity of Irene, while Beckett, full of himself and fallen under the smarmy charm of this middle-aged woman, takes it all on face value. Bad idea.
Trust must surely be an issue in this line of work - do you just take on a task from anyone and accept what the client says? It's early days, they didn't know quite what they were doing yet, as evidenced by the fact they left Ros out of the picture and showed just what happens when the brain box isn't included! Bad idea. Was Ros attending the event on HMS Belfast, docked in the Thames, purely for social reasons, or was she trying to build up contacts for the expansion of the Gizmos business? Actually, Gizmos never gets mentioned, though you can see they still operate out of the place. I'm not sure how often their company name ever does get spoken on screen again, to the extent that when it shows up in Season 4, headed by the other guy (Terry), you wonder what happened in between. An alternative title for the series could have been 'Gizmos,' though I prefer the one they used. The logo was great, and I especially love the wiring behind it, and the shot of what appears to be Beckett running with a briefcase in the outline of the letters - that could almost have come from this episode as we see him speeding from the offices of Cyberscope carrying a case, only he's wearing dark clothing and it's at night, and there's something about the shot in the logo that makes me think he's at an airfield. If it even is Beckett? You see, there's very little behind the scenes material on the series - a few magazine articles from the 90s - and I'd know, because I spent many hours in the 2000s researching as much as I could through magazines and the internet.
For example, I do know this was actually the first episode they shot, though it's the second one shown. It was written by Stephen Gallagher who was also a co-consultant on the series with Brian Clemens (creator of such 'BUGS' inspiration as 'The Avengers'), best known at the time for writing a couple of 'Dr. Who' stories in the 80s, and being an author. He's gone on to be something of a face for the series, even though it wasn't his baby, since everybody knows that he wrote the vast majority of the best episodes, and his absence in Season 4 (along with Craig McLachlan), really hurt its quality. I suppose because he was a Name, he was the one interviewed for the complete series box-set that came out in 2004 or 2005, and was reason enough to buy the collection even after collecting the individual sets as they came out. In fact, he's responsible for this very blog since in my researches I stumbled upon his own and kept up with it on a regular basis, so that when I became unemployed and wanted a new project to help keep me busy the idea of doing my own blog jumped out - once in a while (a long while), he even mentions 'BUGS' and has made some of his scripts available to download, which is very nice. But 'Assassins Inc' was the one he began with, and you can immediately see the Gallagher style that suited the series so well, to the extent that I often thought that it was his series on merit, and if it were ever to make a comeback he'd likely be the one given the task. That was quite a few years ago, back when he was running his own shows such as 'Eleventh Hour' (Patrick Stewart), or 'Crusoe,' and I'm not sure he's quite as active in the TV arena now, nor would it be likely the series would be revived (though I do have a good story about an almost-comeback in 2007 which I'll keep for another review).
It was deliberately intended to use cutting edge science and certainly in Gallagher's writing you get more of a sense of reality than some - cavity resonator bugs that turn your whole body into a microphone and transmitter… tiny flying drones tipped with fast-acting poison that can hunt you down based on specific genetic markers… voice-activated company hardware that seems to have some kind of AI interface like a 'Star Trek' computer… You can see the origins of Season 2's creepy antagonist, Cyberax, in the bank of screens with a silvery-blue three-dimensional model floating on screen, and the calm, quiet voice of the computer, but it may well be mere coincidence. The important factor is depicting a reality you can believe in, and long before we had drones, let alone tiny, fly-sized versions that home in on your scent, those flying darts were incredibly cool. They're well shot, and though you can wonder how such a streamlined model would move through the air at different speeds, rather than darting like an arrow, the imagery shown from the tiny onboard camera and its fisheye lens added immeasurably to the sense of panic and threat - witness the terrific shot as Ed, the intended target, shrinks away from it while the device itself is pulled slowly into a ventilation fan to its destruction! If only Ed had had the sense to get out of the way as soon as the thing had been sucked in he might not have had time to breathe in the poison, but then they needed his life to be in danger to add another layer of motivation.
It's questionable how Irene and her lawyer associate, Mr. Morasco, knew that the piece of trouser ripped from Ed's behind came from him, but somehow they do, as they've already tried to take out both Ros and Beckett with targeted sound-activated bombs. Again, these computer-mouse-sized devices were horribly creepy, though the 'Knight Rider'-esque 'breathing' LEDs on top were clearly there for viewer reaction only since you don't want anything to draw attention to such an unobtrusive killing machine. It makes a good case for having a second phone and a fax machine in your home, and an equally good case for not having an answer-phone, since that would have set off the explosion. Explosions are usually the series' stock in trade, but after we were treated to such a glorious bloom in the first episode, the much more contained blasts here came across as rather tame in comparison. Their use was also sometimes questionable, as in the case with the stuck-up Admiral Lansdale. The only reason he gets blown up is because he replies to Beckett as he opens his locker or enters a keycard, whatever he was doing on the bridge. But Beckett got him killed! If he hadn't been talking to Nick then he'd have been fine, which was a problem because how would the villains know he was going to speak at that point?
It's nice to see inside Ros' flat again back at The Circle, and we also get Beckett's place, though it's filmed in a way I couldn't tell if it was the same layout as in 'Out of The Hive.' Mystery man Ed, of course, does not get to show off his place of abode, but it's supposed to be a few floors up from Ros, so in this case it was unnecessary, though it's telling that once again he's the one we aren't given a chance to find out more about, just as in the first episode we learn the others' names, but Ed remains plain, simple Ed. Going back to the ethics of what the team do, there's starting to be a pattern showing through: we've had two episodes in which a man and a woman cause trouble with some technological device of some kind and then end up dead by the end of the episode! I remember reading in some article how they were keen to bring back what would become the series' classic villain, Jean-Daniel, for Season 2, and one of the rationales was that pretty much all the other villains had been killed! The Gizmos team may not carry guns (except in specific circumstances as shown at the end of the episode when Beckett pulls some kind of big monster flare gun - I thought he should have aped the classic 'Crocodile Dundee' line and said, 'that's not a gun, this is a gun!' but I suppose that would have been too derivative…), but they do seem to leave a wake of destruction behind them.
In fairness, just as with Cottrell and Elena in the first episode, it was the villains themselves who made the mistake and received poetic justice. But it remains to be said that if Irene truly thought Ros was bluffing, as she obviously did by holding up her own bomb in front of her and Morasco's face before speaking and activating it, why didn't she say something earlier? I get it, it was all done for effect and was becoming the hallmark of the series that the villains had to get blown up at the end, but Morasco certainly thought it was real. And for what it was worth, he was right! If they learn anything from the episode, it is that the team need Ros' wise head. Beckett may be the unofficial leader and Ros is usually happy to sit back and give him the authority, but she's the one with the knowledge. We see evidence of Beckett's quick temper again when he accosts Lansdale (nice touch that we get a hint at Beckett's past in the services when he says they met in Gibraltar, though he could have been making it up), grabbing his arm when the older man won't slow down and talk. "It doesn't sound much like respect to me," was a good line from the Admiral, who showed great disdain for surveillance work and the 'spy toys' that don't work half the time. It's evidence of an older generation's attitude to our current heroes' use of bugs and gadgets, not realising how technology was developing in leaps and bounds, an interesting little insight into the state of the art at that time, and the attitudes.
Technology isn't always as much in evidence as you might expect, however. For one thing, with all that CCTV at the offices of Cyberscope you'd think they'd have picked up Ed or Beckett on the inside, or the Cherokee Jeep speeding away when they make their getaway - the first part of that is easily answered as we know they made it so that all the security cameras would read the same (fortunately the guards played ball and weren't looking at the feed the moment it was changed!), and I suppose they could have done the same for the external views if there were some. The guards weren't up to much, especially when you consider they were from The Bureau of Weapons Technology, the organisation that Roland Blatty was heading up, Ros' friend from university days (where he couldn't even hold a chess club together, we hear). Mind you, Blatty's incompetence would become a bit of a theme, though it's unfair in this case as it's all the fault of our team making his life a headache. The Bureau's appearance is especially fascinating considering it would go on to play a crucial role in the following seasons and I love the building groundwork that had begun right with these first two episodes, though I doubt they knew they'd be returning to anything like that: both The Hive and The Bureau would come back in big ways, as would Roland, the first eventually-recurring character to be set up (excluding Dent). The world building is one of the attractive parts of the series as you didn't get a lot of that in the kind of series' 'BUGS' was inspired by, so they were adding a little 90s sophistication, or would be as it went on.
One thing I did wonder is the identity of Roland's boss, as he says he has to go and report in. Could it be that there was a 'Jan' even then? It's been so long since I watched the series that I can't even remember if the Season 3 character of Jan was new to The Bureau or had a history with it, but I have the feeling she was new as Alex was supposed to be the only surviving remnant of the organisation after the Cyberax incident at the end of Season 2, so it would seem unlikely. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of Jan there, but we'd never see him or her (obviously Jan Harvey's later portrayal was inspired by Judi Dench's 'M' in the Brosnan Bond era). I must admit I'd completely forgotten Blatty was in this episode - it's rather like Garak in Season 1 of 'DS9,' in one early episode then they forget him for over a year, and the same happened with the unfortunate Roland (who would surprisingly go on to be arguably the series' best villain in Season 3's 'Renegades,' coincidentally Gallagher's last script for the series, so he created and ended the character, which must have given him some satisfaction!). Here, we find out The Bureau is responsible for policing all exports of technology, among other roles, presumably, since Bureau 2, which the Gizmos team become, are a very different proposition and I don't remember them doing much about imports/exports!
It wasn't a very auspicious start for our fledgling team, but it is a good start for us, the viewers - we get classic crawling through air ducts (I thought for a moment Ed was going to precede Ethan Hunt's dangling down into an off-limits room, a year before the first 'Mission: Impossible' film was released, but he sensibly used a pole and a clip, though he didn't have to mess around with disk drives and the like as Hunt did), and Ed even adopts Ballantyne's catchphrase, 'May-be' in one of the opening scenes. There's more intentional hitting the zeitgeist with Cyberscope's cover (or at least the one Irene spins to Beckett - never trust a woman who wants to meet in a diner), as a computer games and hardware developer, with all this idea of a hedonistic approach to ideas generation - the staff have a room dedicated to pinball machines, jukeboxes, comics and fun and as Ed says, it's all about serious time-wasting here. Ralph, the unfortunate victim of Irene's policy of working them into the ground, made me think of the young dot-commers with the boom and bust of the young internet - making their millions in a short time then burning out. Except it wasn't games they were making but 'Tom and Jerry' ways to kill as Ralph puts it, as if it were game, seemingly his conscience giving him a breakdown. He doesn't seem that mentally broken, but then he keeps taking his medication and we do see signs of instability as he reacts with fright and makes ready to bolt when Ros and Beckett come running in.
It was notably discomfiting to see Ed hooked up to a ventilator and all that talk of a pheromone-specific virus and he feels fine until… he doesn't, in a time when we've seen a global pandemic in the covid virus - who could have imagined that a worldwide event of such magnitude would be coming back when this was being made! It's not quite the same thing, but as the shady 'Embassy Man' explains, it doesn't matter where the virus is released it will eventually reach its intended target as the whole world become carriers ("We can use the time to build cemeteries!" - another line that always stuck in my head, along with Irene's, "Good try, but nowhere near good enough"). In this case it's tailored to the royal line of the Regent in exile (name of country not given), the first victim of this diabolical plan, but as Ros notes, the possibilities of such a heinous technology are that it could be used as an ethnic cleanser, a topic of immediacy in the mid-90s, and even the shady guy admits that their ambitions go far beyond the controlling of a few dissidents, so who know where it would stop? 'BUGS' shows both the positive side of technology and its advances, but also the wicked side, the evil uses it can be put to, so there's a sense of justice inherent in the series that the team use tech to defeat those that would misuse tech.
There isn't a lot of time given over to the characters' lives, they seem to eat, sleep and breathe the job they have to do, and that was a deliberate choice not to get into that aspect, and yet you do get snatches of reality and the sense of life beyond. Little things like Ros showing up with a new car (a yellow one that would be around for a while), or the banter between the characters, which shows their easy friendship with each other. It's also good to see a sense of progression in terms of time - we get Ed and Beckett performing their task in the dead of night, while Ros is out at the HMS Belfast (which I've since visited myself and I believe I found the very room in which they filmed the Regent's assassination - the closest I've come to a 'BUGS' location!), then she wakes a bleary-eyed Beckett who's obviously had little sleep, for a bright and early start working for Roland. So it makes sense that later on what must be the same day, Beckett is almost taken out by the mouse bomb when he's at home having a nap. It all makes sense! There's also the impression that Beckett himself has had problems with things being tied up in a company that went bust as he speaks authoritatively on the subject to Ed, though he could have been putting it on to sound well-informed. Not everything made complete sense, though, with Irene and her staff all back in the Cyberscope building at one point - was that because The Bureau couldn't find any evidence? It was also amateurish of Bureau guards to set off the alarm and alert the intruders they'd been spotted as otherwise they could have snuck up on Ed and Beckett and collared them in the act, but then that would have become a different story!
It's also going into the realms of science fiction that Ros believes she can reconstruct the overridden, but incriminating data, from bits of old hard drives and a visual representation of a veritable 'city of tiny lights' - shall we see what happens when we merge them? It was probably a bluff, but you never know with Ros' expertise and it was all academic in the end anyway as Irene took herself and Morasco out of the picture. The highest priority was saving Ed's life, but surely they also wanted to tie Irene and her company together so she could stand trial. For that matter, although she and her nasty associate were taken care of, what about all the others who worked for her? There seemed to be a sizeable group gathered around earlier in the episode and presumably they were all involved in the creation of this unethical tech? But then, as Roland says, it's not illegal for them to make what they make, just the selling and exporting of it. You'd think they'd want to bring down the whole network of contacts she had in that case, but with only about fifty minutes to tell a story there's only so much you can deal with and I can imagine The Bureau following up on all that while the Gizmos team jump into the next adventure, no paperwork required. No wonder Blatty never seems too thrilled to be working with them…
****
Tuesday, 10 August 2021
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment