Down Among The Dead Men

 DVD, BUGS S1 (Down Among The Dead Men)

After 'All Under Control' used a full-sized passenger plane for its setting, this time they bring out a full-sized submarine, signalling their intent to put the money on the screen, and the impressive scale of their ambitions really comes through on the series. Stephen Gallagher is back for his second contribution writing for the series so it's well thought-out and is quite a technical story full of inter-bank transfers right down to fixing up an undersea pump. It's a good job all three of our team are well versed in their various disciplines, though this time there's no reversal of roles to cause added tension: Beckett is leading from the front, Ed gets to do the mechanical engineering, while I feel so much safer for them with Ros behind the tech - she's a really reassuring presence. Once again it seems her connections are what's getting them their jobs. It wasn't made clear as it was with Roland Blatty that they're old friends, but you can infer from the friendly interaction and first name terms, not to mention that Graham Hurry of Kamen & Ross, their employers in the story, risks his career to sneak her account access once they've been fired by his superiors, that they were on good terms. Always bet on Ros, that should be the motto, because she's got the experience in all this. I like how it's not immediately obvious and is a bold plan by the villains with every angle covered, and takes the puzzling of the whole team to come up with the solution.

Once again they're split up rather than all working together, Ros (in her bright yellow car and long pale yellow coat), is there acting for Kamen & Ross, liaising with Hurry, while Ed (switching to pale green), and Beckett (switching to pale blue), go on location as 'representatives' of their 'mate' McTiernan who they ostensibly served with in 1985 (as 'proved' by a cleverly mocked-up photo of the trio having fun back in the day), although you'd think Bryan Brody would be a trifle suspicious of them being out to avenge their friend's death rather than merely going along for the money. But then, whatever happened he intended to kill them and the sub's crew, so he didn't need to give it too much thought - how much easier not to have a conscience… As with the previous episode we continue with more naturalistic environments than the series would generally feature, what with McTiernan's shabby caravan on a wasteland under the Dockland's Light Railway in sight of Canary Wharf Tower, the docks, and the sea. Gallagher seems to revel in the kind of abandoned industrial areas ripe for killings and subterfuge, though they do seem a little out of place for the high-tech, futurist visual language we'd see eventually.

Things are a lot more messy and untidy, even the teaser (which once again excludes the team), is about creeping around in a naval graveyard as it seems, searching out required components by cadets. The naval setting and connections are a running theme, as with Gallagher's previous story, 'Assassin's Inc,' but oddly there isn't a reference to Beckett's past in the service this time Other than Ed saying he's supposed to be a sailor, but that could refer to their cover), even getting seasick, though covering it by saying even Lord Nelson suffered from that malady, so you know the episode is being written by someone with a knowledge of history as well as technical details. Also someone who isn't afraid of throwing the characters into uncomfortable positions - in this case that means getting wet. Getting wet a lot! Ed's the first to take a dive, but only into McTiernan's water tower where he hides out when McTiernan, holding out for more money, is paid in lead by ex-associate Juliet Brody, a lady that's so coolly murderous she makes it a habit of killing people with their own guns! A couple of thoughts on that sequence, which was good for moving the story along and establishing what kind of villains we're dealing with: was it really necessary for Bryan to lug the heavy McTiernan up that spindly ladder and dump him in the water tower, surely it would have been easier to chuck him in or under the caravan and set fire to it, or something? And Ed shows great naivety in thinking the mobile phone in his pocket would survive a dunking, but then he's often shown to be technologically lacking. Maybe it was a learning experience because later on, when he has his second ducking, Bryan trying to spray him with bullets at the fuel dump, he must have made sure his next phone was kept sealed in a watertight cover as we see him talking on it afterwards!

Beckett only gets soaked once, though he came very close to being shot through the heart in Gizmos when McTiernan overreacts, fortunately only copping a bullet in the battery of his bug - fortunate indeed that batteries were so big then! Actually, the 'battery' looked very much like the device used to connect Elverson to the plane in 'All Under Control,' so is it the same tech? Beckett's real woe is being trapped in a submarine while it floods, though I'd have thought his biggest immediate danger was electrocution as we see the computers go up in sparks as the water gushes in. I thought it was a little odd that Bryan mock-threatens him with a tiny wrench when he at first won't say his real name, but then it made a lot more sense later: that same wrench, left on the shelf in reach of his mouth wouldn't have been possible to be picked up in his teeth if it had been, say, the monster-sized one Ed used to fix up the pump! It's all academic anyway as he wasn't able to escape in the end - I thought he did, but I was remembering a similar scene from 'The Champions' - just goes to show how close to the old ITC productions the series is in reality, not just in spirit. Ed gets all wet for a third time when he dives from a Dutch ship to try and find the abandoned sub - interesting that they work with the authorities in this one as they're pretty much shown not to exist in this world most of the time, as evidenced by the fact that the British police or coastguard aren't around to help at all!

Also atypically, we see another map (another commonality with 'All Under Control'), which has real place names like Dover and Folkestone displayed on the satellite readout, so there's no ambiguity about the place though they never say where they are in dialogue. It's no surprise the British authorities aren't brought in when you consider that these are wealthy and successful companies they're dealing with (bankers Kamen & Ross; diamond merchants Jacobs Doyle), who pride themselves on their security, but show a complete lack of good sense: where are the guards down in the car park? Where's the silent alarm when Juliet is under suspicion in the vault? Just like the snobbish Admiral Lansdale in 'Assassins Inc,' Hurry's boss calls Ros' expertise 'spy games.' I wonder if that was intentional on Gallagher's part to bring in common themes or set up tropes? Probably not, I expect it just came out that way in the writing. He repeats another part of an earlier script (albeit 'Out of The Hive' wasn't his credit), with the final scene which is one of the silliest joke endings ever: before it was Ros being given a present of her crushed car, this time it's Beckett handed a goldfish to which he screams. I don't think he was serious, I think he was just playing along with their gag, but it did come across as a little over the top silly, just as when the sub first surfaces and Ed and Beckett are thrown around their launch in a most comical and cartoonish way - they obviously didn't go to the 'Star Trek' school of shaking about!

If the actual ending of the episode could best be described as 'goofy' (and in some ways they could almost be interchangeable from episode to episode), the build-up to the conclusion is terrific - Beckett trapped up to his neck in seawater, Ed trying to locate the sub, Ros on the phone trying to pass him a message… okay, it doesn't sound that exciting, but with Juliet cold-bloodedly shooting down anyone in her way in her bid to escape, saving the hotblooded murder for her about-to-be-dearly-departed husband, and the security guard Ros was thrown out by before coming to believe her story, it made a thrilling finale where you really feel the rising tension in the best 'BUGS' tradition. There's also a sense of the series' usual style from the high-end businesses and their fancy buildings, but also a greater impression of how far Ros would go for her friends - when Hurry expresses surprise at how dedicated she is to a job even after she's been fired she tells him she's doing it for Beckett, not the company. We still don't really know how the whole arrangement works: are Beckett and Ed employees of Gizmos or do they have part-ownership? Those kinds of details aren't important to the enjoyment of the stories, what is important are the friendships on display - you want to spend time with these people who risk life, limb and reputation, but can find time for lightheartedness along the way. Such as the running joke about ships and boats. You'd expect Beckett to know all about that sort of thing, but was Ed being serious when he seemed not to know a gunship was a helicopter? He's a helicopter pilot, so I reckon he was playing straight man and just being silly.

Beckett gets a good line when handing the wrench to Ed and bidding him fix the pump, telling him to think of it as a big motorbike, one that goes through very deep puddles. But seriously, I'm sure Ed is very savvy when it comes to nuts and bolts and that sort of thing. Beckett neatly takes the glory when the job's done! But despite all the joking about they were up against some stone cold killers this time. Then again, I suppose they pretty much always are, which makes you wonder how they get by without guns. But they do, using wits and expertise, they know when to make a move (Ros flinging herself rugby tackle style at the gun-toting Juliet), and when not to. There was only the one explosion this time, but it was spectacular as Bryan rather foolishly sets it off when trying to gun Ed down at the fuel dump, which could just as easily have taken out the sub itself! There weren't a lot of stunts involved, but it was much more of a mental story - geographical, too, as they're in various places that give the story a wider scope than sticking to the city, but the tech they use tends to be more conventional stuff like bugs and trackers, lock-breaking gadgets and computing, so they weren't going out of their way to pull out bizarre technology, and that helped to keep it grounded, though it also doesn't give it a sense of being in the near future. The more I think about it, the more I see that as Season 2's exclusive mandate, with the others welcoming the natural environment more. Maybe that's why Season 2 wasn't as popular, but was my favourite?

It's very important in something like this that you have villains that are capable of providing a strong enough challenge to make the heroes look good, and the Brody's, an evil married couple, were among the best. The man and woman pairing had been done in the first episode and effectively repeated in the second, but they were even more nasty in this one. Surprisingly, Juliet is one of the few villains to survive and possibly the best villainess of the series, Bryan being executed in revenge by her good self - she could have returned to plague the team again if they'd wanted to bring her back, but she never made a return (I didn't really know Miss Lemon from 'Poirot' when I saw this, but I can never see her as a pleasant, helpful lady because of this!). Both Kamen & Ross and Graham Hurry did have a small return in Season 4, though Hurry was played by a different actor, one with a bit more hair, oddly! The series continues to show an ability for deftness in building up action and boiling over with tension, not to mention concentrating on outdoor locations as much as internal, which always makes it harder to shoot on a TV series. But they were only making ten episodes a year, which is pretty much what big US dramas do now, while UK dramas tend to be even shorter. Just imagine what it would have been like if 'BUGS' had been doing the US standard of its day and banging out twenty-plus episodes at a time. Oh well…

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