Pulse

DVD, BUGS S1 (Pulse)

Other than for the fact of Jean-Daniel's introduction, this doesn't feel like a big end of season story, but it wasn't meant to and was written as merely another episode. I wonder if they'd known what they'd do for Season 2 whether they'd have finished on some kind of cliffhanger - I was actually thinking when JD shows up at Gizmo's to tear up the place with his weapon of choice, a shoulder-mounted bazooka, and we see Beckett lying unresponsive, that would have been such an effective way to end the season. It would have had to have come later in the episode since that's how he becomes JD's prisoner, brought into the very nerve centre of the French villain's lair, the man defeated by his own overconfidence. But stick that at the end somehow instead of the cartoonish glue gun finale, leave Gizmos in tatters and Beckett on the floor, while this scary bad guy is free and out for revenge and that would have been very effective. Of course that would have meant a complete rewrite of Season 2, not just the opening, but the whole prison sequence, unless you have the team capture him at the beginning of the season, then put him in prison and we follow the existing plot from there, but then it might have been anticlimactic if he'd had to be dealt with twice. Still, it's fun to speculate on what is the turning point of the series, a moment which largely set the tone for what the series would be for the next couple of years, even if Season 3's inspiration was much more slight.

I'd forgotten that Stephen Gallagher was also responsible for the creation of Jean-Daniel, but I can see the signs of his black humour interfacing with the eccentric Britishness of 'The Avengers' perhaps more than in any of the previous episodes. The fact that he introduces JD mutely, the man doesn't speak until a good way into the episode, yet he's so expressive in the manner he meticulously dresses and moves while also toting such an atypical weapon. Or that he's such a big man, but wears these dinky half-moon spectacles through which he peers at screens. He just oozed confidence and control from the first moment we saw him - in a position of servitude, but outsized for this role of chauffeur and with a menace from his contrasting body language and disinterested expression, the way he rudely thrusts the briefcase into Neville's arms, or shoves him along when they walk down the long corridors of Computer Recall. You can just tell Gallagher had fun writing both him and his brother Patrick, so suave and threatening in a different way. The only time Anton Lesser's character doesn't work so well is when he's reduced to a lackey, prepping the HGV, shouting at Clare, and just generally behaving like a mindless heavy, when before he'd exuded so much sophistication and personal menace. And he does come across as rather stupid in the end when he stands in the path of the missiles' exhaust, which made me think of Dr. Soran in 'Star Trek: Generations' (I really hoped JD would get back to the control centre and shout at Beckett to 'get away from the console!').

In keeping with the best villains of the season, Elena and Cottrell (there's even a similar scene where JD finds the camera on the briefcase and snuffs it out like the poppy cam), Irene Campbell, and Juliet Brody, the pair of brothers here relish the cruelty and toying with their victims, which is why it's so much nastier to see that they're holding Clare's young daughter Katie hostage. It doesn't work quite as well as it might have since the young actress, while fine for the role, generally seems quite unconcerned and there's never any scene of her being in immediate danger (you can also see she's enjoying the experience when working with Ed or Beckett!). I imagine JD simply overawed her with his presence rather than pitching her over his shoulder and marching off. Perhaps a simple sober threat to her Mother was all it took for compliance, but it is odd to see the brothers go to the trouble of bringing milk and dinosaur biscuits (oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo, to quote Ed!), for her when they don't appear to be very caring types. Actually, I could imagine Patrick getting quite exasperated with a child, especially as he's a man who likes fine things such as paintings, sculptures ("your milk, your dinosaur biscuits" - maybe they really were his guilty pleasure!), and might not have been suited to having a captive child around. If Katie had been more precocious (though I'm glad she wasn't), she might have given him the runaround until JD came in and stopped everyone in their tracks, but again, it's just fun speculation for what might have been.

Ed seems to know a lot of people, and this Clare, a woman that seemingly runs Weapon Works, a company specialising in nonlethal weaponry imports, singlehandedly out of an office, is apparently someone he's known for a long time. They don't seem to have seen each other for some time as he didn't know her daughter, who was around eight I'd guess, but it would have been nice to fill in a little bit of his background in this regard - this is one of those things that stayed the same through Season 1, where they were trying not to give the characters depth beyond their immediate personality in order to keep things light, but this is one of those instances which demonstrate why it can add tension and drama to a story, because if we had known more about Clare and how they knew each other it would give her more sympathy. Instead, she doesn't trust Ed enough to think he can help get her kidnapped daughter back, and being an impulsive, independent woman, she chooses to do it all herself. If Ed hadn't come along when she prepares to storm the Computer Recall offices alone with only the famous glue gun for company, she'd probably have been pasted all over the forecourt! This is another example of the police not existing, too, as JD could have informed the authorities that a mad woman was assaulting his premises with a gun and she'd have been carted off, but then again she'd have been forced to tell them her daughter was being held, bringing everything down on JD, and why didn't she simply go to the police in the first place? We're back to the impulsive independence again.

In colour terms Clare seems to have taken the place of Ros, with her bright red suit standing out quite strongly, but Ros actually gets to be both the stylish sophisticate (a la the diplomatic party on HMS Belfast in 'Assassins Inc'), and a lorry driver, grinning broadly as she ploughs the cab into the lobby of Computer Recall! She also knows how to decouple a trailer and shows no hesitation in leaping aboard the moving HGV (though you can tell it's a stunt man as he doesn't run anything like that awkward gait that signified Ros!), as Patrick drives it away, clinging on until she can slice her way into the back in an attempt to prevent the launch of these pulse missiles that will wipe out computer systems in Geneva and London, so she really gets to excel. The only disappointment is that the team don't get to work together as much, which I always prefer. Ed (in blue), is more often with Clare, and Beckett (in red), is off on his own, liaising with Newsoms Coachbuilders and Lena, the apparent supervisor there. I suppose this does make the team more vulnerable and forced into improvising as they go, such as Ros keeping Patrick talking until the launch so he gets blasted out of the back of the trailer instead of killing her, or Ed squeezing into the drop-off point at Computer Recall, conveniently the size for a man to fit! Other issues are that there only appear to be two companies involved in the plan to build the pulse launcher, Newsoms and Weapon Works, when the impression was that the Marcels (if that is their surname), were buying up various minnows, although the building project was only part of the plan, they were taking big and small companies' data so they could destroy the big ones and own the small.

I'd also like to know how they managed to get camera visuals of the missiles, was that supposed to be zoomed in imagery from satellites? And wouldn't countries detect such missiles in their airspace? There's a bit of an error in another visual, too, though it wouldn't have been spotted if not for the DVD age of pausing and perusing frames: when they hold up various criminal records they have Jean-Daniel's picture (in Foreign Legion garb - he left as it was too easy), but Patrick Marcel's name underneath, a bit of a booboo. It looks like Patrick's first name was actually Clement if 'Prenom' means first name, as I'd assume it does. I've always thought that both brothers' surname was Marcel, but it was never confirmed in the series at any point and we only ever heard of JD as Jean-Daniel. Another naming mystery comes with Gizmos, which looked like it could have been an excuse to move to new premises (as they did for Season 2), except that they chose to set the usual tag scene there, with the place back to normal - did Clare show up for a DIY party to get the place back into shipshape as a thank you for what they did for her? Except they're all sitting around drinking tea out of china cups and eating little fancies off a multi-tiered cake stand, which doesn't fit with overalls and paint rollers, plus they're all in normal clothes, so when did Gizmos get fixed (perhaps Clare paid for it to be done up and this was after that?). But about the name: when Ed goes there after the attack he never says 'Gizmos,' just that the place is a bomb site. I find it strange they never mention the name of the company as if they don't use it, yet it's the same place as the company Ros was running at the start of the series!

Another issue is the identity of their client - they've always had a client, aside from the first episode when they were trying to clear Beckett's name and Ed wanted to find out what had happened to Ballantyne, but we never actually get someone fronting an organisation that has employed Ros and the team, it's like they're just doing it out of curiosity. Until Ed learns he knows the woman from Weapon Works, and Lena agrees to work with Beckett after her boss, Mr. Newsom, is blown up in his own office. I will say they did a good job with the effects work, though at the same time, seeing it on DVD and a big screen, you can spot certain things that show the cracks: when JD first lets rip with the bazooka, you can see the 'projectile' is run along a line towards the victim, though it's fairly well disguised by all the sparks and smoke. You can tell the frontage to Computer Recall is false just by the fact it's a completely different colour and material to the rest of the building, but again, it's well disguised and you'd never guess they were planning to ram an HGV cab through it, which was done most effectively. Similarly, you can tell the office section at Newsoms was built within this warehouse to be blown up, as it was, but that's the most realistic since you would get something like that. The bazooka blasts could have been more dramatic as they didn't quite give the impression of an explosive that would rip apart man and tree, leaving no trace. Even when Gizmos is attacked I got the impression the effect was mainly achieved with a blast of fans and debris thrown in the air rather than actual explosions, which is a shame because we know how well they could do those.

While I like the sequence where Beckett and Katie creep around the mainframe room while JD hunts them, that was the only moment it didn't seem appropriate for the bazooka since it's not really a close quarters weapon and all Beckett had to do was run for it, and by the time the shell was ready to launch, he'd be out of the target zone - JD even says he needs to put in the range, size of target and such before he can fire, but it was like they were mesmerised to the spot. Not the least, I feel Beckett could have attacked JD himself. The difference to normal was that he had the little girl to protect, so he probably didn't feel free to go in fighting. He seemed good with children, although obviously Ed was the more fun since he's just a big kid himself. Only Ros would be the sort not to be as good at entertaining children, I feel, as she's the only fully grown up one and wouldn't want her gadgets being tampered with, though she doesn't mind Katie being on the upper level when she's taping Beckett to an office chair! I like the hint of something bad coming when they talk about the brothers grim being out to do something very specific that they haven't yet worked out, and Patrick mentioning a 'small contribution to the grand design' when he's getting potential business partners on board gives a sense of looming threat to the story.

In the end perhaps it wasn't such a dramatic event, though if successful would have crippled the businesses of two major financial centres and sent the Marcels' interests skyrocketing, and we wouldn't want them having any more power than they did. It's interesting that they were talking about computer systems being connected to the net and backing up automatically every twenty-four hours - I wonder if this was actually possible in 1995 or if it was extrapolation from Gallagher. Not that the files would have been very large in those days, but it's fascinating to think how much has changed in computing in a quarter of a century, while still being recognisable today. It seemed like they'd finally moved on from floppy disks when Patrick gives Beckett a CD and it feels like a whole new generation of technology, but we do see the humble floppies again when Ed takes a briefcase of backups to Computer Recall for its secure data archiving service. If the series had been created a year later I suspect they'd have only ever used CD-ROMs, but it was made in an interesting moment in technological history, where things were just about to transition, and yet everything looks very dated in Season 1. Obviously that's true for every season and anything that ever shows computers at all since they're always becoming more powerful inside and sleeker on the outside, but even in comparison to the other seasons I feel like the first was of another era.

That makes it fascinating to watch from a different perspective as Ros is so advanced and is yet dealing with such old tech, but sometimes even the most basic idea can seem quite revolutionary, such as the one about moving the phone handset closer to the computer screen so it can pick up the radiation. It sounds like sci-fi to be able to convert that into a readable signal which can be picked up and decoded with 'the right box of bits' down the phone line, but it was believable to me as a layman and seemed like a very plausible concept. I feel such concepts would only increase after this, but also they were more comfortable in the idea that the series was set just a little bit further into the future so they could get away with stretching tech further than reality, and the series definitely had a different tone in Season 2. It didn't get much bigger than actually having a space walk for Ed in the opening two-parter, a multi-episode story a new idea for the series in itself, so they were clearly interested in expanding the series and not standing still. While Season 1 feels like it could be 'today' (back then), after this it took a more vague approach to location and time, so I'm expecting Season 2 to seem a little more timeless in comparison. I kept track of some of the series' tropes, so here they are, the summing up of Season 1: 35 explosions, 10 countdowns, and 20 deaths on screen. Quite a collection! It's been lovely to return to a series I'd long meant to and I'm fully anticipating jumping straight into Season 2, my favourite and the year I started watching on original transmission.

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