Gold Rush

DVD, BUGS S2 (Gold Rush)

'Serious science' is a phrase used by Beckett at one stage in this one, and that sums up the episode quite neatly. 'Cool bananas' is a phrase used by Ros at one stage, too, but that doesn't sum up the episode, it's just a fun line that she'd either said before, or would say again. It didn't quite become a catchphrase, but it's just the sort of thing you'd expect to come from her mouth. Beckett's wording is the appropriate one as this is heavy on the sci in sci-fi and I was impressed at how much detail they were able to get across to the audience, complex descriptions and concepts bandied about between the action that I'm pretty sure you would not see in Saturday evening entertainment now. And probably not then either - it's not like 'BUGS' was the vanguard (hee, hee), for scientific discussion. But in this case the writers really put the effort in to make things sound right, much in the same way Trek always used to. Technobabble is the word and the series often included it, just perhaps not quite as much as this episode boasts. There's also what I took to be some unintentional foreshadowing, setting up a concept vaguely close to what would be the big ending of the season when they talk about this computer virus has jumped the digital moat Ros has erected around the defenceless data of their client - it sounded very much like Cyberax jumping the species barrier, as we'd find out in a few episodes, and the idea of an airborne computer virus was genius and also heralds a further link between the physical, organic world our team operate in, with the shadowy digital one of computers.

That wouldn't have been their intention, Cyberax may not even have been invented yet (I'd love to know if it was part of the season's plan from the start, but we'll never know), and if it had been meant as a primer to prepare us for that idea it would have been a lot more obvious. Just like the way the subtlety is lost in the Jean-Daniel scene with the Prison Governor as they sit in his office and share cake: the Governor actually says outright that JD is an inspiration for his forgiveness of 'those three' who put him there and that he bet on their success, which is what he's been doing the whole time. I suppose with hindsight I've watched the episodes so many times that I know what's going on and there was no need in the early episodes to explain it like that, but in retrospect it may have been needed, may have been too subtle for viewers, especially if they missed an episode here or there so I can understand why they'd make it clear. I just loved the fact that before it was so nuanced and about interpretation. In any case they add some new mystery into the mix with JD's thermometer of doom portending big things will happen when his investments reach the top goal and the final shot of the episode is exactly that happening. It makes you really want to find out what's going to happen next (one of my favourites), when the prison scenes had been such a slow burn, although this was only the fourth episode to actually feature this serialised part of the story.

As we'd seen before, the team carry on unaware that their moves are actually earning their nemesis a means to power (despite the bonkers way the end result would be achieved!), it's only the audience who are given the extra layer of intrigue on top of everything else. We're thrown right into the story once again after the opening credits with the team striding into the Eastern European Monetary Commission, an outfit headed by the straight talking Vanguard in her striking red suit and blonde hair, a woman who has a lot of responsibility on her hands with the economies of several countries, but isn't very practical when it comes to computers and technical things, which is realistic - you'd expect her to delegate realms outside her expertise to experts. One question is why she didn't call in the security consultants who are tied to the EEMC and who keep a key to the vault off-site. How did she know to call in Gizmos (as they never call themselves), this is an instance where there's no friend in the company whom Ros or Beckett know (Ed almost never seems to have any friends!), so they must advertise well? Direct mailings? Email? Cold calling? We don't need to worry how the business works, the important thing is that the team are all present and correct, ready to power up their skills in the service of good, and they do start by impressing their client, getting through the voiceprint authorisation with no hassle at all, though it's a different story when Ros fails to stop the progress of the virus.

Did Pyke and Kristo, this week's money mad villains (they should have teamed up with Pascal and Lacombe from 'Blackout'!), buy their virus carrier from Cyberscope? It certainly looks like the little metal mouse bombs that could climb up the inside of walls and were activated by a target's voice to explode. This one is a tasteful shade of green, unleashing its payload of gold-eating gas by wickedly spreading its little wings. It could have been a Cyberscope design (and in real terms was likely a repurposed prop from 'Assassins Inc' as we'd seen them reuse several gadgets so far), but we don't need everything to connect to something we'd already seen as things can become ridiculous. Still, I wouldn't have minded someone wondering if the tech had been modelled on one of those designs, a little throwaway suggestion, perhaps. Another little throwaway that probably was entirely unintentional was that the colours on the Network Status screen that represented stages of the EEMC's data security corresponded with the team's main clothing colours! I only noticed this because I'm paying so much attention to what they wear each episode (Ros had some more interesting earrings), but Beckett had a green shirt and on the screen that stood for 'operational,' Ed wore his usual blue jumper and blue meant 'de-coupled,' while irony of ironies considering her heroic roles, Ros wore a red dress and on the screen red meant 'failure'! So I don't think we can read too much into that, it must have been mere coincidence, though Ros' antigen is also red… but it didn't fail.

It's fun to look out for odd little details like these or spot reflections of other episodes: Pyke, the blue suit-wearing villainess, partner of Maximillian Kristo, uses a brooch or lapel pin as a clever disguise for a communications device, just as our team would sometimes use. Then there's the switch-around of Beckett's driving being joked about at his expense by Ros for a change (he asks if she wants to drive and she says she would, but he needs the practice!). And don't forget, while they didn't reference Cyberscope, they certainly did bring back one previously used company from Season 1: JBS Security. This was the company Ed and Beckett used as cover so they could get into Hennessy Brock's building in 'Manna From Heaven,' only this time it's inverted, the villain using it as cover to get into the EEMC (which when I first saw it I thought looked like the Bureau building from Season 3), and surprise Ros and Vanguard, so that was a fun little connection. This time Ros ends up as the one at the switchboard of doom, Ed's trapped in the vault and Beckett is the one being the action man as he has to get down a tunnel full of noxious gases - now all three of them have crawled through air ducting in at least one episode! Last time it was Ed at the control station while Ros had the action down a tunnel, so I like how they switch things around from episode to episode, no one having a set responsibility that they always have to maintain as their role.

Another inversion is in the trope of the bad guy being caught as part of his plan. It wasn't a trope then, as far as I'm aware, but in the last decade or so it's become tiresomely familiar (the Joker in 'The Dark Knight,' Silva in 'Skyfall' and Loki in 'Avengers Assemble' to name a few high profile examples), but here, instead of the villains allowing themselves to be caught, they booby-trap Ed's recorder from when he infiltrates their Bio Gro facility as 'Dr. Russell' from the Biohazard Safety Council, and allow him to escape from the back of their van so when he enters the gold vault they can unleash the gas and infect the reserves. A clever plan, and one in which you see the cold, clever mind of Kristo at work. Pyke isn't quite as intelligent as him, there are a couple of times when she's about to do something and he stops her. For example she's not sure if 'Dr. Russell' is genuine so Kristo tells her to test him, then when they catch Ed out and decide to kill him because he knows too much she's all ready to pull the trigger until Kristo says not to do it there. This could have all been part of the ruse to convince Ed he was being carted off to a secure location to be killed, but it could just as easily have been all planned in Kristo's mind and he didn't reveal what they were actually going to do until they were on the road. He may be the sensible one, but he also demonstrates a fearsome streak of violence, as when he roars at Pyke's death (I think we can assume she hadn't survived the explosion from the giant pressure cooker), and pushes up the security shield over the door with brute strength.

There's also the confrontation with Ros and Vanguard in the EEMC security control room. He's clearly angry, Ros has already bested him once, escaping with her antigen. He's not thinking straight because you'd expect him to be a better shot than what he manages, firing wildly round the room, missing both Ros and Vanguard. I didn't quite see how the thing with the gas cylinder came to be: we see Vanguard uncouple it to use as a weapon, but instead of attacking Kristo, she shouts to Ros, who I thought had been the other side of the room, but who has somehow made it to Vanguard's side where she can grab the cylinder and use it as a weapon to batter Kristo with! She accidentally knocks him onto the fizzing electrics he'd previously shot up, electrocuting him (much like Hex in 'A Sporting Chance'). So Ros killed both villains singlehandedly this time, she's getting a bit of a record in that regard - I wonder if she marks them off as notches on the edge of her computer monitor? Ros still doesn't seem quite as relaxed and herself as she did in Season 1 and I wondered if maybe it was the clothing they made Jaye wear? Maybe she didn't feel it fitted with the character as much, who knows, but sometimes she's seemed more Ros-like than at others. I don't know, it's difficult to describe, but she has generally seemed more remote than before while the two guys have been exactly the same.

Ed gets to almost be James Bond, although he doesn't have the ruthless streak that MI6 operative has, he isn't into killing people (not like Ros is, apparently!). But superficially at least - he wears the tuxedo in his role as Dr. Russell, effecting a more upper class accent, but it's on the top of the van and climbing down the ladder on its rear that it's most striking. Whenever I see a van with a ladder on the back it always makes me think of 'BUGS' for this exact scene! I wondered if the guy, Dench, who shows Pyke round at the EEMC at the start  as if she's come for a job, was a tribute to Judi Dench who had made her mark as 'M' in 'Goldeneye' the previous year and would return the following year for 'Tomorrow Never Dies'? They certainly had the gadgetry of the Bond films of the past - although there are no tasers this time, Pyke prefers nonlethal darts, and I thought, at least she'd done that instead of killing Dench, unlike Pascal in the previous episode who just killed the guide right away. But then she rolled an explosive at him which blew him to shreds (like JD using his bazooka on the guy in 'Pulse'), so she wasn't so ethical after all! Kristo prefers a handgun. Ros' goggles were the standout piece of tech this time - they seemed to have dual functionality, if that's possible, since they were clearly night vision for use in low light, yet she could also see an infrared beam which she has to step over. And she actually has an argument with one door-opening gadget that refuses to play ball!

The real gadgetry hardware is in the vault, as Ed finds to his detriment. I don't know if it was intentional, but we see a bright white room for the Bio Gro lab, with such strong contrast you can't see the walls at all, which lights everyone in it as if they're out in the snow, then we have the exact opposite with a completely black room for the vault, though it's a shiny, reflective blackness. It's here that Ed encounters a live action computer game that has a licence to kill: him. The threat detectors, Motion Detection and Disabling Units, or MDDUs, to add another acronym (MDDU, EEMC, they weren't shying away from being technical and these names only added to the sense of complication!), were Ed's worst nightmare since they mean he has to move around at a snail's pace, not something he'd ordinarily be good at. Each time he outfoxed one of them it was like the 'game' went to the next level: escape out of the view of one of these guns (probably a high-powered taser as it fired an energy beam from its nozzle), and another one comes down from the other side of the ceiling, level two. Use one of the guns to blast the other and you think you're safe and another gun comes down, level three… I thought he was going to get the guns to detect each other's motion and destroy themselves, but it would make more sense that their location and movement would be part of their programming so they couldn't damage each other, and Ed grabs one to blast the other instead. They certainly were given character with the nozzle part like a face, and this growling noise being emitted, unless that was Ed's stomach rumbling!

Ed wasn't given much help by his colleagues in the episode, it must be said - he gets stuck in the vault while Beckett and Vanguard dash for the exit, and earlier, when Ros said she'd cover for him when Pyke comes to test him, she lets him act as if the nonsense Pyke was spouting was something he knew about so it's too late to pretend he is an expert! Thanks, guys… In the important ways, however, they once again show great faith and trust in each other: Ros has a terrible decision to make, letting rip with the antigen in the vault to save the gold of all these nations, while risking Ed's death, she says to herself, 'don't let me down, Beckett,' then has to do what must be done. And he didn't let his friends down, they save Ed, save the gold and even get Vanguard to replace the gold ring Ros lost to the virus earlier. About that ring: where did it come from, who gave it to her? I don't think she'd ever worn it before, so was this a gift from Alex, the guy in 'Blackout' who she was special friends with? I have other questions, too: where did the oxygen and mask come from that Beckett dons to crawl through the toxic gas pipe? Vanguard just strides in lugging all this diving equipment as if they keep it in a locker just in case and it did make me laugh from the matter of fact way she carried it in. And JD's sentence is supposedly one hundred and forty years! That seems a little harsh, and can a Governor really petition it to be cut in half? There was even a rare production flaw as you just see the boom mic drop into shot when they enter the vault for the first time. Whoops!

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