This episode opens aboard a flight from Tripoli to Marseilles where a stewardess approaches passenger Jules Meyer and tells him that the man expected to meet him will not do so. He immediately starts to panic and forces his way on to the flight deck and tells the captain that somebody is going to kill him but he has no idea who. It turns out the person who sent the message was Steed; Meyer is an agent carrying a sample of a new rocket propellant known as 'Propellant 23'; Steed turns up to take possession of the propellant but Meyer dies before he can tell Steed where it is. We know it is in a bottle and see two people take bottles from the scene; a drunken hotel worker takes Meyer's hip flask and a policeman takes a bottle of hair restorer and gives it to a bald colleague
It will be up to Steed and fellow agent Cathy Gale to track down the bottles before the opposition and before the people who took them use the contents.
This is a solid early episode of the 'Cathy Gale era' Avengers. The story get off to a good start aboard the aircraft Meyer's concerns about being murdered are intriguing given the small number of possible killers on board. Once they are on the ground and Meyer has dies thing only get more interesting as not only are we wondering who the bad guys are, although it isn't hard to guess, and there is the question of which bottle contains the propellant and whether it will be found in time. Those more familiar with the widely repeated 'Emma Peel' and 'Tara King' era shows may be surprised that this is a fairly serious story without the surreal edge of later stories; it still has some humour though; mostly provided by the airport police. Patrick Macnee did a fine job as Steed, as one might expect, and Honor Blackman impresses as Cathy Gale. The rest of the cast are pretty good too. There are a couple of things that seemed a little off; the airport seemed very small for a city the size of Marseilles and all characters spoke unaccented English whether they were meant to be English, French speaking English or French speaking French these details were fairly minor though. Overall an enjoyable episode.
This is a solid early episode of the 'Cathy Gale era' Avengers. The story get off to a good start aboard the aircraft Meyer's concerns about being murdered are intriguing given the small number of possible killers on board. Once they are on the ground and Meyer has dies thing only get more interesting as not only are we wondering who the bad guys are, although it isn't hard to guess, and there is the question of which bottle contains the propellant and whether it will be found in time. Those more familiar with the widely repeated 'Emma Peel' and 'Tara King' era shows may be surprised that this is a fairly serious story without the surreal edge of later stories; it still has some humour though; mostly provided by the airport police. Patrick Macnee did a fine job as Steed, as one might expect, and Honor Blackman impresses as Cathy Gale. The rest of the cast are pretty good too. There are a couple of things that seemed a little off; the airport seemed very small for a city the size of Marseilles and all characters spoke unaccented English whether they were meant to be English, French speaking English or French speaking French these details were fairly minor though. Overall an enjoyable episode.
