I spent the evening watching coverage of one of the day's bigger news stories unfolding and couldn't help seeing its echo in Close Up. Frankly, this episode baffles me, all the more for having been written by Tony Barwick.
Straker has a new plan to stoke his passions for, a probe satellite that takes images not by conventional camera but by electron telescope. He wants to lure a UFO close enough to send the probe after it back to the aliens' home world. Everything goes swimmingly until...well, until the final minutes of the episode. Really, that's it. The A-plot of Close Up is a procedural that takes us from trial tests through funding to implementation. While this is a major step forward for SHADO and promises tantalizing discoveries for the audience, its telling is fairly dull. This is the first of three major problems.
BTW, I did a lazy-fast search on electron telescopy and couldn't find anything. I'm guessing it was still an exciting theory back in 1970, so maybe I shouldn't be too harsh...still, from the photographs that Straker and company were oohing and aahing over I have to say they didn't strike me as all that impressive. Conventional spy satellites were already projected to yield more breathtaking results. In color, while we're at it.
The second problem is plausibility. UFOs travel at FTL speeds, which we know the probe cannot. I've grown up on filmed sci-fi entertainment and have learned to put up with non-science nonsense, and it's often not easy. When a show violates its own established rules, it makes things unnecessarily harder. We might also wonder why the aliens would not spot a tail, but I'm not overly fussed with that (perhaps they hibernate on the voyage between solar systems). At story's end we find it's all been for naught as the craft's telemetry has malfunctioned, failing to provide crucial information with which to measure the images it sends back. Yet, the images are crystal clear, and one wonders that technicians could not reconstruct the missing info from the original programming: distances from the planet at which the scanning was meant to begin, speed of the craft, etc. Really, none of the photos have any worth?
That's quite an expensive gamble, too, that the UFO thwarted from its path will give up easily and just run off home instead of hanging around out of range for another go. We've seen them do that often enough. SHADO may have trouble appropriating funds, apparently that's pocket change to these aliens.
There area few nice things here of note, foremost being the fx work - not just the models. There's a launch sequence that meticulously recreates genuine rocket launches that were still an exciting staple of popular TV at the time. FX master Derek Meddings was probably responsible for this and would go on to perfect the immaculate launch fakery in Moonraker - the final element being the blinding glare of the rocket fire.
It's the third problem that drops my rating. The B-plot, where I think the real story might have been intended. The human factor, as Straker himself alludes to in one of several awkward scenes involving a bewildered Lt. Ellis. I'm not sure if even Gabrielle Drake knew how her character was supposed to react to Commander Straker's speeches most of the time. What are we supposed to make of them?
Sigh. Okay. Let's back up. The ep's "human factor" begins with a technician developing the satellite who pleads with Straker for funding to develop micro-photography, insisting that it could be applied to space research. Straker is unimpressed and unsupportive. At least he doesn't verbally backhand the guy - he'll save that for Ellis after her diligent work. He just can't help himself. He's got to put her in her place, a woman and beneath him.
Now, this is fully in keeping with his character as we've come to know him, and as previously written by Barwick...but it comes out of nowhere in the middle of this story that had not hinted at being a character piece. The look on Gabrielle Drake's face is wonderful acting, Ellis' humiliation and shock. I felt it with her. It's an ugly moment. I felt something I've not felt before from UFO: uncomfortable. We've just shifted gears; where is this going?
I still cannot answer that. What did Barwick intend to do with this? Straker has been set up for a humbling that never comes. He realizes almost immediately that he has put his foot in it, but - again according to character - assumes that Ellis faults herself rather than his own chauvinism. Okay, here's my big problem - I'm not sure that Barwick doesn't think so too.
Coming from Barwick, that's upsetting. He's the guy whose scripts have deftly pointed out more than once that Straker's smug superiority is partially based on an ignorance of others' experiences (his insistence that racism has died out, for example). We've seen him patronize SHADO's female personnel in the same sentence as he's applauding equality in the workplace. So why is it that Ellis is the one treated by this script as needing a lesson? Oy, and what a lesson!
"You're doing a fine job, Gay.", Straker tells her. "A man's job." Oof. Just stop there. "You don't have to do it any better because you're a woman." No, really, stop digging. "And don't ever forget a very attractive girl."
The forehead slap due here should leave a bruise.
I cannot read the look on her face. I honestly think even Drake didn't know how to play a reaction. She seems to want out of the scene every bit as much as Ellis does. And so did I. Almost immediately we have another scene in which Straker addresses the entire Moonbase staff but singles Ellis out for direct bit of fatherly reassurance - or maybe it's another rebuke. Her body language says "okay, whatever, I don't get it." It might not have been acting.
Seriously, what the hell? I don't get it. Whatever Barwick was aiming for, he failed to communicate it. The coda should provide a clue, as Straker is treated to a demonstration of micro-photography. Ellis participates in a trick that fools him into thinking that he is looking at the surface osf the alien homeworld but turns out to be Ellis' bare thigh. This takes place back on Earth, yet Ellis is wearing her embarrassingly revealing Moonbase uniform. Again, if Barwick is trying to be pointed he fails to nail it down. At any rate, the tech gets his funding and Ellis gets no recognition from Straker that he is a misogynist ass.
The episode was something I didn't expect from UFO, a little queasy. It didn't get better in retrospect as the antipathy toward women of another socially stunted manchild filled the news cycle. I give it 3 lovingly crafted miniatures, which might still be too generous.
Asides:
a nice editing choice when we see the gray-green alien world s the probe approaches it, the soundtrack gives us the same music cue that accompanies that world's entrance to the weekly closing credits sequence.
When Straker speechifies at the coda and natters on about all matter consisting of "billions" of particles, it put me in mind of another turtle-necked pop scientist. I half-expected Straker to declare that "we are all made of starstuff."
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