Phantom of the Opera (Robert Markowitz, 1983, TV movie)

Who  would've guessed that the opera ghost can't carry a tune?

The setting is Budapest, circa early 20th Century - we are not told when, but Bartok is considered a young man of promise.  Elena Korvin sings Marguerite in Faust.  She hasn't the disciplined talent or voice for it but is encouraged by her doting husband Sándor, who is the opera's conductor.  Also keeping her in employment is the opera house's owner, the lecherous Baron Hunyadi.  After a disastrous opening night, Elena is further hit by a scathing review paid for by the Baron as retribution for spurning his advances.  She throws herself from a bridge.  Sándor's revenge on the critic leads to a fight and ubiquitous accident with acid that leads to his disfigurement.

Four years later, aspiring singer Maria Gianelli becomes an understudy in a new production of Faust.  Hunyadi still owns the theater.  Korvin survives in the catacombs beneath, having been rescued by the homeless who live there.  When Korvin sees Maria, and hears her natural talent, he believes her to be his Elena  returned.  Both roles, Maria and Elena, are played by Jane Seymour.  Korvin determines to groom Maria to his late wife's vindicator.

This Phantom was produced by the Halmis, both Roberts Sr. and Jr.  They're a prolific pair, having put out a handful of worthy productions and a library's worth of mediocre ones.  Phantom is one of the latter.  A few of the notes are there but the script and direction fail to find a melody.
Phantom stars Maximilian Schell as Korvin, Seymour, Michael York as an English director overseeing the new production, and Jeremy Kemp as Hunyadi.  They're a good cast doing their earnest best, but the script by Sherman Yellen doesn't  support them.  Their characters are inconsistent, lurching from scene to scene as the plot requires rather than developing naturally.  Korvin is meant to be a  musical genius but cannot tell that his wife is a terrible singer.  When at first he tutors Maria, he is singularly disinterested in her as a person...later he will kidnap her in a demented effort to protect her from the world, yet at no time does he ever evince an inkling of genuine affection for her.  Meanshile, Hunyadi's villainy remains restrained until the story needs it as a plot device. York  as the love interest is all over the map, one minute throwing an conceited fit and the next acting the gentleman and detective to boot.  Presented thus, no chemistry ever develops between any of the characters...and what is the Phantom of the Opera without passion?

The editing is sometimes unhelpful as well, such as the backstory: a stranger helps the ailing Korvin escape to the underground, and I was left wondering who this samaritan was and what his motivation might be  until well late n the story.  The director neglects to let us in on it.  I thought he'd been forgotten.  We never really do learn except by inference near the finale.  The Phantom has made a lair for himself but allowed the homeless to remain with him.  What are thy to each other?  No one involved has any interest in exploring this.  Is he a kind of leader to them, or an eccentric that they tolerate?

Filmed on location in Budapest, photographer Larry Pizer makes the whole affair very...brown.  Perhaps the idea was to emulate a sepia tone to suggest  antiquity, but no amount of lit candles lend warmth or make for a  golden aura, it's just...brown.  After a  while you long for a splash of color.  You want a splash of emotion.

As a phan, I hate to dislike any telling of the Phantom of the Opera.  Alas, of all the versions of this story I've seen this is the least inspired, without flair or feeling or sense.  There are no scares to be had, nor romance, both vital to any good Phantom.  Even the Phantom's masks look defeated.

This is currently available on YouTube.

Ye ban ge sheng (Weibang Ma-Xu, 1937)

aka Song at Midnight

Every midnight Xia listens for the song of her lover, dead ten years now. He never fails her.

Song Dan-Ping had been a revolutionary forced to flee his home and take up a new life and new identity.  Changing his name, he became an actor.  Success and fame followed, and soon he had met an admirer in Xia.  The two fell in love.  Unhappily for them Xia's father, a general, had already arranged for her to marry another, a financially advantageous alliance.  Actors being amongst the lowest class, Song never had a chance.

The fiance Tang Jun was a cruel and proprietous man.  When Xia defied him for Song, Jung flung acid into Song's face.  Disfigured and ashamed, Song had word sent to his beloved that he had died - hoping to spare her.  Instead, it sent her mad. 

We learn all this in flashback halfway through the movie, related by the very-much-alive Song who serenades Xia every night.  It's not a spoiler, for a ghost he's very physical.  Ye ban ge sheng was inspred by the classic Universal horror films of the Thirties, and by the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera.  Director Weibang Ma-Xu imbues his frames with gloom, dread, and loneliness, not a single moment taking place in daylight hours.  Rain falls, fog drifts, cobwebs waft.  Men and Women in Western dress emerge from Western automobiles to seek shelter in a ton closed down for the night.  it's a town where the people lurk in superstitious fear of the ghostly singing that comes every night.  They all know the legend of the doomed love.   The performances are often exaggerated, adding to a creeping sense of unreality and theatricality.

Into this comes a theater troupe looking for a venue.  Its best to warn that the most easily available copy (it's on YouTube) is difficult to follow in places.  For one thing it suffers poorly translated English subtitles.  They make for an amusing read, but are nearly incomprehensible - I'd advise you to skim them for a general suggestion of meaning rather than pay strict attention to them.  Also problematic are the visuals, lovely as they are.  It's a dark film by design with an alluring lighting scheme, and unfortunately age has only deepened it's shadows to overwhelm much of the scenery.  If Ybgs could have a digital restoration, it would be a textural wonder.  Are you listening, Criterion?  Ye ban ge sheng is reputed to be China's first horror film surely deserving of inclusion in the Criterion Collection right there.

The troupe makes itself at home in a lodging house and begins to renovate the disused theater, not knowing that it it now the home of the "phantom" Song.  Song sees in leading man Xiao Ou a chance to reach out to Xia and earns his favor by becoming a secret vocal tutor.  In exchange Ou approaches Xia, who mistakes him for her lost love become flesh again.  Unbeknownst to any of them, tragedy looms again as Ou's own girlfriend catches the eyes of the unrepentant Tang Jun, who - being upper class - got away with the assault on Song Dan-Ping ten years earlier. 

Ye  ban ge sheng is not an apolitical film, not are it's politics easy.  It's backdrop and heart lay with an aversion to the warlord's feudalism that still ruled much of China  in the midst of civil war.  Complicating matters, conflict with Japan had finally become all-out war in 1937.  Both sides were calling for solidarity against the Japanese, a spirit that isn't reflected in Ybgs as Song, ever the activist at heart, plies Ou with a revolutionist opera and encourages his new friend to keep the cause alive.  Dan-Ping's cause is the director's own and he leaves no doubt who the film's true villains are.

Ye ban ge sheng's place in the pantheon of Phantom of the Opera movies is an interesting one and deserves to be better known.  What it retains of Gaston Leroux is the shamelessly romantic side of pulp - it's a movie that wears it's heart on its sleeve politically and humanely.  While this Phantom, like Leroux's, is a shadowy teacher or music and aspiring composer, he is not psychotic.  He is a wholly innocent figure of heartbroken love, as later Phantoms will be (see some of the TV adaptations of the 90s), playing to audience sympathy.   To that end, he is also a man of attractive looks until assaulted with acid, a plot twist that originated here and transplanted whole into the next adaptation, Universal's Phantom of the Opera (1943), a prestige production directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Claude Rains as Eriq the Phantom.  Even people with only a passing knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera think of his as a character disfigured by acid...you can thank Ye ban ge sheng for that.  Ybgs also deviates from the Leroux in its finale, though perversely echoing Lon Chaney's 1925 classic with an exciting chase sequence involving the opera  ghost and an enraged public. 

In 1941, director Weibang Ma-Xu made a sequel, Ye ban ge sheng xu ji (literally 'Song at Midnight - the sequel').  Ye ban ge sheng has been remade twice, once as a two-part film in 1962 (aka The Mid-Nightmare) and again in 1995.  The latter was directed by Ronnie Yu and starred Leslie Cheung.  As yet I have  not seen any of these.

This was my second time seeing the movie, and I have to say I'd love to own a restored  copy with accurate subtitles.  It's grown on me considerably, having thought it soulful but confusing the first time several years ago.  "We didn't be baffled  forever."

O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)

Let it be stipulated right up front that the Schwab family are monsters.  According to a number of sources I've read, they are meant to represent the middle class, but if that's so then they belong to the upper reaches of middle-classdom.  They are conspicuously wealthy and conspicuously unworthy.  The Schwab patriarch is a bigoted boor, his wife an oblivious alcoholic who thinks she's fooling everyone, the daughter an obnoxious brat and the son was born to sport taped-up hornrims and underwear pulled over his head by the school bullies.  These people stepped out of a cartoon.  Not a parody, a cartoon.  I stress that because the film and its characters are an adaptation of a series of stories published by National Lampoon.  We expect satire, but Robert Altman takes the clan a few steps further.

That's an awkward choice, because from all accounts he has played down the antics of the films teenage protagonists Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs.  The two are meant to be taken as a couple of laid-back smartasses expressing their contempt for suburbia, for everything bourgeois, and for their peers.  We are supposed to snicker at their war waged on everyone in sight.  They're smarter than Beavis and Butthead and less manic than Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo.  Unfortunately, their contempt is not based on moral outrage, like Hunter S. Thompson's, it is because they are a couple of sociopaths.  A typical day for them is to buy a Studebaker (so they can feign being too poor to have insurance),  turn it into a monster truck, and crash into other people's cars.  For them, an amusing wedding gift is a loaded uzi.   Their dripping sarcasm spares few: Wino Bob,  because he amuses them; a girl that O.C. is attracted to (he's  quick to drop her for "some sluts" when she displays some humanity and taste);  Dennis Hooper, a brain-fried Vietnam vet, because he can get them armaments; King Sunny Ade, because Stiggs thinks being a fan makes a political statement; and Schwab's neighbor, a self-made millionaire.  The guy got rich selling tacky clothing to plus-sized women..."hogs", in his parlance.

So I have to ask, as crass as the Schwabs are, how can they be morally offensive to the titular antiheroes who value nothing?  We hate them, Altman hates them, but why do O.C. and Stiggs hate them?   Altman goes after familiar targets as easy as they are deserving, but he asks us to accept as surrogates a pair of champions who are every bit as loathsome.  Schwab is confronted with poverty when his house is used as a "charity" front, but our heroes have no genuine concern for the homeless folk - they too are fodders for a joke, for which O.C & S hope to make a buck themselves.   O.C. is no Hawkeye, and Stiggs no Trapper John.  Their misanthropy has no fire in it.

It helps that it's Altman.  His style is unmistakable, and he fills the movie with his usual impeccable cast (including Paul Dooley, Jane Curtin, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Mull, Ray Walston, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Cryer, Tina Louise and Bob Euker),  his usual quirks, his visual and aural layering,  and enough quiet touches that I almost forgot what scumbags I was being asked to sympathize with.  Still, the humor never quite finds its groove nor do the  nominal heroes ever earn their  rewards.

I have not read the original stories from National Lampoon, nor do I desire to.  It's enough to have read that Altman has excised most of their destructive swath and taken their edge off.  It's impossible to guess if that was a good move....O.C. & Stiggs are too assholish for the film to be amiable, but it also fails as the black comedy it wants to be because Alltman has defanged it.  Had he not done so it could have been a success, or maybe an Ishtar-caliber bomb.  Instead it's simply forgotten.

UFO - The Long Sleep (final episode)

The waters are awfully icy this morning. Col. Lake informs Straker that a ten-year-old case has just been reopened and asks if he would like to look into it personally. 'Asks' night not be the right word, more like 'taunts'...and then we learn why. The case involved a woman who had been hit by a car and sent into a coma. The man that hit her was Straker, and the woman has just woken up. The way Lake lets her boss know borders on cruelty. Straker has such a look of guilt on his face that he can't object.

Under the care of Dr. Jackson, Catherine Frazer rebuilds her memories of the accident and the circumstances that led to it. As a young woman she had just run away from her parents and spent the day with another youth she had just met, Tim Redman. Tim also was an escapee with nowhere to go, he running from academia. Together they wasted a day in an abandoned farmhouse. At night, Tim introduced her to drugs. While they were high, they encountered by chance a couple of aliens planting a device in the barn. What fun!

Imagine the poor aliens' bewilderment at these two crazed humans who steal the key to the device to play tag with, lead them on a merry chase to the roof, and then one of these mad terrestrials leaps off the roof to his own death. Imagine poor Tim, who thought he could fly.

Now imagine poor Catherine. She awakes the next day to see Tim's body dragged away by the aliens and witnesses the UFO fly away. She hitches a ride to return to the city only to have to flee the driver who tries to molest her. She runs right into the path of one Ed Straker.

It's Ed that Jackson calls in to help revive her memories (that's right, Jackson, the girl's state is fragile so call in Mr. Tact). She has no family now, her parents died waiting for her to recover.

Someone else is waiting. Tim was revived by the aliens ten years ago, programmed, and stationed as a sentinel to watch over Catherine. As long as it may take, they want that key.

Something about Cathy's tale has Ed spooked. In 1974, three days prior to colliding with Cathy, a UFO was spotted over Turkey. A few hours after that Turkey was rocked by an earthquake that killed 80,000 and leveled a city. (note - that places this episode as taking place in 1984, so it has now been four years since our introductory episode 'Identified'). Somehow Straker makes the leap: the UFOs destroyed the Turkish city, therefore they must have been about to do the same to rural England. (Really? Not, say, London?) Yes, it must have been a bomb! No, not the plan, I mean literally a bomb - and it's still there!

Indeed it is. A bomb, barely covered by loose soil hastily tossed ten years ago, in a farmhouse no one has set foot in for ten years, not even local kids looking for diversions. Yep. Not only that, the key is still on the houseboat it landed in, the boat that still sits on the same patch of river under the bridge Catherine threw it from. The chase is on because now Tim knows, and so does Straker. they both obtained the final lost memory with the use of an alien serum that sped up Catherine's heart rate as a side effect. Tim used it on her and carelessly left it behind. To stop him it must be used on her again. For once, Straker is unable to make the call that endangers a life, and the morally inscrutable Jackson is reluctant as well. It's Foster who insists. Turkey, 80,000 people dead...Straker put the fear into him. Ed, though...you'll remember the last time someone he was responsible for was in a hospital waiting for him to make a choice. Ed has come to care about Catherine.

We see Ed in the waiting room. it's a nicely understated callback to 'A Matter of Priorities' without exposition or otherwise being obvious. I like the direction of this episode very much, the work of Jeremy Summers who also directed The Psychobombs. The flashbacks scenes are in sepia, until that gives way directly to shifting bright color filters for the pharmaceutical high. It's an effective transition. The script is by the same David Tomblin who gave us The Cat With Ten Lives, Reflections in the Water, and three episodes of The Prisoner. Just what the aliens get from killing by the tens of thousands is unclear, but it doesn't exactly hurt their aims either. One might speculate that it throws nations into chaos as cover for the aliens to do their work. Real-world answer is likely the same fuzzy spec script communication that resulted in 'Destruction': they're aliens so they must want to kill us all (and who said anything about body harvesting?) You might wonder why the aliens don't simply send another key on the next UFO headed our way, as in 1974 SHADO was probably not up and running yet, but it may be a matter of resources - notice they left a human drone behind to deal with it instead of their own personnel. That's a minor matter. What counts is that this is the rare episode that lets us have a little backstory for our civilian characters, not much but enough to invest in them, get to like and root for them.

Alas, this is UFO so things come to a sad end. Tim accomplishes his task and essentially falls over dead. SHADO techs fail to disarm the bomb, so they employ a miniature rocket to send it into space. Returning to the hospital, Ed finds that Catherine died as Tim did: their life force spent. Catherine aged rapidly. Jackson doesn't have any answers but guesses that the aliens brought Tim back to life by stealing some of her life essence.

Tim and Catherine met, perhaps fell in love, and spent one glorious day together. They spent ten more years apart but locked together, and died still tied one to the other.

Lake's anger at Straker has vanished, replaced by empathy for his pain and for Catherine. Ed goes home alone.

10 'Century 21' logos. Even those thrilled me as a child, part of the ritual of watching every Sunday around noon like seeing the old UA symbol appearing before Bond flicks when they aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

And so UFO comes to a close. Plans were shaping for a second season in which SHADO would expand their forces, the aliens would step up their fight, and much of the action would take place on and around the Moon. Unfortunately the show was dropped by ITC. Not ready to give up entirely, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson took what they had and created Space: 1999.

UFO - Timelash

The morning after leaving to pick up Col. Lake at the airport, Commander Straker suddenly appears at SHADO HQ disheveled and apparently stark raving mad and taking it out on the machinery. Taking the show out to the Harlington/Straker sets, he leaves in his wake a hefty damages bill and questions: how did he get back into the building, why is he holding dangerous drugs to increase metabolism, why is Lake unconscious on the roof, and why is one of the lesser technicians dead in a go-cart, riddled with bullets?


Lake isn't much help when she comes to. She's diagnosed as having sustained a blow to the back of the neck that has caused a two-hour amnesic gap. I don't know what's more impressive, knowing to tap a neck to produce a two-hour amnesia (top that, Spock) or diagnosing that it's been done.


The answers will have to come from Straker, who also inhabits a recovery bed. Not coming around fast enough for Henderson who declares that a SHADO without Straker is a dire emergency and promptly orders Dr. Jackson to administer a drug that might kill Straker instead of hastening his recovery. Makes sense. You wouldn't want to just give the man a day or so to get his wits back. Might be a rough job of it, from his ravings. "They murdered time!"


Here begins the flashback. Returning from the airport the night before, Straker and Lake are first tracked by a UFO, then attacked as they near HQ. We know something happens as the screen image turns negative for a moment, but just what it is will take unraveling. I've seen the episode some four or five times over my life, and I'm still trying to work it out. Hurrying on to the studio lot, night suddenly turns to day and time has stood still - people frozen mid-stride, birds aflight, tossed objects that remain in the air. Straker grabs a piece of wood and strikes at a stool doing bullet-time and can't make it move, failing to realize that he should have been unable to pick up the wood...or open doors for that matter. Apparently only objects that were under the influence of kinetic energy are paralyzed while those at rest can still be manipulated. Probably a neat conundrum in there somewhere, make for a cool sci-fi novel. There's no time to explore it here, but we do pause for some brief exposition that clears up nothing.


Let me see if I have this close to right...at first it appears that SHADO has been caught in a bubble of frozen time. We have to guess why Straker and lake are immune, perhaps because they were caught at the edge of the affect area. Their watches no longer work. Straker has a better theory: the aliens have projected in which they themselves move at a highly accelerated rate, making everything around them appear to stand still. This explains how they could get past moonbase, an incoming UFO is travelling in such a bubble, and because its path brings it right to HQ the forward edge is now affecting Harlington/Straker studios. SHADO is shielded by heavy lead within its walls, so another field generator has been placed inside HQ, thus necessitating a traitor to plant the device. They wouldn't have to do that to blow the place sky-high, so the idea must be to take it over entirely. An ambitious scheme on all fronts!

Wait, that doesn't sound right either...if the wave is hitting the studio, then everything there should speed up too. My brain hurts, it'll have to come out.


Frozen time, sped-up movement...either way it presents us some problems that haven't been worked out. For instance, if the world is still moving at normal speed then things like elevators, guns, and electronic security panels should not be moving at his speed. Nor go-carts. Nor should the laws of physics bend to his will - gravity and others. So, we have to wonder. Like Straker, we're guessing. Best leave it at that.


Like I said, not a lot of time (heh!) to discuss it because - let's all shout it angrily together - "TRAITOR!!!" One of our lesser techs, Turner, is an agent for the aliens and it didn't take mind control to turn him. Looks like Straker's not a hit with everyone after all. Turner is one of those with a hate-on for humanity and how he's been treated, and sells us out with the promise of a chance to whip out his psyche and wave it at Straker.


The rest of the episode, a good half maybe, is a game of cat and mouse with Lake & Straker hunting Turner while an unhinged Turner tries to kill them. Somewhere on the base is a bit of equipment that the tech rewired into a transmitter for the alien time wave. Again, I'm too slow to follow what does what here. The signal is being sent from a UFO outside the time envelope, and though it is on it's way it has to come slowly because it is operating at a different temporal level and must adjust as it passes the threshold. I think. I wonder if that shouldn't affect the oscillation of the signal as well (ala sound and light waves). Meanwhile, Turner is able to play with time in ways a Gallifreyan would envy, projecting himself backwards or forwards, pulling Straker out of incidents to witness them again. So what kind of time manipulation are we talking about here? A world slowed down or people sped up? if there's an explanation for this it could only be pulled from Jackson's backside. It's wicked fun and doesn't make a lick of sense. Seems to me the aliens have endowed Turner with more power than they've allowed themselves, a rather foolhardy move. You can tell from the childishness of his taunts that his cogs have slipped big-time. He's been promised a high place in the new regime. Aren't they all?

I'm also not clear how Straker and Lake made it into the affected field and whether they were meant to. I doubt it, as they were attacked before arriving...and why do they not need to adjust at the same rate the UFO does once they're through the envelope? Really, there are all sorts of things that you're not meant to think about here. Timelash was written by Terence Feely, who also contributed scripts to Space: 1999 and The New Avengers. I enjoyed those as well, but this is easily the better piece aided by terrific direction and fx work.


I don't care. It's a brisk episode that grabs your attention right away and never lets up, nor is it straightforward enough to easily guess where it's going. If sense must cede to sensibility, this is a good way to go. with many wondrous little touches and a little skewed humor. This is among the best of what UFO could be when it comes to sheer exuberant strangeness. So, I'll give it 9 magic machine guns that never need reloading.



Asides:
It's good to see Henderson again, and Jackson! I'm gonna miss these guys.


ep concludes with Straker coming to his senses. Jackson explains to Henderson that Straker has experienced...ah, I can't remember what he caled it, but it sums up what we just saw. But how the hell does he know that??


One of these episodes, either this one or Mindbend, has a glimpse of the Interceptor cockpit sets. Between the swift pace and looking away to take notes, I failed to spot them.


Give Harlington/Straker a hand, ladies and gentlemen! That prop gets a lot of use. maybe they're filming a sequel to whatever movie used it last time.


Catch the funky wind machine effect on Straker's face as he tries to target the UFO? To quote MST3K, "That's quite a tic ya got there, son."


Turner fumes that Straker is "the guy all the girls admire". There's no evidence from the series to support that. I can buy that Turner believes it, though, it's clearly a sore spot and I can see him endowing Straker with every trait he feels a failure at.

UFO - Ordeal

"Two weeks here and you're going to feel on top of the world", the therapist says.  He should have said "out of this world".  It would have been truer.

Immediately followng his return home from a stint on Skydiver, and the night before a mandatory stay at SHADO's torture  health spa, Col. Foster spends the last of his energy on a party.  (Prediction for the 80's: your future will be fashion retro with a nostalgic wave of mod 60's excess.  Get your unironic Austin Powers on!)  So he's drained going in, struggling when he realizes he's locked in the sauna with the temperature rising, and limp when the aliens find and kidnap him.

Except they don't.  Foster has passed out and is having a vivid stress-induced nightmare.  You're not told that until the final moments of the episode, and there's a deft bit of sleight-of-hand to fool us all: SHADO HQ has been hunting a UFO that broke though their perimeter, and Foster's nightmare hinges on just that scenario.  It almost feels like  a cheat upon reveal, but the former is common enough for SHADO while the nightmare would be a  common one to personnel.

Speaking of entertainement in general, this is exactly the twist that always turns audiences off.  The 'it was all in his/her head' ending.   People become invested in the situation only to be told "It didn't happen?"  "It didn't mean anything!"  It smacks of the writers not being able to think up a decent solution to the central dilemma so they reach for their handy book of trite cop-outs.  An argument can be made that the dream of Ordeal does certainly mean something and has some value, but in this case I can only be just so enthusiastic about it.

The episode is illustrative of the fear, tension, and fatigue that must be what every SHADO agent carries just under the sonscious barrier on a daily basis.  That's worth seeing.   As an inner look at Paul Foster, he turns out to be not that interesting.  We see very little that we hadn't already seen on the surface.  That is, we may not know it's a dream but sriter Tony barwick does, so he's aware that manifestations of Straker, Freeman, Jackson and the like are taken from Foster's own perceptions and expectations.  Of ccourse, Barwick doesn't want to tip his hand, so we get the same Straker, Freeman, etc.. that we always do...and honestly I don't think Barwick was after anything other than a thrilling experience, which he deelivers quite expertly.  From our POV, we've never been the abductee before.  Now we have.  I'm just saying we could have had that small bit more, not enough to break the illusion but enough to leave lingering questions about Foster and his working relations.

Maybe there is something,  though.  For a fantasy concocted by Foster's id, Lt. Gay Ellis features a lot in his rescue.  For example, how often so we see her take to the lunar surface personally when someone under her command needs rescuing?  Foster is an exceeption, is he?  Must be awfully special to her...It's your classically romantic scenario, she spends every minute after in his company, reassuring and comforting him right up to the moemnt he comes to on the sauna floor at the health spa.

The episode is gripping on a first viewing, with plenty of tension as Straker orders the UFO shot down (will  the Sky 1 pilot Waterman comply?), as the damaged UFO crashes on the moon,  Foster having his lungs filled with the liquid aleins use for space travel, etc.   Having seen it a number of times, I know it holds up on rewatch.  So,  I'm giving it 7 rights clearances to Paul McCartney's catalog.  Never ceases to surprise me that 'Get Back' made it in in the first place, and more that it's still there.

Asides:

F.O., Foster! That means you're first, alphabetically!

At SHADO HQ, a female technician brings coffee to a male tech...at least it  didn't seem as if he aked, she simply offers him some.  Either the sexism problem is more institutionally entrenched at SHADO than any of us has realized, or she really likes the guy and wants him to notice.  I'd like to think it's the latter.  She reminded me a little of someone I fell for once.

"Have you ever been in a sonar bath before?"  Sounds neat.  Is that like a sonic shower on Star Trek?  Hmm, so you need steam for a sonar bath?  How does that work?  Why not just call it - oh, I see.  Sauna bath.  Ne'mind.

Should have been a lot more green liquid gushing out of that helmet, and to clear Foster's lungs he should have been leaning forward. Still, kudos for getting the  panic right.

On learning that Foster was abducted, a Skydiver crewmember exclaims, "How could that happen?"  She must be new, because it happens to SHADO people all the time!

At the spa there's a guy named Franklin who's overweight.  Oh, sorry, I meant to say fat.  We're supposed to be thoughtful of others and not inflict 'political correctness' on them.  Franklin's a tub.  That means he's the comic relief.  Just pointing out that he's a fatass is inherently funny.  So go ahead and have a  laugh at his expense, because even the score mocks him.


Two episodes to go.

UFO - Reflections in the Water

RitW made my brain feel fuzzy.

There's trouble in one particular stretch of water. A commercial ship has been blown apart by what the crew reported as 'flying fish', a film crew has had one of it's divers killed by a slashed air hose, and unusually warm currents are diverting marine life from their usual habitats. Fortunately for Earth, the film crew happens to be under contract at Harlington/Straker and their director a stupefyingly boring man with a keen eye.

I guess those flying fish set the tone for the whole story. Are they cool, or absurd, or some cruel joke played on victims? Basically, they're missiles that shoot lasers instrad of actually hitting their targets. Oops, missed! PSYCH, no we didnt! Na-na-nana-na! UFOs already have laser weapons, so why be so elaborate? Why, because its fun!

At this point the narrative needle skips its groove with a montage of clips previewing the rest of the story. UFO's production team was experimenting with the lesser credits format and someone must have liked it because it would become a staple of Space: 1999's title credits. Not being used to it on UFO, it's momentarily confusing.

Skydiver investigates and finds a UFO plying a route along a cable powering an underwater dome. Straker and Foster don scuba gear and check the place out, finding that its walls are accommodatingly transparent (always handy if you're trying to keep a secret, much like blowing up every ship that passes overhead).

Peering in, they spot one of their own: one Lt. Anderson. Traitor! Or he could just be under mental control, if he weren't such a lying traitor. Back on Skydiver, Straker orders its captain to maintain his position surveilling the dome - he'll be in contact when he gets back to HQ. This was the first instance where I felt my mind slipping, and it wouldn't be the last. Suddenly I needed to rewind the entire block and see it again...surely I'd been mentally wandering and missed some crucial line of dialog? How are Straker and Foster returning to HQ if Skydiver isn't taking them? Sky 1 seats one, and it's not a taxi service. Had they rendezvoused with another Skydiver or some other vessel? Are they going to swim back?

It happened again not long after. There's Anderson, that sickening traitor, smiling at them all innocent-like. Straker straps him up for a third degree. Expert grilling technique, that, consisting of shouting a single question at him denial after denial. Even after two doses of truth serum, Anderson insists he doesn't have a clue what Straker and Foster are on about. Y'know, SHADO personnel have been known to succumb to alien brainwashing - well, sure, you could excuse an innocent person that way but not a lousy traitor. What cheek, pretending his honor has been hurt.

Frustrated, Straker demands the psych evaluation be rushed into his hands. That's Col. Lake's job. Surely the evaluation will explain why Anderson has turned on SHADO...but it doesn't. It's a rather terse reply, almost snide...and there I went again, needing to rewind. I watched the scene three times. Was it the computer that made the analysis (as has happened before) or a doctor such as Jackson (also standard SHADO procedure)? Wasn't Lake, yet she's the one who put forward the questions. She's approached them as many different ways as she can think to, and the answer is always the same. Yes, that's what happens when you're trying to squeeze a computer to yield more than it's programmed with. Yet, I don't recall UFO ever mentioning before that its computer not only has an artificial personality but one that's cranky. That's what it's like to work under Straker, he even pisses off the machinery. Lake knows the feeling well. She's the only one (besides HAL) with the guts to snap at him. Even SID knows better.

Straker and Foster return to the dome. Discovering that it's housed in some wonderful self-sealing skin, they enter to find that the UFO has been there. I'd been wondering about that, as we know they don't last long in our atmosphere, and it's surmised in The Sound of Silence that immersion in water doesn't help. So, now we know the craft doesn't remain in the ocean but rests in the dome. But it's still in an oxygen-rich site, so...? Oh, well, back to the plot.

In the dome they find more SHADO personnel, including themselves. Also Anderson again, who is locked in a cell back at HQ. Aha, thinks Straker, it's plastic surgery. Personally, I leapt immediately to clones and thought that Straker must not have seen enough science fiction TV shows, but no - he's right, it's not clones. If the aliens figured out how to clone bodies, they'd have no more need to raid Earth.

Exploring further (and with the clock ticking, orders having been left to torpedo the dome in exactly an hour), they find a replica of SHADO HQ, wherein they espy their duplicates lipsynching to voice recordings of the genuine SHADO agents. We learned early in the episode that the aliens have mounted an ambitious invasion plan with a force of at least twenty-five UFOs standing by. Now the plan is revealed: when the fleet makes a go for Earth, all defense forces will be ordered to stand down...and they'll do it, too, because they know that Straker has a penchant for wild, suicidal gambits that always pay off.

Not to worry. Straker and Foster blow the joint, figuratively and literally, and when the assault launches it is ably if improbably fought off. We never learn how the aliens intended to neutralize SHADO HQ, which they would have had to do for their own fake to be effective. There's also a question raised about the Interceptors taking out four UFOs - watch the editing, we see exactly three missiles fired. I've always wondered about those three nozzles mounted fore of the visor - are they weapons or thrusters? I still don't know.

Oh, and all's cool between Straker and Anderson, the traitorous bastard, it's all smiles and backslaps. So that's okay then.

This was just plain fun, and I give it 7 "Damn dome!"s and other alliterate outbursts.
The score - no, the musical score - included a short burst heavy on brass that sounded like the standard villain's cue on the '66 Batman. Because it occurred while onboard Skydiver, I thought Burgess Meredith was about to enter quacking.