Spectrum Strikes Back

Plot

Colonel White (voiced by Donald Gray), Captain Scarlet (Francis Matthews) and Captain Blue (Ed Bishop) attend a secret conference hosted by Spectrum Intelligence beneath a hunting lodge in an African game reserve. Also present are the World President, Space General Peterson and, finally, SI's Dr Giadello, who has developed two anti-Mysteron devices based on the discoveries that Spectrum made during the attempted assassination of General Tiempo. To exploit the Mysterons' vulnerability to electricity, the "Mysteron Gun" can fire concentrated electron beams capable of permanently destroying their reconstructions; the "Mysteron Detector", meanwhile, is a radiographic device that can distinguish Mysteron agents from humans by the former's imperviousness to X-rays.

Unknown to the delegates, Captain Indigo, a Spectrum officer working undercover as the hunting lodge's waiter, has been murdered by Captain Black and reconstructed in the service of the Mysterons. When his existence is revealed by the Mysteron Detector, the Indigo duplicate sabotages the conference by activating the lodge's descent mode; seizing the key for the ascent-descent controls, he subsequently escapes in a car, leaving the delegates to be crushed by the building slowly bearing down on them.

Arming himself with the Mysteron Gun, Scarlet returns to ground level alone in the lodge's lift. The lift is rendered inoperative when the lodge starts its descent, removing the other delegates' sole escape route and necessitating that Scarlet pursue Indigo and recover the key. In the subterranean conference room, Blue slows the lodge's descent by firing his gun into the ceiling at the point where the controls are located. Chasing the Indigo reconstruction in a second car, Scarlet and a game warden intercept the Mysteron agent; he is only wounded by a shot from the warden's rifle, forcing Scarlet to use the Mysteron Gun to kill him. Rushing back to the lodge with the retrieved key, Scarlet reverses the building's descent seconds before White, Blue, Giadello, Peterson and the President are killed. Later, the delegates agree that the Mysteron Gun and Detector have truly proven their worth in the field.

Production

The working title for this episode was altered from the less grammatically correct "Spectrum Strike Back". Incidental music for both this episode and "Avalanche" was recorded by a 15-member orchestra, conducted by Barry Gray, in a four-hour studio session held on 11 June 1967. Released on CD, the "Spectrum Strikes Back" suite runs for eight minutes and 33 seconds.

"Spectrum Strikes Back" marks the second appearance of the World President, who is threatened with assassination in the series' pilot episode, "The Mysterons". The character of Captain Indigo is a re-use of the Macey puppet from "Big Ben Strikes Again", while the puppet of Dr Giadello appears as Morton in "The Trap".

Reception

In a review published in the Gerry Anderson-related publication Andersonic, Vincent Law refers to "Spectrum Strikes Back" as "one of the most convoluted and inconsistent" episodes of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, citing "poor plotting" encapsulated by devices such as the moving hunting lodge: "... the whole lodge descending underground for reasons of secrecy is bizarre, as surely any passer-by would become immediately suspicious when a non-descript building started sinking into the ground!" Among other perceived plot holes is the fact that the stranded delegates do not resort to the lift, used by Captain Indigo only shortly before, to escape. On the subject of the reconstructed Indigo's sabotage of the conference and the danger facing the delegates, Law comments humorously that "Obviously Spectrum don't have a Health and Safety department!" However, he praises Barry Gray's musical score and, in contrast with his initial criticism, commends the moments of "light relief" in Tony Barwick's script. He regrets the absence of the Mysteron Gun in later episodes of Captain Scarlet, and observes that even the Mysteron Detector appears only occasionally following its debut in "Spectrum Strikes Back". Andrew Pixley and Julie Rogers, writing for Starburst magazine, note that the gun, "although fantastically useful, is never seen again"; the detector, meanwhile, is compared to a car's radiator grille.

James Stansfield of the entertainment website Den of Geek considers "Spectrum Strikes Back" the tenth best episode of Captain Scarlet, judging the instalment memorable for its introduction of the Mysteron Gun and Detector ("though both were seldom seen again") and "some unintentional hilarity with the nicknames used by the Spectrum agents" (Scarlet, Blue and White adopt the undercover aliases "Mr Panther", "Mr Bear" and "Mr Tiger"). He shares Law's concerns regarding the conspicuousness of the lodge's movements and suggests that the security of the game reserve in general leaves much to be desired. Stansfield additionally questions the purpose of Indigo: "Although a Captain, he is assigned the humiliating task of being a waiter to those gathered at the base".