The Most Special Agent

Plot

Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine invites his friend Sam Loover to his Dorset cottage to view his latest invention, the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer (BIG RAT). Mac reveals that the BIG RAT interfaces with the human brain, allowing knowledge and experience to be transferred electronically from one person to another. To demonstrate this function, Mac implants his own "brain pattern" into his nine-year-old adopted son, Joe. The test's success is revealed when, under questioning, Joe displays expert knowledge of the C-3400 supercomputer.

Although Mac is already in negotiations with Convex Computers for the sale of his device, Loover — an agent of the World Intelligence Network (WIN) — believes that the BIG RAT could prove to be the ultimate weapon in the fight for world peace. The McClaines are soon summoned to a meeting with Loover's superior, Shane Weston, at WIN Headquarters in London. Proposing that the machine's existence be kept secret, Weston posits a fictitious mission to explain how Joe, aided by the BIG RAT, could become WIN's most special agent ...

In London, reporters interview a Russian pilot about the MiG-242, the world's most powerful fighter-bomber. Although the pilot is quick to point out the MiG-242's specifications are unrivalled by any aircraft in the West, he is unaware that Professor McClaine and Sam Loover are transmitting his brain pattern by means of a concealed antenna to the McClaine cottage, where it is subsequently transferred to Joe via the BIG RAT. The boy is then supplied with a unique pair of glasses fitted with electrodes that, while worn, give him access to all the pilot's knowledge and experience. Joe's mission is to capture a MiG-242 and fly it to England, thus removing the Eastern Bloc's tactical advantage over the West.

Travelling to a Moscow airbase, Mac and Joe join a group of aviation experts who, in a first for Western correspondents, are permitted to view the MiG-242 at close range. Joe slips past security and takes off in one of the parked aircraft. Brought before the base commander, the soldier acting as tour guide insists that the MiG-242 is in the hands of a child; furious, the commander orders his arrest. In the air, Joe shoots down three other MiG-242s that have been scrambled to intercept him. He then turns his attention to a missile base on the ground, leaving the installation in ruins. Joe flies across the rest of Europe unhindered, landing at Manston Airfield in Kent. Escaping from the cockpit before armoured vehicles arrive, he is picked up by Sam in Mac's flying Jet-Air Car. A local farmer's eyewitness account of the incident meets with scepticism from the airfield controller ...

Ending his speculation, Weston reminds the McClaines that the West and Russia are in fact at peace and that no aircraft by the name MiG-242 exists. Mac is outraged by the suggestion that Joe work for WIN, insisting that the boy is too young to embark on such a dangerous career. When Loover emphasises his son's extraordinary potential, however, the Professor grudgingly accepts Weston's proposal.

Production

Although the episode includes no on-screen title, it is referred to in all production documentation as "The Most Special Agent". The knowledge transfer from Professor McClaine to Joe via the BIG RAT serves as the title sequence for all subsequent episodes; for certain episodes (as is the case here), the sequence is integrated into the episode's plot, following a cold open.

In the first version of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's script, written in autumn 1967, the character of Joe was to have enlisted in the CIA. Accordingly, Shane Weston was to have been portrayed as the CIA's Deputy Director, and his meeting with the McClaines was to have taken place at the United States embassy. A brief scene, set after the McClaines' arrival in London, was to have depicted a police officer pausing in amazement at the sight of Mac's futuristic Jet-Air Car. The name of the organisation was changed to WIN, and Weston's position to that of WIN Supreme Controller in London, when Tony Barwick and Shane Rimmer devised a scriptwriters' guide for the series.

"The Most Special Agent" was filmed at the Century 21 studios in Slough in November 1967. Series production controller Desmond Saunders reprised the role of director from "The Mysterons", the pilot episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. In a scene deleted from the finished episode, Mac explains to Joe that the reason for the Russian authorities' invitation is their desire to prove to the West that the MiG-242 is a defence and not a weapon. This scene takes places during the McClaines' imagined flight to Moscow; in the completed episode, all that remains of the sequence is Mac and Joe's boarding of the passenger plane. The aircraft in question is a re-use of a filming model created for the Captain Scarlet episode "Flight 104", while the MiG-242 fighter seen later in the episode is a re-dressed version of the Angel interceptor that appears regularly in the same series.

Model footage of the destruction of the Russian missile base is recycled from the crash of Skyship One originally shot for the film Thunderbird 6. The argument between Mac, Shane and Sam over Joe's possible involvement with WIN was unscripted; it is represented in the finished episode by still photographs of the three men overlaid with actors Rupert Davies, Keith Alexander and David Healy's improvised dialogue. The episode's incidental music was recorded on 18 January 1968 in a four-hour studio session at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London.

Broadcast

Prior to the episode's first broadcast on London Weekend Television on 5 October 1968 – directly opposite part four of the Doctor Who serial The Mind Robber on BBC1 – voice actor Len Jones had predicted that his character would "slaughter that soppy Dr Who [sic]. He may only be a puppet, but he is more realistic."

Edited scenes from "The Most Special Agent" appear as a flashback in the series finale, the clip show episode "The Birthday". In 1969, condensed, silent, black-and-white versions (titled "Joe the Pilot" and "Secret Mission") were released on 8 mm film by Arrow Films; the same year, "The Most Special Agent" served as the basis for a Joe 90-themed TV advertisement for Kellogg's Sugar Smacks. In 1981, a re-edited version formed a part of the compilation film The Amazing Adventures of Joe 90, produced under the banner of "Super Space Theater" by ITC New York for US television (and later released on VHS in the UK).

"The Most Special Agent" aired as a segment of a Gerry Anderson-themed day of programming on Channel 5 on 27 August 2000.

Reception

Jonathan Bignell characterises Shane Weston's speculative scenario, which effectively concerns an arms race between nations, as an "unusually precise reference to the 1960s context" in which Joe 90 was created and filmed. Tat Wood of TV Zone magazine questions the logic of the "framing device of a 'What if?'", deeming Weston's choice of Russia as an adversary "odd" given that he is subsequently obliged to "explain to Joe that nobody spies on anyone any more. This rather limits the possibilities of the World Intelligence Network's 'Very Special Agent' [sic]."

The scene in which Weston points out that the West is not at war with Russia has itself been the subject of critical commentary. According to film historian Nicholas J. Cull, the sequence affirms that Gerry Anderson "took an end to the Cold War as a given in his work." While being interviewed by Cull, Anderson spoke about how he had been "inspired by some aspects of Cold War technology, [but] believed that he had a duty to the rising generation to avoid perpetuating Cold War stereotypes"; in a different interview, he remarked: "I'd always tried very hard not to put my ten cents into creating World War Three." Stephen La Rivière, writer of Filmed in Supermarionation: A History of the Future, describes the scene as "amusing", and considers one of Mac's lines to his adoptive son ("Don't come crying to me if you get hurt!") expressive of a readiness to "abnegate all parental responsibility". For Jim Sangster and Paul Condon, writers of Collins Telly Guide, the "photomontage" argument – "more emotionally fraught than anything that had gone before" – is representative of what they consider to be the series' superior direction as compared to earlier Anderson productions.