Amazon.com
This special, four-episode volume unhappily brings the Mrs. Peel chapter of
The Avengers to a close. "The Positive-Negative Man" is a shocking tale about an electronically charged killer dispatching members of a scientific research team with one touch of his finger. Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Mrs. Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) get a dose of high voltage, and the story is deliciously tense at times (who doesn't remember being a kid and squealing when somebody threatened to poke you with a finger?), but the wacky plot keeps matters from getting too serious. Good surreal fun and delightfully sexy. "Murdersville" is a dark tale about a quiet English town in which nearly all the residents participate in killing for a fee. Mrs. Peel discovers this the hard way when an old friend inadvertently leads her into danger there--some of it quite medieval, as in a tense scene where Emma nearly drowns in a witch's ducking pool. Highlights include a phone ruse in which our beautiful heroine foils her captors by calling her "husband John" to reassure him, and a climactic fight that manages to make pie-throwing a deadly art. "Mission Highly Improbable" follows, a wild story about a miniaturization device being used by villains to shrink their enemies to pocket-size--at which point they can be tossed into the trash or washed down a drain. The action gets even more fun when Steed and Mrs. Peel, at different times, are themselves made tiny and have to make do in a world of giant--though ordinary--objects such as pens and telephones. Finally, there's "The Forget-Me-Knot," in which Mrs. Peel's replacement on the show and in partnership with Steed is introduced: Tara King (Linda Thorson). The script concerns a traitor within the intelligence organization and his henchmen, who are using a memory-killing drug on their victims. But the strongest moment anyone watching this show will remember is a coda in which Steed and Emma say goodbye. Crushing!
--Tom Keogh
