Now, Mr Steed, you’re going to have to work for your supper.

The Avengers

4.9: Room Without a View

If The Gravediggers’ eccentricity feels entirely natural, Room Without a View’s seems plastered onto a standard issue spy plot, one that wastes the talents of the majority of its cast and leaves Steed polishing off the best table leavings.

Even the premise of Roger Marshall’s teleplay is the sort of thing we’ve heard every other week, with seven physicists having disappeared “over the past year or so”, accompanied by then-topical references to the Brain Drain. One of boffins has resurfaced, though, Dr Wadkin (Peter Madden, coming on like Father Jack), who “suddenly popped up in the middle of the chop suey”.

Lest this seem like a casually racist reference to Wadkin’s wife Anna (Jeanne Roland of You Only Live Twice), Marshall tempers Steed’s stereotyping by having her observe the doctor can’t bear to be around her anymore: “It’s because I’m Chinese that my husband can’t stand the sight of me. It’s like that bad joke; now we all look alike to him”.

Carter: In a Chessman Hotel, all service is superlative.

Yes, Marshall has been watching The Manchurian Candidate, quite overtly grafting a brainwashing plot line onto the otherwise innocuous Chessman Hotel setting, in which the kidnapped are led to believe they have been sent to a prison camp in Manchuria (that it is actually a mock-up of one in North Korea may be intended to emphasise such blasé stereotyping). Add in the Canton Chinese Laundry and some yellow face, and Steed’s stunt double pulling a rickshaw at the coda, and the attempts at sensitivity are, shall we say, somewhat insufficient. The broader problem with the episode, however, is that this simply isn’t inventive stealing. It only ever feels like a cheap rip-off.

Carter: I, er, hope you’ll give us your award of merit, sir.

Steed: You mustn’t ask that! Makes me quite nervous. I’m likely to get quite severe indigestion.

So it’s fortunate that Steed, posing as M Gourmet, the famous food critic, is on hand to enliven the proceedings. He has decent foils in hotel manager Carter (Philip Latham, The White Dwarf, and considerably livelier than as the final Borusa in The Five Doctors) and Paul Whitsun-Jones, Sir Charles in the previous Season’s The Wringer and Man with Two Shadows, and of course the Marshall in The Mutants).

The latter, a fat man with thin blood (he maintains the room temperature at 80 degrees) is on a diet – a pea and mineral water for lunch, forgoing the banana – living vicariously through his critic (“He’s very much looking forward to testing your reputation as a gastronome” – “Delighted!” responds Steed) and mortified when “Gourmet” informs him that salted Normandy butter was used on the rye bread. Steed also gets quite carried away describing his Cuban cigar (“Rolled against the thigh du jeune fille”).

Carter: For a receptionist, you undertake a great many tasks, Mrs Peel.

Mrs Peel: As a receptionist, I expect to, Mr Carter.

Emma, having decried the suggestion of going undercover (“I dislike the idea of working in a hotel”), soon finds herself in hot water when she comes under suspicion, gets gassed in the dreaded Room 621 and interrogated by a Chinese soldier and a made-up English actor, requiring Steed to rescue her.

Pushkin: It took nineteen seconds for this lift to arrive. This would not be tolerated at home.

The rest of the cast are put to mostly below-their-station work. Peter Jeffrey (The Macra Terror, The Androids of Tara), in his first of three Avengers appearances, probably enjoyed playing the buttoned-down, by-the-book Varnals, there to have his sexist assumptions about Mrs Peel dashed, but we can’t help but wish he was better serviced. Likewise, Peter Arne, who stole Warlock in Season Two, is all but forgettable as a red herring chemical company tout. In a more minor role, Vernon Dobtcheff fares better as a very precise Russian Chess grandmaster (working for the Ministry of the Interior and interested in doing a deal with Chessman in return for the latter building hotels on the Black Sea coast).

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
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Dude. You’re my hero and shit.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.

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My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

It’s not every day you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents – by himself.

Gemini Man (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ang Lee seems hellbent on sloughing down a technological cul-de-sac to the point of creative obscurity, in much the same way Robert Zemeckis enmired himself in the mirage of motion capture for a decade. Lee previously experimented with higher frame rates on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, to the general aversion of those who saw it in its intended form – 48, 60 or 120 fps have generally gone down like a bag of cold sick, just ask Peter Jackson – and the complete indifference of most of the remaining audience, for whom the material held little lustre. Now he pretty much repeats that trick with Gemini Man. At best, it’s merely an “okay” film – not quite the bomb its Rotten Tomatoes score suggests – which, (as I saw it) stripped of its distracting frame rate and 3D, reveals itself as just about serviceable but afflicted by several insurmountable drawbacks.

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What you do is very baller. You're very anarchist.

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You’ll just have to face it, Steed. You’re completely compromised.

The Avengers Season 6 Ranked – Worst to Best
The final run, and an oft-maligned one. It’s doubtful anyone could have filled Emma Peel’s kinky boots, but it didn’t help Linda Thorson that Tara King was frequently earmarked to moon over Steed while very evidentlynot being the equal Emma and Cathy were; the generation gap was never less than unflatteringly evident. Nevertheless, despite this imbalance, and the early hiccups of the John Bryce-produced episodes, Season Six arguably offers a superior selection of episodes to its predecessor, in which everyone became perhaps a little too relaxed.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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