The Avengers: Man-Eater of Surrey Green

The TV Tomb of Mystery is an ongoing catalog of one man's attempt to stave off  acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs until he can take better inventory of the ones already in his possession. Today's excursion:

Season 4, Episode 11.

The Avengers (1961 - 1969) is often described as stylish, quintessentially British, quirky, charming, and surreal. It's certainly all of that, but I think it's simply a well-written show. Patrick Macnee's John Steed and Diana Rigg's Emma Peel are two of my favorite characters in TV, period, and although I like the other seasons with Honor Blackman and Tara King, like many people, I prefer the Steed and Peel years.

My Mom was always a big fan of The Avengers, and I never saw any of it until A-and-E (damn you, ampersand) began showing it in the late 80s. I didn't fully embrace the show until ten or twelve years later, so I was poised between two eras of Avengers appreciation when the movie came out in 1998. 

Which was a disaster. The screencap above actually might suggest that everyone is wrong and that certainly whatever movie has such a colorful and surreal scene must have some hidden treasure. I sympathize, but the answer is no, it's just jaw-dropping. The director certainly seems like he was cut off at the knees in post-production, and he has my sympathies, too.

Nevertheless, if you were a fan of the original Avengers and saw this in the theater, you were hit twice: first by the chaotic mess of a movie on the screen, and second by having to watch Steed and Peel dragged through all of it.

There's really no element in the film you can't find precedent for in the series, but "by the time the studio was done with it, they had cut out all the internal logic, and it was chaotic and absurd."

This back-to-back with 1997's Batman and Robin considerably slowed Uma Thurman's momentum. I don't think anyone could reasonably pin either film's failure wholly on her, but she was not a good fit for Emma Peel.

I've made my peace with the inevitable remake that changes everything about them to chase millennial electioneering. But for our purposes today with "Man-Eater of Surrey Green," Emma Peel is Diana Rigg.

The plot: A telepathic man-eating plant from outer space has kidnapped England's top horticulturalists. Can Steed and Peel stop it before it germinates the earth? 

"I'm a herbicidal maniac, didn't you know?"

The Avengers did not shy away from the fantastic, but it didn't bring in extraterrestrials very often at all. So in that aspect, the plot for this episode is an exception. But in all other aspects, it's a fun representation of how almost all Avengers episodes - at least the Steed and Peel ones - break down.

1) The prologue introduces the danger to be faced. In "Man-Eater," it's the sudden hypnosis of one half of a horticultural team, who abandons her post to get in the limo of a shady-looking guy. I don't have a screencap for this, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

2) Steed and Peel discuss the above in a roundabout way, usually while Emma Peel is on her way to some kind of university conference.

3) They are dispatched to canvas the scene. This usually involves one or the other going to interview the principal suspect. In "Man-Eater," it's Steed, who goes to Sir Lyle Peterson's estate to interview him and discovers evidence of a deeper mystery.

3.5) Here we always eavesdrop on the baddie and his henchman's evil schemes.

4) Steed and Peel pretend to go away but really stick around and dig some things up. 

Literally, here, where they find some kind of alien coffin, buried in manure.

They call in the brass.

4) Kooky Guest Star on the Good Guys' Side is introduced.

Athene Seyler

Sometimes, Peel performs this role, but usually said KGSOTGGS provides the key piece of info for Steed and Peel to solve the mystery. Which is the case here: these cells she's looking at are intelligent, alien, and (British accent) some damn tricky business. 

Seyler was born in 1888. And she rocks the living crap out of this episode. She had a long career as an actress but retired soon after this, making "Man-Eater of Surrey Green" one of her last roles. She died at the unfathomable age of 101 in 1990.

4.5) Emma Peel tells Steed that the plant invader could be from Mars or the moon, as "recent photos show whole areas of vegetation."

5) The guest star from the prologue almost always gets himself killed. 

I'm skipping many details, of course, but this man is the betrothed of

who was the horticulturalist mesmerized and kidnapped in the prologue.

6) Peel changes to some kinky get-up.

7)  Steed and Peel 

and any guest stars still standing

attack in force and snuff out the danger. In "Man-Eater," this means an all-out herbicide and machete and shotgun attack on the alien plant, now with tendrils that envelop the house and an even stronger telepathic siren call. (Hence the ear-jammers, above.) Most of this takes place in a room filled with nude mannequins covered with vines and other flora. You'd think such a thing would provide more memorable screencaps.

The fault is undoubtedly mine.

8) Danger bested, Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel exchange cheeky dialogue in some manner of moving vehicle that recalls motifs of all we've just seen.

Unlike a few shows covered in these Closet of Mystery posts, The Avengers has a sizable presence on the web and in pop cultural memory. You can spend days at this site and barely scratch the surface of what's out there. The above is certainly not all that insightful, but I though it'd be a good way to lay some foundation for any future exploring I might want to do.

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Is it "with teleplay" or "and teleplay?" Teleplay's not a verb, so "with" makes sense to me but it looks a bit odd. I throw it out there. Google has failed me.

Night Gallery: The House

The TV Tomb of Mystery is an ongoing catalog of one man's attempt to stave off  acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs until he can take better inventory of the ones already in his possession. 

Today's excursion:

Season 1, Episode 3. Specifically:

The first part of the episode.

Night Gallery (1970-1973) probably falls on the lower side of the anthology show spectrum: not quite Freddy's Nightmares and maybe neck and neck with, if not below, Tales from the Darkside.  Nevertheless, had it been in syndication when I was growing up, I likely would have devoured it the same way I devoured Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone on Nick at Nite. Had that been the case, I'd undoubtedly have formed some kind of nostalgia bond with the material that would help me over some of the rough spots. But I only came to the show much later (2007 or 2008 via Netflix) and so, while I do enjoy it, I don't love it.

The first thing an anthology show needs is a snazzy title sequence with a memorable theme.

Check. I realize this is true of most television shows, but an anthology show's intro has to be at least twice as highly stylized and over-the-top as any other show's, according to theorems and laws I am making up right now.

Second, it needs a kick-ass host. And he or she (or it - whatever the Cryptkeeper is) can't just be talking to the screen, they have to be employing some conceit organic to the show itself.

Check. And how. 
Night Gallery deserves special praise in this category, since they actually had someone creating paintings for each and every episode. You can see them all here.

Rod Serling is the equal of Lee/ Kirby or Roddenberry/Coon (or Iron Maiden) when it comes to having ignited my adolescent imagination the most. It's kind of funny that this is the case, as all of the aforementioned (except Maiden of course) are associated with the 60s, before I was born. But, speaking broadly of course, the trickle-down effect of their work (and EC Comics, definitely) is all over the era in which I did grow up, in the work of John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg, in the Marvel comics I read, etc. When I was going to school in Dayton, OH, I made frequent pilgrimages to Serling's old stomping grounds in Yellow Springs, searching many times for his initials allegedly carved on the wall at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, where he worked and taught a writing class in the banquet room upstairs. (I never found them.)

The third and probably most important thing an anthology show needs is a consistent level of quality. And this is unfortunately where Night Gallery fails to launch. The first season is relatively solid, but the quality and production value of the second and third vary widely. Rod Serling, frustrated by this and repeated producer interference, tried to get his name taken off the show, to no avail.

He died shortly after, way too young, at age 50.

But Night Gallery certainly had its high points, and among them is this gem from December 1970.

The Plot: On the day of her discharge, sanitarium patient Elaine Latimer tells her doctor of a recurring dream. In it, she's driving along a country road that is both familiar and unfamiliar and approaches a house. She goes to the door and knocks and when no one answers, she gets back in her car.

It's only as she is driving away that she notices that the front door is slowly opening, but she always wakes up before it can open completely. Her doctor assures her it means nothing, and she is discharged. She finds herself driving down the same country road from her dream, leading to the very same house. A realtor steps from the shadows and offers to show her around. This proves unnecessary, as she discovers she knows every detail of every room.

The realtor tells her the house is priced-to-buy on account of its being haunted. She moves in immediately. She begins to have the dream again, but this time, from the perspective of inside the house.

She arrives outside just in time to see the car pulling away.

She's awakened by the ringing of the phone. It's her doctor, checking up on her. She tells him rather matter-of-factly, that she's found the house and that it is haunted by a ghost that only comes with the sunlight.

There's an odd penultimate scene where she puts the phone down and runs out of frame, only to return and say "I just met my ghost."

I can only imagine this was some kind of mistake born of necessity, as... well, who does that? "Okay, I'm back - while you were waiting, I resolved the plot off-screen. The end." There are some odd zooms, as well, but that is a hallmark of the era and can't be lain at this episode's door.

Okay, so if you're any kind of ghost story buff, it's unsurprising to discover that she is the ghost, haunting herself. It is foreshadowed throughout in some compelling ways:

As a "sun ghost," the slow-motion, dreamlike way she is photographed while driving, with her robe and hair billowing like a shroud, is spell-binding. The first time I saw this I had these images - and the cascading strings and Pettet's upper crust narration accompanying them - in mind for days.

Black Sabbath album cover, the daylight version.

Another aspect of ghost stories is repetitive behavior on the part of the ghost. ("All ghosts have OCD" is the spook-equivalent to "All dogs go to heaven.") When we first meet the non-dream Elaine, she is working on a cross-stitch, feverishly, while she and her doctor go over her dream.

It's a nice visual motif for her repetitive behavior,

recalled in every scene she's in the house.

And then there are the not-so-subtle ones:

I don't really know Joanna Pettet's work very well. But her presence in this episode is really something. Not just the way she is photographed - though that is certainly commendable - but the way she carries herself and speaks. Everything works towards the the end of creating and sustaining a dreamlike, ghostly affair.

For a simple enough story, John Astin (yes, that John Astin) packs an awful lot into these twenty-odd minutes. Nowadays, undoubtedly, the whole thing would revolve around an awkwardly-moving girl with hair covering one eye while she crab-walks to the camera and then raises a finger to her lips to say "Shh." God, Mr. and Mrs. Nowadays: get a life.

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