Homicide and Old Lace

Rehashed lame material from the producer that was let go early on in the final/Tara King season. I am not at all a fan of the "Mother" character to begin with, so - apart from the yawn inducing story and material - there was almost 50% of the episode's screen time focused upon him to persevere. If I saw this Tara King episode before all the others, I would have not watched the rest of them. Yes, this was that bad.

For his birthday, Mother visits his Aunts Harriet and Georgina, he recounts a recent case, in which Steed and Tara take on a group of art thieves.

Looking at one or two reviews, and hearing from fans of the show, I was expecting this to be awful, I can understand why it's not universally loved, but I have to admit, I didn't mind it.

Doctor Who had Shada, The Avengers had The Great, Great Britain crime, an episode that for one reason and another wasn't made. I can understand there were probably pressures on the producers to get episodes transmitted on time, so you can't blame them for trying to salvage the material.

You can see where they were trying to go with Tara at the time, but she wasn't Gale or Peel, I understand why there were frustrations with her character's early episodes.

Obviously it would have been better if it had been completed in its original format, but what was cobbled together here was actually quite fun. Patrick Newell's Mother was entertaining enough, but Joyce Carey and Mary Merrall are great value as the crazy Aunts.

I preferred it to Whoever shot George and Have guns, will haggle.

6/10.

I can't add much to the spot on negative comments by other reviewers except to say that this episode is proof positive that the problem with this season was not Linda Thorson as Tara King. "Get rid of the lemon & bring back the Peel" was the battle cry for Diana Rigg fans, but there are some episode in which Ms. Thorson shines. The problem was the scripts, and this one is undoubtedly the worst.

In American TV series there is a tradition that each season has precisely one episode (sometimes referred to as a clip show episode) that consists almost completely of clips from earlier episodes. Typically this is done by making two or more protagonists reminisce about their exploits. As a 1960s British TV series, The Avengers thankfully does not follow this tradition. However, after a change of production teams one of the earliest Tara King episodes produced was reworked by the new team into something that has pretty much the same feel, even though there is only a small number of scenes taken from earlier episodes and most of the clips are original. (To the original episode that is, which unfortunately we can't watch instead.)

This episode is a bit of a counterexample to the principle that the quality of an experience is determined by the beginning, the end, its best moment, and its worst moment:

The beginning, a spoof of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), is extremely strong. The end, in which Steed is irritated by the fact that Mother's assistant never speaks, and tries to do something about it, is slightly better than the average Steed/King ending. The problem is that the beginning is also the high point, and is followed immediately by the low point: the set-up of the boring framework in which Mother tells the original story.

Despite these problems, I did enjoy this episode because there is enough of the original version left to be genuinely interesting. It's framed to make it ridiculous, but personally I don't mind. Ever since the days of Tara King's predecessor Mrs. Peel, the series has never taken itself very seriously anyway. I assume I would have enjoyed the original version even more, but apparently it is lost. (To be honest, the material that didn't make it into the clip show may have been awful; it seems unlikely, but we just don't know.)

The story told in the clip show concerns Intercrime, and is a continuation of Intercrime (1963), an episode of the era before the series was sold to the US, featuring Mrs. Peel's predecessor Mrs. Gale.

It is an episode where the writers were all sick so they recap all the previous episodes. So boring and feel so cheated I wrote my first review on IMDB. Dreadful.