A Canadian plane crashes under mysterious circumstances in Ireland. Steed's leads take him to the Shamrock airport and a convent, while Dr. King performs autopsies on the dead passengers hoping to find a clue pointing to the wreck's cause. As this episode opens a flight from Montreal to Ireland is approaching its destination when the crew get a message claiming to be from air traffic control telling them that they are five minutes from arrival, not twenty as they believed, and are too high. They descend and the last thing they see is a headland; they try to pull up but the plane crashes and explodes. Steed and Dr King fly to Ireland to discover why the plane crashed and what happened to the £250,000 that was in the hold. Dr King goes to the local convent, where the bodies were taken, and it soon becomes apparent that there was one survivor; a stewardess who was found later some distance from the plane. There are a couple of other anomalies; the pilot was strangled and the co-pilot is missing. Later the stewardess is also murdered and Steed intends to call in the Garda but the convent's mother superior reminds Steed that he is in Ireland not England and the authorities will not be entering the convent. With a second flight carrying money due soon it is imperative that Steed and Dr King get to the bottom of the case swiftly.<br/><br/>This episode gets off to a great start with a plane crash with a death toll that is surprisingly high for this series. The actual crash may not be exciting by modern TV standards but for the shows age and budget it was pretty impressive. The plot was interesting; the villains are modern versions of the old wreckers only instead of luring ships onto the rocks they are luring planes into the ground. The setting was good; one could believe that a convent in '60s Ireland would be considered beyond the suspicions and reach of the law or at least that an Englishman might be persuaded that it was. There were a few surprises to be had; I certainly didn't expect the surviving stewardess to be murdered and the identity of the person behind the atrocity involves a good twist. Overall I found this to be a pretty impressive early 'Avengers' episode. Looking back at the early episodes of "The Avengers" is like looking at a completely different kind of series. Beside Patrick MacNee as John Steed there is nothing to remind you of what would become a cult classic, the British tongue-in-cheek humor, the artificial look, the mix of old and brand new fashions, the science fiction elements, and so on. Instead, we see many things which were completely forbidden from the Emma Peel-episodes onwards. <br/><br/>1. This installment starts out with a veritable plane crash that causes 38 deaths. After Emma Peel (EP for the rest of this review) entered the series such a mass murdering would have been impossible. <br/><br/>2. One stewardess survives only to be strangled later. From EP onwards no females get murdered (with one exception in a late EP episode). <br/><br/>3. We see practically no single outdoor scene although the whole story takes place in a secluded part of Ireland. (Later, in strong contrast to the outlandish stories, the series sports many real landscapes and outdoor scenes. Just think of the first episode with EP, "The Town with no Return".) <br/><br/>4. Speaking of Ireland, foreign locations are more the rule in the early episodes than an exception. (Although we hardly get to see much of it.) After EP appears not a single story has a location outside of England (although some play with the illusion of taking place somewhere else, e.g. "African Summer"). <br/><br/>5. This particular episode has a strong connection to Canada, which is also the case with other early episodes. The reason could be that Patrick MacNee worked as an actor and producer in Canada before he started in "The Avengers". <br/><br/>6. Religion was a no-no theme in the EP and Tara King episodes, here we have a convent and "nuns" with guns. <br/><br/>7. Steed has no female companion here but instead a male one, a Dr. King, which appears in three episodes.<br/><br/>In this episode we also have a rare personal comment by John Steed, telling that he flew a Lancaster throughout the war. This is picked up in the EP episode "The Hour that never was".<br/><br/>Overall, "Dead on Course" has many surprises for people who think they know what is coming. One drawback is the fact that all pre-EP episodes were videotaped and not filmed. The used film only for outdoor scenes and videotaped that later which looks simply awful! The scenes are sometimes oddly connected, when the stewardess got murdered, Dr. King and Steed are very relaxed that their only witness is death. For a few seconds one even believes that they have not found out yet! The ending is very fast paced, one hardly gets any answer to too many questions. There are no fight scenes and one explosion is happening off screen. But maybe this was a common thing in a 1962 TV series. On the other hand, John Steed already has some of his later antics, like joking about drinks with pub personnel. Worth seeing!
Elanmaur replied
295 weeks ago