A man is assassinated by his double, who then assumes his identity. Bizarrely this takes place in a holiday camp chalet, which gave me the unshakeable impression that he was one of the redcoats. I couldn't lose that idea however many times it was explained that he was Gordon, an agent taking a holiday there.
Meanwhile Paul 'The Marshal' Whitsun-Jones is taking Steed to visit Borowski (Terence 'Orum' Lodge) who has been driven insane by enemy brainwashing (a real perceived threat in the post-Korean war years). There are a couple of scenes like this and they're effectively unpleasant.
Steed listens carefully to Borowski's odd lucid remarks and realises that there may be a plot to replace British agents with doubles. So when Gordon's mutilated corpse apparently turns up, he gets the man's own doctor (Geoffrey Palmer back again) and dentist to identify the body. (Despite having said in The Golden Eggs that dental records weren't to be relied on).
But then it appears that Gordon's alive, so Steed travels to the holiday camp and has the medical and dental inspection done on him for good measure. Good bit of misdirection here where it might be suggested that Geoffrey Palmer's part of the plot.
Cathy joins Steed at the camp in search of two further imposters, but spends most of the time hanging round with Gordon's fiancée Julie (Gwendolyn Watts, who's in the background in most of the hospital Carry Ons). So when Steed may or may not himself have been replaced by a double, some quick thinking and mutual bluffing is called for to outmanoeuvre the imposters. Philip Anthony, who wants to see the Mars-Venus game in Dalek Master Plan, and George 'Haroud ed-Din' Little are among the villains. Coincidentally, Robert Lankesheer, also from The Crusaders, plays a holiday camp official.
There's a certain amount of predictability here, as soon as the 'doubles' motif became clear I knew that Steed would be doubled, and that we'd be left in doubt about whether or not the Steed we saw was the real one. I did however like the clever double-bluff he and Cathy use in the climactic scene. It's one of the episodes I had to watch three times before it properly made sense, which hasn't necessarily been a bad thing in previous cases in this Avengersthon.
Also there's some interesting moral ambiguity in the way Steed chooses to leave the imposter Gordon in place at the end, so he can be used as a channel for false intelligence. Cathy thinks this rather unfair on Julie, but Steed has an answer to that one too.
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