Zookeeper Martin Friend (back from The Gilded Cage) is upset to find that Snowy the white elephant has gone missing from the private zoo run by Noah Marshall (Godfrey 'film Dortmun' Quigley, returning from Hot Snow). Cathy's safari experience in Kenya is ideal for putting her onto the case as a potential new collector for the zoo.
Judy Parfitt returns from Bullseye as Noah's efficient - and therefore, instantly suspicious - secretary. Edwin 'Captain Hart' Richfield makes his third appearance as a supposedly missing anthropologist.
Rather like Second Sight, this story uses a lot of setup to tell what turns out to be a fairly simple story by about smuggling. John Lucarotti dresses it up with scenes at a gunsmith's (run by Bruno Barnabe, who was the BBC bloke in The Bowmans) and a supplier of human and animal restraints (principal saleslady, Rowena Gregory from Immortal Clay).
At least here the smuggled goods (ivory) have some connection with the rest of the plot. The actual reason for abstracting the elephant isn't very well explained: as far as I can work out, it's because she knew Lawrence and would have reacted to seeing him at the zoo, thus creating a disturbance not conducive to smuggling. But then, if it was so necessary for Lawrence to come to the zoo, why had the smuggling plan been able to operate successfully before now without him coming there?
There's some fairly good cold villainy from Richfield, and Scott Forbes as fellow-smuggler Conniston, and I liked Toke Townley's fussy gun craftsman. And you have to admire Quigley for being able to act with a real live parrot sitting on his shoulder in half the scenes.
The final scene is one of Cathy's rare but periodic disenchantments with her work with Steed: he presents her with an ivory carving, and she comments 'You always manage to win something, don't you?' Steed would probably understand the additional meaning of 'win' as an Army word for 'help oneself to'.
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