Mrs Peel and Steed are on their way to a decommissioning party at his old airfield, but things don't go smoothly. Their car crashes, and when they walk onto the base they find it deserted. This starts off in vaguely Prisoner territory - then veers off into what's made to seem like Sapphire & Steel-style timeslips, with stopped clocks and sequences of events repeating themselves invisibly. It's great to see that the Mrs Peel era can do 'serious' if it wants to.
The pacing of this episode is again excellent - there's a very long stretch where Steed and Mrs Peel are the only living people we see; then the silence is broken by the terrible vibrations, then the personable tramp Hickey (Roy Kinnear returning from Esprit de Corps) appears. And then suddenly the base bursts into life with the long-expected party, which excellently seems unbearably raucous by comparison.
And then, once again, having shown its hand and had the chief villain do his exposition, the ep has nothing else to show except a big fight. Quite an amusing fight, with laughing gas etc, but still just another big fight.
Steed's war service has changed rather since Death of a Batman - back then he was just in the despised I Corps army of occupation in 1945, now he was not only serving during the real war, but he was explicitly an agent in training then.
Ray Austin returns from The Gravediggers, Gerald Harper from Death Dispatch, Daniel Moynihan from Man With Two Shadows. Fred Haggerty, who plays the milkman, is briefly in Hammer Into Anvil.
