The executives of several ceramics companies are being driven crazy or killed by fear. The trail leads to a consulting company with some unusual techniques for helping their clients beat their competition. When four executives from leading ceramic companies are driven mad Steed discovers that another pottery owner, Jeremy Raven, had requested that they merger but was refused. He had engaged a consultancy firm, Business Efficiency Bureau, to boost his factory, unaware of their deadly means of eliminating the opposition. Steed poses as a travel agent to trap them, naming Emma as his business rival. I'm pretty much in agreement with the weaknesses pointed out by laika-lives in another post but I don't think those weaknesses undermine the story that much. Of course it's unbelievable that every one of the victims can be driven made by exposure to a minor example of the thing they irrationally fear. One spider? One bird? One MOUSE? It requires not simply the suspension of disbelief. It means you have to wrench its head off and contaminate its neck cavity.<br/><br/>And it does exemplify a formula that was to be used repeatedly and had in fact already been used in "From Venus With Love." But that's a concern mainly for completists. Seen in isolation, and given the available budget, it's still a lot of fun and has the same quotient of wit as most of the other episodes. Emma Peel does some sculpting in this one, wearing a jump suit with cut-outs over the iliac crests. And there are the usual low-key gags. She and Steed are draped over one of her half-finished stone sculptures, Mrs. Peel says something like, "I suppose we'll have to put some PRESSURE on them," then bangs mallet on chisel and a bit of dust flies into Steed's face. Two episodes in, and 'The Avengers - in colour' looks like a programme already struggling to come up with new ideas. The glory of the previous, monochrome season is that anything could happen - the style ranged from po-faced thrillers to knock-about comedies, from the real world of insider trading to psychic plants from outer space. It observed no formula.<br/><br/>Maybe that splashy declaration of colour that now opened the series went to everybody's head, or maybe getting Philip Levene to write so many of the episodes in a short space of time strained his imaginative resources, but suddenly, 'The Avengers' was predictable. 'From Venus With Love' set the formula. A series of characters are killed in surreal fashion. The Avengers, investigating, manage to trace the connection, which leads them to the lair of the eccentric villain. Mrs Peel is captured, Steed arrives and rescues her, and there is a big final fight. It would serve the series again, with minor variations, in 'Escape in Time', 'The Winged Avenger', 'The Hidden Tiger', 'The Correct Way to Kill' and 'Something Nasty in the Nursery'.<br/><br/>'The Fear Merchants' is the worst of these, with only one slight originality to differentiate it - rather than killing their victims, the villains are driving them insane. Unfortunately, neither writer Philip Levene nor director Gordon Flemyng seem to have any idea how to present this plot in televisual terms. 'The Avengers' was one of the first series to tell stories visually, but this episode fails to do so almost completely.<br/><br/>The whole basis of this episode is that the characters are being literally scared out of their wits. The visual potential for this is extraordinary, yet neither Flemyng nor Levene do anything with it. The exception is the opening, as an agoraphobic man wakes up in a deserted football stadium, filled with the sound of an absent crowd. Nothing else lives up to this magnificently eerie sequence, mainly because the phobias exploited simply aren't visually interesting, but also because they don't convince as sufficiently terrifying to drive men into the asylum. So a man with a phobia of mice… finds one in his jacket. Just one. Similarly, a single spider is dangled over another character, and a third encounters a single bird. Didn't the budget stretch to multiple animals? The mouse, after all, doesn't do much but sit there, and the spider is obviously plastic. We're supposed to believe these rather gentle exposures are enough to drive even phobics crazy? At least the bird sequence is better directed - the bird is kept off screen and evoked through sound effects, and the room is kept dark.<br/><br/>It isn't really a case of realism, but visual power. We can accept that the agoraphobe is driven mad because that sequence convincingly evokes something overwhelming. None of the others do (the speed sequence has a better chance, but blows it through overacting, bland direction and obvious use of speeded up film). Why did Levene not utilise similar phobias that could be done more simply - such as claustrophobia or acrophobia (the fear of heights) - rather than this tiresome use of animals (he'll later use cats as weapons in 'The Hidden Tiger' to much greater effect, and the bird here sets up an odd avian motif that runs through the early part of the season - see also 'The Bird Who Knew Too Much' and 'The Winged Avenger')? Why didn't he trap Fox in a room full of mice, or cover Raven in spiders? <br/><br/>His rather off-hand approach to the apparent theme of this episode is confirmed when the villains attempt to bump off Steed by… luring him into a pit and dumping soil on him with a JCB. Which has what to do with fear, exactly? If it were a little more claustrophobic, it could have been turned into a nightmare of live burial, but the pit is practically a quarry. It's also obviously illogical - where does Steed hide that the bad guy can't see him? It's hard to surprise someone in a hole in the ground; this is a real stinker of a loophole because it is explicitly visual - we can see that Steed can't jump out of anywhere and surprise his attacker, and Flemyng does nothing to hide that.<br/><br/>The villains are maybe the only really successful bit of the episode, bar the opening. Patrick Cargill is, to a certain extent, repeating his politely lethal bad guy from 'The Murder Market' - but he's effective nonetheless. The moment when he threatens a seemingly fearless Mrs Peel with the ultimate fear - 'pain' - is the one moment when Levene's script actually seems to get to the heart of its own subject. Annette Carrell's Dr. Voss, with her sunglasses, white lab coat and ginger helmet of hair, is maybe the most visually striking thing in the episode, along with the bright, immaculately white lair she and Cargill inhabit - a set that actually serves as a neat clue to Cargill's own fear. It's also a nice twist on expectations that their concealed lie detector enables them to see through Steed's cover.<br/><br/>Other than the villains, there isn't a single memorable character in support. Raven comes close to being an interesting eccentric, but the actor is obviously miscast in the role of a young go-getter. All the others are mere fear-fodder, with good actors like Bernard Horsfall and Jeremy Burnham wasted in bland roles. Without interesting characters, all the viewer is left with to support the incredibly attenuated plot is a repetitious series of poorly realised 'phobia' sequences - although Flemyng manages one interesting moment when Steed visits Raven in the asylum. The extreme camera angles he uses aren't merely showily 'weird', but actually evoke Raven's alienation quite nicely.<br/><br/>This, at least, is the nadir of the Diana Rigg episodes. Although many other episodes would follow the formula, none would be quite as dull as this again.
Cherisama replied
293 weeks ago