The second disc of the Thunderbirds series has 5 episodes. Here's the episodes.
The Mighty Atom 12-30-65
The Hood is back, this time he's sabotaging atomic energy plants. He also hopes to lure the International Rescue vehicles into the area so he can get his pictures and steal their ideas. At one point he uses a mechanical mouse to take pictures of the power plants. All he gets are pictures of the equipment's outer casings. How would that help him? Of course, he's doomed to failure but not before he's destroyed plenty.
Vault Of Death 12-23-65
The Bank of England has Parker crack their safe to show how poorly it works. He used to be a safe cracker before he went to prison. Now he's on the level and he works for Lady Penelope. The BoE then installs a new safe door with a special system that sucks all the air out of the vault. A man is trapped in there because he's stupid and the others didn't look in all the rooms. Now they need to open the door before the air is sucked out in two hours. The man with the special electronic key is dining at Lady Penelope's. There's a whole complicated bit of story that has Parker misunderstand, because he won't stop and listen, and that keeps them from getting back to the bank until nearly the last minute. We learn that Parker is a bit of ass and Lady P is the worst driver since the rich bitch in the episode with the giant tower building. The mayhem she causes is almost another job for IR.
Operation Crash-Dive 12-16-65
The Fireflash is crashing into the ocean. Some group is sabotaging the planes. You'd think they would have beefed up security but nope, someone keeps sneaking on to the planes and they can't figure it out. The guys from IR figure it out.
Move - And You're Dead 2-10-66
Alan Tracy returns the to world of auto racing with a special car Brain's developed. A rival decides to steal the car and he sets up an elaborate device to blow up Alan and his grandmother. They're out in the hot sun, on a bridge, with a motion detector that will detente the bomb if they move. Of course the Thunderbirds have to come from a long distance away and Alan gets a chance to fill us in on what happened in the form of flashbacks. The rival is a dumb creep and his plans to kill Alan aren't very good. The baddies manage to escape but they don't get to far before Thunderbird 1 takes some shots at them. They loose control of the car and drive off a handy cliff. No rescue for those guys as Thunderbird 1 drives off.
Martin Invasion 3-17-66
Turns out it's just a movie set, no invading Martians. The Hood traps a couple of actors in a cave to get International Rescue to come out. He plans to get film of their vehicles and sell them to a mysterious figure for $200 million. Again I'm wondering what the value is for film of some vehicles but nothing much of the inner workings. At one point the Hood calls the film "plans". Makes little sense, unless $200 million isn't much money in 2065. When the Hood does get away they chase him in Thunderbird 1, firing on his car, with little care about committing murder for their security. That's kind of troubling. They do make a point of showing the Hood climb out of the wreckage but nothing was shown to indicate what happened to the 2 guys in the stolen car in the racing episode.
Again the episodes suffer from padding a story out to fill an hour spot. Some of the story elements are pretty lame and there are dead spots when not much is happening. Read some tropes on the series on this website. The vehicles action and locations are usually pretty good. One of the problems that they seem to have is the smaller vehicles are way lighter than they should be and they just seem to bounce around too much. They all seemed filled with explosives that of on when they kit anything. Hardly any of the IR gear failed in these episodes. That's good, huh. I did read that the first few episodes had to have more material shot to pad them out to the hour long format. Originally they were going to be half hour episodes and Lew Grade wanted them to do an hour an episode when he saw the footage.
Comments