Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

Normally, with a plot like this, the audience would not be informed until the end that, yes, the good guy is still the good guy. Here, with a title like "Special Assignment" and Col. White bringing Scarlet back to a private discussion of said assignment, it was utterly obvious what was going on.



The matter of knowing when to send an undercover agent in, and to whom, could have been dealt with by tucking in a few lines about Spectrum Intelligence. They could have discovered the wrecked car and the dead men, found that they were questionable characters to begin with, and learned that their dopplegangers had been sighted. That would have given Col. White an excuse to throw in an agent to see how they would react--but it shouldn't have been Scarlet. Making the agent Scarlet made both Spectrum AND the Mysterons look like fools. Would Spectrum really be silly enough to throw aside its "most valuable asset" because he dropped a little more cash than he could comfortably afford? And the Mysterons were willing to believe this? Powerful beings they may be, but rather lacking in brains.



This would have been a nice opportunity to make use of one of the other captains. Captain Magenta, whose "official biography" gives him a criminal background, would have been ideal. Scarlet could have been involved--just from behind the scenes. If it had to be the star of the show, then it would have been much more plausible if they'd shown Scarlet, faced with disciplinary action--a demotion, perhaps--choosing to quit, instead.



There were other flaws. Col. White claimed that he didn't tell Captain Blue and the others about the assignment because he wanted their reactions to be "natural". For the most part, their reactions took place up on Cloudbase, where there were no Mysterons to see. (At least, let's hope so.) It's insulting to think that Captain Blue and the others could not play a role as well as Scarlet, and the result was that Blue nearly got himself killed. What if the other Mysteron agents had opted to shoot Blue themselves, rather than testing Scarlet?



Col. White also makes the statement that gambling is strictly forbidden to Spectrum agents. This makes no sense. If it were so, Blue would have steered Scarlet clear of the casino in the first place, rather than simply protesting when Scarlet continued betting after he was cleaned out. And at the end of the episode, Lt. Green asks Scarlet to assist him with a betting system he worked out on the computer--with Col. White right there!



This show has a lot of nits, which are fun to point out without detracting from the enjoyment of the program, but in this case the flaws pretty much overwhelm the episode.

This episode would a good Scarlet-goes-undercover story if it wasn't for one huge plothole. That is, who Colonel White knew that there would be two Mysterons at the casino he sent Scarlet to on that night and that they would be needing an ex-Spectrum officer to get them an SPV. Without some answers or explanations to this, the rest of the episode falls flat on it's face. Even more unexplanable is why the Mysterons even needed Scarlet to get the SPV in the first place, especially when he didn't even use his ID. Captain Black demonstrated in Manhunt that he still knew where SPVs were kept, so he could easily have punched out the guy guarding the SPV in this episode just as Scarlet did. Apparently, there is still a Mysteron mechanic working at a garage that no one knows about as well. The ending with the SPV emitting smoke and being attacked by the Angels is the best part, but without the above questions answered it doesn't make much difference to the state of this episode.