The Mysterons
"The Mysterons" is the first episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and produced by their company Century 21 Productions. Written by the Andersons and directed by Desmond Saunders, it was first officially broadcast on 29 September 1967 on ATV Midlands, although it had received an unscheduled test screening in the London area five months earlier.
Set in 2068, the series depicts Earth at war with Mysterons: a race of Martians with the ability to create functioning doubles of destroyed people or objects, which they then use to carry out specific acts of aggression. Earth is defended by a military organisation called Spectrum, whose foremost agent, Captain Scarlet, is a Mysteron double that regained the consciousness of the original, human officer. Scarlet has powers of self-repair that allow him to recover from even fatal injuries, making him Spectrum's top asset in its fight against the Mysterons.
The first episode begins with a group of human astronauts destroying the Mysteron city on Mars due to a misunderstanding, only for the aliens to reconstruct their settlement. The Mysterons then declare a "" on humanity, intending to destroy high-profile targets one after the other. On Earth, Captain Scarlet and fellow Spectrum officer Captain Brown are killed in a road accident and replaced with Mysteron doubles programmed to carry out the aliens' first threat – the assassination of the World President.
"The Mysterons" was filmed in January 1967. The finished episode differs significantly from the Andersons' pilot script, particularly with regard to Captain Scarlet's biology as a Mysteron double. Patrick McGoohan was approached to voice the World President but scheduling conflicts and budget constraints precluded his casting. The episode was well received by the voice cast at the time of production and has since been praised by critics. It has drawn comment for its levels of violence, particularly during a scene in which Brown's double physically explodes.
The Century 21 mini-album Introducing Captain Scarlet, released in September 1967, is an audio re-telling of the episode that expands on various aspects of the plot. In 1980, the episode was re-edited for inclusion in the Captain Scarlet compilation film Captain Scarlet vs. the Mysterons.
Plot
In 2068, the crew of the Zero-X spacecraft land on the surface of Mars in the Martian Exploration Vehicle to locate the source of unidentified radio signals detected by the Spectrum security organisation on Earth. The source is revealed to be an alien city inhabited by the Mysterons, a collective artificial intelligence with powers over matter. The astronauts mistake the Mysterons' surveillance towers for gun batteries, and the mission leader, Spectrum officer Captain Black, orders Lieutenant Dean to fire on the city using the MEV's rocket launcher. Although the city is seemingly obliterated, the Mysterons use their powers to reverse the damage. They then seize control of Black and declare a "war of nerves" on humanity, stating that their first act of retaliation will be to assassinate Earth's World President. When the Zero-X returns to Earth, Black mysteriously disappears.Spectrum's Captain Scarlet and Captain Brown are ordered to escort the President to the Spectrum Maximum Security Building in New York City but are both killed when the Mysterons use their powers to engineer the crash of the officers' Spectrum Patrol Car. From the corpses, the Mysterons create living duplicates of Scarlet and Brown programmed to carry out the threat against the President. The aliens make their first attempt on the President's life by turning Brown into a walking bomb, which explodes inside the Maximum Security Building. Although the President escapes unharmed, the building is completely destroyed.
On Spectrum's airborne headquarters, Cloudbase, Spectrum commander-in-chief Colonel White concludes that Brown was a traitor and had a bomb on his person. Unaware of Scarlet's true nature, White orders him to fly the President to a second Maximum Security Building in London. When Brown's body is discovered at the scene of the SPC crash, White realises that the President is in the hands of an impostor, and orders that Scarlet return his Spectrum Passenger Jet to Cloudbase. Ignoring the order, Scarlet ejects himself and the President over southern England. On the ground, he steals a car and sets off towards London with the President hostage.
Captain Blue obtains a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle from a garage and follows Scarlet. Meanwhile, the Spectrum Angel fighter squadron destroy a bridge to force Scarlet to the top of London Car-Vu, a car parking structure 800 feet tall. Watching from a derelict building, Captain Black telepathically orders Scarlet to await the arrival of Spectrum Helicopter A42, which has been hi-jacked by the Mysterons and will take Scarlet and President to an undisclosed location. Reaching the top of the Car-Vu, Blue dons a jet pack and prepares to engage Scarlet. He is fired on by the helicopter, which is shot down by Destiny Angel and crashes into the Car-Vu, fatally damaging the structure. Blue shoots Scarlet, who falls from the Car-Vu to his apparent death on the streets below. Blue then lifts the President to safety just before the Car-Vu collapses.
On Cloudbase, White addresses his staff, announcing that the Mysteron plot has been foiled. He then reveals that Scarlet's double has inexplicably recovered from his fatal injuries and is seemingly no longer under Mysteron control. White suggests that Scarlet's power of recovery makes him "indestructible" and that he is destined to become Spectrum's greatest asset in its war with the Mysterons.
Production
"The Mysterons" was written by the husband-and-wife team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, assisted by series script editor Tony Barwick. The Andersons devised the formats and characters of all the Supermarionation series and wrote most of the pilot episodes. The presence of the Zero-X Martian Exploration Vehicle, first seen in the film Thunderbirds Are Go, was intended to mark a transition between Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, which are set in the same fictional universe.The pilot script, written in August 1966, differs significantly from the episode as filmed. Originally, it was conceived that Captain Scarlet would be revived by means of an advanced computer. The pilot script also gave deeper insight into Scarlet's Mysteron biology, stating that after resurrection he is no longer truly human but a "mechanical man".
Between pre-production and filming, the series' approach to voice casting changed. Originally, each episode was to have featured a "guest star" character voiced by a well-known actor. In the case of the first episode, the World President was to have been voiced by Patrick McGoohan, whom the puppet was sculpted to resemble. However, McGoohan was unable to commit to the episode, and the "guest star" idea was later abandoned due to budget constraints.
After two months of pre-production, filming began on 2 January 1967 with Desmond Saunders as director. Although "The Mysterons" was the only episode of Captain Scarlet that Saunders directed, he served as "supervising series director" for the rest of the production. The incidental music was recorded by series composer Barry Gray in a four-hour studio session held on 16 March 1967, where it was performed by an ensemble of 16 instrumentalists.
The script posed several technical challenges for Century 21's puppet and special effects departments. Captain Scarlet's "grimacing" head, which is briefly shown when the character is shot by Blue, was sculpted especially for this episode. For the opening scene, in which the Mysteron city appears "blurred", a sheet of glass was placed in front of miniature model set; Vaseline was then smeared onto the glass to distort light. The model shots of Captain Blue's SPV travelling up the Car-Vu's spiral ramp were made simpler to film by rotating the set rather than the SPV model, thus eliminating the need move the camera or pull the model on wires. The model of Helicopter A42 was filmed upside-down on wires fitted to its underside so as to avoid the spinning blades; footage of the model was then flipped in post-production. A scene in which the President and Captain Brown undergo security checks at the Maximum Security Building was particularly difficult to film as it was essential that the puppet operators, working from an overhead gantry, kept pace with the conveyor belt powering the moving walkway on which the puppets were standing. In his DVD audio commentary for "The Mysterons", Gerry Anderson recalled that as it was the first episode to be filmed, "everything had to be perfect" on a technical level.
The title "The Mysterons" does not appear on screen; however, the opening shot features a caption that reads "Mars2068 A.D." While some sources consider this to be the title, the episode is referred to in all production documentation as "The Mysterons". Chris Bentley rejects "Mars2068 A.D." as the title, noting that the title captions in the series' other episodes use a different Microgramma font.
Broadcast
"The Mysterons" was first broadcast as an unscheduled, late-night test transmission on 29 April 1967. This was restricted to the London area and did not include a break for advertisements. The episode had its official premiere on 29 September 1967 on ATV Midlands, for which it attracted viewing figures of 0.45 million – a number considered "promising".For its first network broadcast, held on BBC Two in 1993, the episode drew an audience of four million, making it the channel's third most-watched programme of the week. The episode was later screened as part of a Gerry Anderson-themed night of programming on BBC Four in January 2008, when it was seen by 0.35 million viewers.
In the episode, the MEV crew fire on the Mysteron city after they mistake the Mysterons' surveillance towers for gun batteries. When the series was repeated on Central Television in the 1980s, this scene was re-edited to remove a voice-over in which the Mysterons allude to rotating the towers to "take a closer look" at the MEV. As a result, this version makes the Mysterons appear more aggressive.
Reception
James Stansfield of the website Den of Geek ranks "The Mysterons" the fourth-best episode of the series, concluding that the first instalment "had it all ... Exciting and dramatic, you knew you'd be watching next week." He particularly praises the episode's "kick-ass action", describing the Car-Vu gunfight as "hair-raising" and the crash of Spectrum Helicopter A42 as "impressive". Stansfield argues that the episode's central theme is one of "misunderstanding, and the consequences of such actions". He points out that the attack on the Mysteron city is motivated by fear of the unknown, which is implied to be an aspect of the human condition: for destruction is "what all humans do when faced with something they know nothing about".The episode was positively received by members of the voice cast and their families when they attended a preview screening at Century 21 Studios in 1967. Francis Matthews, the voice of Captain Scarlet, recalled that "the moment we heard, 'This is the voice of the Mysterons,' my eldest son ran screaming from the room, but my other son just sat there riveted." He added: "Reg said, 'Oh my God, what have we done? We've made a series that no children are going to watch!'" The episode was also given a cinema-style at the Columbia Theatre on London's Shaftesbury Avenue, which Gary Files, a supporting voice actor on later Captain Scarlet episodes, fondly remembers: "I looked at with total and utter amazement ... Boy, you should have seen it on the wide screen! They had laid in an incredible soundtrack to go with it ... We all tottered out into the night, convinced that we were on to a winner." In his DVD commentary, Gerry Anderson praised Saunders' direction.
Reviewers in 1993 were satisfied, if somewhat bemused, by the first episode of the then 25-year-old series. In a preview dated 1 October, the day of the episode's first broadcast on BBC Two, James Rampton of The Independent wrote: "The best thing about the programme is that it's just as ludicrous as you remembered: the lips bizarrely out of synch with the words, the strange uniformity of features... and the totally preposterous dialogue. Highly recommended." In a review printed in the same newspaper two days later, Allison Pearson was comically critical of certain design aspects, such as the surface of Mars, the exterior of the Mysteron city and the London Car-Vu model. However, she also described the episode as being part of a "classic Sixties puppet show."
Stephen La Rivière, author of Filmed in Supermarionation: a History of the Future, notes the violence of several scenes, such as the murders of the original Scarlet and Brown, Scarlet's bleeding body and the graphic demises of Scarlet's and Brown's Mysteron doubles. Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, authors of The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, highlight Brown's conversion into a living bomb as an example of the series' occasionally "incredibly violent" nature. Andrew Blair of Den of Geek describes the explosion of Brown as "quite an unnerving thing to watch" but regards the episode in general as being "tailor-made to appeal to small boys and men-children." In 2001, the BBFC certified the episode U, noting that it contains a single instance of "very mild" violence.
Re-edited versions
Various scenes from "The Mysterons" appear as flashbacks in the later Captain Scarlet episodes "Winged Assassin", "Dangerous Rendezvous" and "Traitor". In 1980, the New York branch of distributor ITC Entertainment re-edited the episode for inclusion in Captain Scarlet vs. the Mysterons, a Captain Scarlet compilation film for which it serves as the introduction.The episode is re-told in the audio play Introducing Captain Scarlet, a Century 21 mini-album that features excerpts from the soundtrack. The play ends with the discovery that Scarlet's double has mysteriously returned to life and the suggestion that his allegiance to Earth can be restored with the help of an advanced computer.