Gerald Kelsey

30 December 1969 (epguides.com) or 14 January 1970 (IMDb)

22^nd November in London, England

It’s late at night. A train pulls into the station. It is the titular last train to Redbridge. The guard yawns as he goes about his duties. A passenger…

…stares at a young lady’s legs.

She is not impressed by his boyish charms.

The passengers get off the train at the next station and the train goes about its business. However, at the next stop, something is amiss. A chirpy station employee gets on to liven everyone up and finds…

DEATH~!

The guard tries to rouse the passengers but finds they are all dead. He soon succumbs to some kind of gas in the carriage and collapses.

Who would poison a train load of people? Why poison a train load of people? There is only one person who can possibly solve this case – summon him and the two people he’ll drop before the spin-off arrives.

The train was filled with an experimental nerve gas. Sir Curtis doesn’t know why it was there or who could possibly have used it. But he wants to know.

Not strictly speaking a clue but the newspapers of the day could certainly get away with not having very much info on a big story.

Two men arrive – they’ve brought their own coffin – and try to steal a body. They only succeed in stealing a widow.

I don’t know what this is but it looks like retro-technology and that interests me strangely.

This is officially saucy. Five minutes in and our first glimpse of Jason King, bachelor of this parish, is him leering…

…at a girl’s legs.

If I didn’t occasionally do it too I would object most strongly.

Derek Newark will be familiar to anyone who has seen "100,000BC", "The Tribe of Gum", "An Unearthly Child", "Story A" or "Inferno". He plays one of the heavies.

Frank Forsyth plays Sawyer - he sounds familiar but I don't know why. He appeared in Carry On Again Doctor as "Mr Bean". He did the rounds in the 60s and 70s.

Bruce Boa has a voice-only cameo - he was Mr Hamilton in "The Waldorf Salad" which makes him iconic.

She has massive hair. This is well beyond Tara King now – this is officially huge.

She lets the widow be taken at gun point. Stewart tells her "The Department prefers dead heroes to live failures" which is nice. I suppose it makes the pension scheme more profitable.

When Jason disappears and isn’t at his home the next morning, Annabelle wistfully asks "I wonder what she’s like". It’s almost as if Jason being kidnapped was less likely than his ending up in the boudoir of an unknown female. What a low mind she must have. They cut to Jason in the dungeon with the widow which is visual irony.

She goes undercover (using her real name) as the secretary of the owner of the chemical company which made the gas. She piles her hair up so far that she looks like a beefeater.

Her new boss takes her out to dinner. Literally the second he puts the key in the ignition the dramatic excitement music starts. He pulls a gun on her and takes her prisoner. I’ve had dates like that.

Lots of perving over girls in miniskirts (see above).

Annabelle looks rather lovely in this green or yellow (possibly both) mini dress.

She spoils it later with this truly nauseating skirt. It looks like the tartan of the clan McHubbabubba.

Stewart attempts to rouse the sleeping Jason. Not only is this potentially homoerotic, it also gives a flash of manly chest hair for those who enjoy such things.

Jason gets a lead and goes to a house where a suspect was dropped off by a taxi driver. He gets half way through his description when he realises he’s talking to the man he’s after. He then blunders into a trap and gets knocked out.

He wakes up in a cellar with the kidnapped widow. Her husband was a telephone engineer for most of his career but for the last three months he’d been in business with "a friend called Grey".

When faced with a dungeon filling with gas, Jason’s first thought it to put his coat over the keyhole. When that doesn't work he decides to just ignore it. His cigarette remains unharmed throughout. Eventually the gas overcomes him and he appears to start trying to eat his own tie.

They carry him out of the gas-filled dungeon and leave him in a disused tunnel. He is delirious. We know this because he looks delirious.

He sees a poster about Nazis on the wall. We know from "A Cellar Full of Silence" that he isn’t keen on Nazis. If that wasn’t a trait shared by absolutely everyone of his age I’d almost mistake it for character depth.

Jason and the widow (a cabaret act if ever there was one) are taken out in their still delirious state. The widow is left to wander off and promptly mown down by a car. Not great. Luckily, they don’t try the same trick with Jason. The car would probably bounce off his aftershave.

Instead they take him out to a jetty (is this a jetty? I would’ve said "small pier" but you would’ve immediately thought of Colin Moynihan and that would never do). He totters along it and eventually plops in like the drunken old fool he isn’t. I bet it’s not the first time Jason had fallen in the drink after a night out and I don’t think it will be the last.

He’s fished out of the water and taken to hospital. They diagnose he must’ve been heavily drugged. We know that – there is no way a sentient Jason would wear that.

The poster turns out to be valuable – Jason babbles about "Stop Hitler Now" and only a fool would fail to put two and two together.

Eventually he does – disused Underground stations. He then turns out to be a railway geek as he can name all the stations which were open during the war and are closed in 1969. Alas, he refers to the "Central Line" as the "Central London Line" which is too revoltingly trans-Atlantic for words.

In our first meeting with Jason he’s driving his latest pretty young thing about in his sports car. He mentions what Mark Caine would do and she asks "Who is this Mark Caine you keep talking about?" Jason is appalled. She gets a potted history and turns out to be extremely keen on Mark Caine. If Jason is to have any hope of getting inside her knickers he has to convince her that the former is based on the latter.

In the same scene, Jason is stopped by the police and assumes the honest, hard working constable wants his autograph.

We first meet Stewart in this fetching brown ensemble at the mortuary. He’s been looking at the bodies. Or possibly just some bodies. He may have a fetish.

His first meeting with Sir Curtis is in a car, his second is jogging against back projection. The car is more convincing. Interestingly, he wears a RED~! tracksuit top. Unless the back projection made brown look like red. It is entirely possible.

A rather good twist at the half hour mark saves what had been a fairly dull episode so far. The bad guys have been tapping phone calls and eventually hit upon the one they wanted – the hotline between Downing Street and the White House.

Taylor was a member of the gang but he had turned on them and threatened to expose the whole operation. To silence him they filled his compartment with gas and killed both Taylor and a dozen innocents. What could be worth all this? What? What?

The President is going to make an announcement which will affect the world gold price. Back in those days he’d always inform Number 10 of his plans in advance. The chemical guy is also a gold trader and with advanced warning of the news he would clean up.

It all goes pear shaped when the call is scrambled using a new scrambler. There’s always one thing you overlook. The chemical guy is appalled.

A fight breaks out – it’s about the only thing Department S do to foil the plan – most of it was already foiled before they arrived.

The teaser isn't especially baffling but it makes perfect sense by the end. The explanation also makes perfect sense but just feels unsatisfying. I know the stakes were high but we feel a little let down when we find out it was all done for that. Especially when the plot is foiled so accidentally. There is some good acting from Peter Wyngarde - we really do feel sorry for the bemused Jason and it is to Wyngarde's credit that he let Jason be portrayed so pathetically. It all ticks along nicely and fits together so it deserves a few points.