Harry W Junkin

21 January 1970 (IMDb) or 3 March 1970 (epguides.com)

20 April in Wiltshire England

A sweaty man is in a train carriage. He gets a card from his pocket. How wacky – it’s in mirror writing.

But wait – it isn’t mirror writing – he gives it to a fellow passenger and he can read it perfectly. The sweaty man has some kind of mirror disease. Hence the sweat. Probably.

He goes to the address on the card but the street sign is backwards. He has the craziest illness ever. And parted hair – that’s going to be a problem. Two men are watching him and are ready to make a move when a couple of British Bobbies walk past. One of the men looks like Barry Letts.

He buggers about with a cigarette lighter – I think he feels no pain. Or has cold fingers. Either could be a symptom of his disease. Then the final insult – he looks over at the bed and who does he lying on it? Himself. He (imaginary version) laughs at him (real version).

More symptoms of what the title tells us must be some kind of nerve gas include –

Having too many hands.

Your bedroom being upside down.

When Halliday recovers, he’s grabbed almost immediately by the men who were following him. He wakes up in a much nicer bedroom than he’d had at the guest house. The door is locked but the French windows lead out into a pleasant garden. With a guard dog in it. A voice from the radio tells him he’s been brought somewhere. How very Prisoner.

Nearly eight minutes into the episode – Stewart is annoyed again – this time because he thinks Department S is turning into a missing persons’ beureau. Jason King is the voice of reason. In that tie.

Greg Halliday is only bloody played by Sir Anthony Hopkins. And I didn't recognise him because I don't think I've ever seen one of his films.

Elsewhere, Frederick Jaeger pops up as Arkwright but I don't know who that is unless it's the guy on the train who read the card for Halliday.

Colin Gordon is the sinister doctor - he was in "The Faceless Ones", "The Baron" and "Oh Brother!"

When an important person visits the team in their little office, Annabelle is basically the secretary – she announces his arrival, she opens the door, she introduces everyone and all those other important social functions which require ovaries.

"I checked all our routine sources" says lovely Annabelle.

"And got routine results" replies Jason. She sighs.

She gets very angry with Jason when he suggests she hasn’t processed enough data.

She wears a strange necklace on the outside of her coat. But then she’s found some more data to process so maybe she was distracted when she got dressed that morning.

Phwoar - nerve gas. Or just nothing sexy at all.

Jason is anti-chemical warfare. He hasn’t been this animated since he saw a picture of Hitler. Oh wait, the tinned pâté in the last episode – that got him riled too.

The doctor somehow mistakes this face for Jason being amused. Jason corrects him and says he is in fact terrified.

When they go round to see a member of the working class, Jason remembers to keep a tonne or so of metal between himself and the oily poor. Luckily, the garage man can tell them exactly where Halliday is being held prisoner.

Jason is appalled at the suggestion that they should book in to the health farm as guests because he could "afford to lose a couple of pounds". He says that would make him skinny.

This is what Jason wears to break into the health farm and blend in with his surroundings.

Halliday: "I could do with a bottle of brandy."

Jason: "I could do with a large one myself."

Snigger.

"Are you the Jason King who writes books?" askes the doctor. When he gets an affirmative he says "Must read one of them sometime" and quickly gets on with being a prick.

Stewart’s plan to cleverly work out where Halliday is involves putting large adverts in all the national newspapers and waiting for someone to come forward. Luckily, the chap from the teaser spots the pic and goes straight round to see Department S (in Paris?) He remembers the address on the card and Stew is straight round to see Halliday’s landlady. He annoys her almost immediately by being cross that she passed out when she was clobbered by a burglar.

He’s absolutely fine with playing chicken against the bad guys. Jason on the other hand looks like he’s about to sneeze. Who knew he was allergic to car crashes?

Having gone to the trouble of rescuing Halliday, Stewart cleverly makes him really suspicious by asking him where his store of nerve gas is. Halliday knocks Stewart out and escapes on a train. But it’s fine – with his bandages hand and sports coat Halliday will be easy to spot when leaving the train. As long as he doesn’t change his coat or cover his hand they’ll be laughing. Oh.

Sir Curtis meets the sinister doctor chap in a government car. The man is from a sinister research facility wants Department S to "take care" of Halliday – the sweaty man from act 1. Sir Curtis is appalled. Department S don’t kill people. People kill people.

Is that a missing backdrop or was the sky lower in the 1960s?

Once again the criticism is that this wasn’t a baffling mystery – any question about what had caused the man’s delusions was answered with the episode’s title. But although this could’ve been an episode of any series, it is still pretty good. Jason gets to be the focus and his repulsion at the mere idea of chemical warfare does sit well on the character. His earlier distaste at knives ("A Cellar Full of Silence") and his refusal to carry any sort of weapon puts him in the Steed class of civilised dandies. Stewart and Annabelle are purely functional and decorative (respectively) and it was episodes like this which made a Jason spin-off seem like a good idea. The anti-WMD angle is hammered home and while it gets a touch weary after a while it is still powerful and valid. Its lack of true resonance is caused by our blasé twenty first century attitude to such dilemmas not to any weakness in the script. It is pointless now to debate the morality of governments having poison gas when every terror group from animal rights activists to Islamic fundamentalists either have it or could get it easily enough.

So a good, exciting, well paced episode which largely abandoned the Department S format and trod a much more straightforward path. If Jason King (the series) had been more like this it might be better thought of. Jason King (the character) turns out to have far more depth than people thought.

Sir Anthony Bloody Hopkins folks