An episode strangely light on regulars. Unlike Captain Scarlet, which often had episodes with but a handful of regulars involved, Thunderbirds was more likely to try to aim for more of a full set.

The Sidewinder vehicle / a helicopter flying over a forest / the sidewinder falling over / the helicopter hovering over a smoking pit / the flaming sidewinder wreckage / a bloke wearing an oxygen mask being lowered into the pit / a man with his face in bandages lying on a stretcher / Thunderbird 2 coming in to land / Virgil in a protective suit in the pit / the Mole burrowing into the ground / an explosion / a recovery vehicle buggy trundling out of the Thunderbird 2 pod / the Sidewinder being dragged up a slope.

A more dramatic selection of clips than those used in the episode 1 teaser, though this collation has the problem of giving away much of the story straight away, especially as Pit of Peril is probably one of the most simplistic episodes of the series.

The US Army is testing the new Sidewinder, a gigantic crab-like vehicle designed to be able to make its way through jungles unimpeded. However, during the tests the Sidewinder crosses an unstable area of ground which disintegrates under its weight and the vehicle, and its crew of three, falls down a pit 300 feet in depth onto its side and into a burning inferno of 220 degrees Fahrenheit and rising. No heavy-lifting gear could reach the area in less than two weeks and improvised attempts to rescue the trapped men prove unsuccessful. It looks as though International Rescue may have to be called to the scene but can they save the three men inside the Sidewinder before they suffocate or burn to death?

The crew of the Sidewinder consists of three men, all of whom are very obviously voiced by Tracy Brother voice artists (they sound like John, Scott and Gordon). Also, the main one, named Sweeney, is the same puppet as used for Captain Hanson from the last episode.

The small contingent of military forces on the scene makes several attempts to rectify the situation, all of them pitiful. Lieutenant Meade volunteers to go on a reconnaissance into the pit to check out the dangers, being winched downwards from a helicopter wearing no protective clothing at all other than an oxygen mask. He manages to have a quick look around before being horribly burnt, whereupon he's winched out of the pit, given medical attention and tells them as much information as they had already without the fool going down there. Plucky young Sergeant Reynolds then suggests going down into the pit to attach a gigantic hook and cable to one of the legs of the Sidewinder so that the helicopter can haul the Sidewinder upright, whereupon it could try to climb out of the pit. Despite General Peters saying a few minutes ago that the Sidewinder, weighing 500 tonnes, would be too heavy to be moved by any equipment they had to hand, including the poxy helicopter, he lets this plan go ahead presumably because he wants to see another of his men getting horribly burnt and scarred. Unsurprisingly, this plan is not a success: the cable is successfully attached but breaks when the helicopter tries to haul the Sidewinder up, letting it fall back and explode again. Reynolds does indeed get horrifically injured as well and yet again a character says "It was a good try!" after an absolutely miserable plan backfires. It also seems strange that when a character yells out "Winch up! Aaaaaghhh!" the pilot only activates the winch and doesn't make the helicopter hover upwards, which would get the poor buggers out of the pit much more quickly. Unbelievably, Ralph, one of the army guys in charge, suggests having a third attempt before, mercifully, he suddenly decides to call International Rescue instead. Thank God for that.

After Scott surveys the pit with a mobile camera (no horrible burnings!), Brains works out a plan of attack which goes ahead mostly flawlessly. Virgil is winched into the pit - wearing a protective heat-resistant suit - to strategically place charges everywhere to destroy the topsoil covering the pit in order to create a better slope up which to drag the Sidewinder. Scott buries into the pit using the Mole and collects Virgil, the charges go off, the pit is widened and Virgil then uses two recovery vehicles from Thunderbird 2's pod to pull the Sidewinder out of the pit using magnetic clamps.

The small recovery vehicles find it difficult to drag the Sidewinder out; the remote control one skids and slides all over the place (note to Brains: radio controlled pod vehicles don't work). One magnetic clamp also fails and has to be fired again. Other than that, though, the plan goes ahead perfectly.

The Sidewinder crew are contacted by radio and told that Sergeant Reynolds intends to be winched into the pit to slip a line over one of the Sidewinder's legs. Sweeney muses that if it worked the Sidewinder could be hauled upright and it could try and climb out of the pit. Meanwhile, the inferno rages outside…

Thunderbird 1 takes off and begins to fly to the danger zone.

Brains explains the situation to Scott and Virgil and works out that the remaining level of topsoil over the pit must be destroyed so that the Sidewinder can be dragged out of the pit.

An odd collection, none of which are cliffhangers at all; they all predict good things happening. Hum.

Scott recites his "We must not be tracked, secrecy must be maintained at all costs!" speech at the end of the episode, though the General is on first name terms with him. Well done, Scott.

GENERAL: "Just look at that thing! It's like a monster from another planet!"

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The names given to some of the army guys tend to hinder the dialogue somewhat. When General Peters calls Sweeney in the Sidewinder for the first time, his drawl had me convinced that he'd called him "sweetie". And talking to Lieutenant Meade lends the following oddity: "I don't know me!"

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GENERAL: "What's keeping those boys? It's about time we had some action from them!"

No terrible comedy at all.

No decent dialogue either.

GENERAL: "Hold on, Lieutenant. You can make it."

You've just lowered a man wearing nothing more than a boiler jacket and a small mask into a blazing inferno, without even a helmet to cover the rest of his face and head, and you think he can make it? Have you any relation to Colonel White? You'd both get on very well.

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GENERAL: "If only we weren't so darn far from civilisation we'd stand a remote chance of affecting a rescue!"

RALPH: "Rescue. You said rescue, General! That's the answer. Yeah. That's the answer."

"Yeah… saving those men's lives! What a novel concept! I was going to let 'em burn but I think you're onto something!"

John is listening in on the first reconnaissance attempt and gives Tracy Island the nod. Afterwards he keeps the relevant frequency on "priority monitoring". Once International Rescue are requested, Scott immediately blasts off in Thunderbird 1, whereupon he's given all the details about the situation by John in Thunderbird 5… making Thunderbird 1's use utterly redundant. The whole point of the blasted thing is to get Scott somewhere really quickly so that he can call back to base and tell them what equipment they'll need; if John and his clipboard can do all that then what on Earth is the point of Thunderbird 1?

Anyway, Virgil flies off in Thunderbird 2 with the relevant pod vehicles, whereupon we come to a typical rescue situation: Virgil is the one who does all the dangerous stuff and risks life and limb (going into the pit, laying mines, avoiding fires, being inside the piddly little recovery vehicles that look like they could be dragged into the pit to oblivion at any moment) whilst Scott does the easy stuff (sits in the Mole for a while). Then Scott hangs around at the end so that he can reap all the compliments and platitudes from the Sidewinder crew and General Peters, despite having done sod all; they didn’t even know that Virgil and Brains were even there!

She's probably still desperately attempting to get low interest loans to pay off the mortgage on the mansion, so doesn't appear.

When Scott suggests shooting over to the pit to help out, Jeff states that they can't stick their noses in uninvited just in case it's a top secret operation, which seems a bit odd; it's highly likely that International Rescue will be needed so why doesn't he just let Scott and Virgil fly to the general area and land a couple of miles away? It would save a lot of time. Jeff's attitude to these protocols are often very vague and likely to waver between rescues; it's like having Jim Hacker in charge of your elite rescue team.

Brains goes out on a rescue for the first time (and, indeed, before three of the Tracy brothers get to) though only sits around inside a laboratory seemingly secreted inside the Thunderbird 2 pod. Does every pod have a lab like that? From some blurry footage of the inside of the pit and of a piece of metal with "US Army" on it he creates an elaborate theory about the pit once being a mine used by the army as a dump for military equipment, Virgil wildly speculating that this probably occurred after WWII (though he has absolutely no evidence at all to back up this claim). Apparently the pit was filled, a crust of topsoil formed above it and spontaneous combustion (!!!) created the inferno. This really isn't one of Brains' better theories. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that it doesn't make any sense at all. Brains also seems to have developed a lisp, an accent that dodges its way around Kansas and he looks frequently as if he's on the verge of bursting into tears.

Thunderbird 1 is equipped with a mobile camera, a dinky little flying thingy which was built to withstand intense heat and emits a funny noise wherever it goes. It turns up once more a few episodes down the line in which it's used to spy on British Telecom.

We also get a few pod vehicles thrown into the fracas. First off there's everybody's favourite: the Mole. This is the one that most people seem to remember, despite the fact that it only gets used on three occasions (though appears as a slide in the closing credits of every episode from now on). It does look like an impressive beast and brings to mind a similar vehicle from At the Earth's Core (Doug McClure and Peter Cushing team up for prehistoric hijinks). The Mole itself is the cylindrical device, sat atop the platform and tread; it gets raised upwards and then burrows down through the ground. How it boosts itself backwards without a drill on the opposite side is a complete mystery to me. Reverse motors? Reversed footage, more like.

The recovery vehicles, meanwhile, are one-hit wonders similar to the elevator cars from the last episode in that Virgil mans one himself whilst controlling another via radio control. They're bizarre little buggy things that hold two cannons each. These blast out strong magnetic clamps, whereupon the vehicles reverse frantically and try to drag the Sidewinder up and out of the pit. Seeing as the combined weight of the vehicles is probably a fifth of the Sidewinder's, this rescue is of course quite impossible. Still, so is the idea of anybody falling for Alan.

The 500 tonne Sidewinder's a pretty nifty looking thing (though tends to look better in photographs than when actually moving about onscreen) but I can't see how it could be of any practical use. It makes its way through the jungle by wrenching trees from the ground with its crocodile-clip arms, so it's not exactly environmentally friendly, and it also seems quite fragile and liable to get its legs tangled up on regular ocassions. Plus if there's a pothole in its way it'll simply keel over and explode. Apparently it's what the US army needs for those "bush-fire wars" but when General Peters radios John he calls it a "defence vehicle". Yeah, right.

General Peters hovers around in a bog-standard helicopter but we also get a glimpse of a helijet, a vehicle that gets used quite often throughout the series. Basically it's a helicopter but it has jets instead of rotor blades. Hence "helijet". Clever clever clever.

There's a heavy reliance on footage of a real life jungle and accompanying animals - lions, monkeys, crocodiles, zebras etc. - at the beginning of this episode to set the scene. It's an odd technique and not wholly effective but kudos to them for trying something interesting. The interspersed shots of small sections of the Sidewinder, building up to its full appearance, are, however, very good, especially when complemented by a swelling Barry Gray track.

The sequence showing the Sidewinder actually falling into the pit doesn't entirely work for me. Firstly one of the backdrops seems to have a gigantic crease in it (it's particularly noticeable in the establishing clip in the "Thunderbirds are go!" teaser) and, more importantly, the calamity just isn't dramatic enough. It's walking along, there's a shot of the floor giving way and then the vehicle just tips over, accompanied by silly music. It's all over too quickly. Gray's score doesn't seem to fit the footage for once, which is a shame.

Despite the Sidewinder being on its side or back, the interior is only slightly tilted and the crew can get about quite easily.

We're told by the Sidewinder crew that they have some coolant to keep well enough for a short time, but the atomic reactors need refuelling. Again. Doesn't anybody check the fuel gauge anymore?! What with this and the Fireflash, I have to question why the people of the future don't just get shot of these bloody atomic reactors and find a more reliable power source. Like jam.

For some reason, Matt Zimmerman voices both of the helicopter pilots, meaning that they both sound like Alan (though, since he hasn't voiced Alan yet, perhaps it would be fairer to say that Alan sounds like both of the helicopter pilots?).

Given that the temperature of the pit is about 260 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm fairly sure that both of the men winched down into the pit - neither wearing protective clothing - ought to have been incinerated rather than blackened a bit. But this is Thunderbirds, where people can be seated inside an exploding vehicle and only ruin their shirts.

In an effort to pad out the episode a bit, we get the full launch sequence for Thunderbird 2. Notice also the two entirely different methods of gaining access to the Thunderbird: Virgil flips up over a painting, falls backwards down a chute, zips about in a small coffin and then gets thrown into his chair on an altogether spine-busting journey, whilst Brains… takes the lift. Cough.

After the drama of episode 1, Pit of Peril is a bit of a letdown. It's too simple for its own good and is horrendously padded: it takes International Rescue forever to get involved and the US Army's attempts to save the Sidewinder get boring very quickly. The main rescue itself, despite utilising several vehicles, doesn't come off much better as it's played out in laborious detail and the vain attempts to inject extra incident just don't come off; it just makes International Rescue look like an organisation that gets by on a wing and a prayer. Fortunately, most later episodes played about with the formula a bit or at least tried to do something innovative.

Next episode: The Perils of Penelope! Watch the trailer here!

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