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Four crooks return from a successful raid to their hideout to ... immediately be gunned down. When their corpses are found, the scenery as well as the crooks' backgrounds pretty much suggest what has happened - there's just one problem, there isn't a crime that can be pinned to them. Then a fifth dead man is found, in the trunk of a car that was pushed into a lake, and he was shot with the same gun as the four crooks. Thing is, he has no ID on him and isn't known by police, so it at first proves impossible to determine his identity. Stewart (Joel Fabiani), Annabelle (Rosemary Nicols) and Jason King (Peter Wyngarde) from Department S are called in, and Stewart immediately manages to track the four crooks down to Kyle (Paul Whitsun-Jones), an antiques dealer by day who actually ran a job agency for criminals. Stewart tries to beat information out of Kyle, but Kyle keeps the employers of the crooks to himself, and ultimately Stewart and Jason try to put him under surveillance - but already prove to be too late, but learn it's all about a baton ... which it turns out is in possession of Kyle's right hand man Pally (Robin Hawdon), but Jason "persuades" him to give it up, and he soon finds out it's used in a blackmail scheme - which leads Jason and Stewart to Kend (Edward Brayshaw). Meanwhile, Annabelle has identified the dead man as an employee of Tronson (Brandon Brady), who owns a mansion in the country - but when she pays him a visit, he claims to know nothing. But his employee Libby (Denise Buckley), whom he tries to keep locked away in her room, knows everything, and she spills the beans to Annabelle, about how the four crooks broke into Tronson's place and killed the employee - only for Annabelle to become Tronson's captive. In the meantime, Jason and Stewart have found out that the robbery was actually just a smoke screen for installing explosives in the board room of Tronson's mansion, as he and Kent want to blow up a bunch of white collar criminals in there to take over a criminal organisation. Jason and Stewart of course intervene and save the day ... sort of, as the board members are still blown to Kingdom Come.

If above synopsis sounds a bit confusing, than it definitely does the episode justice, as the story seems to be little more than a hanger for disjointed murder mystery tropes blended with much cloak and dagger. But it also does the episode injustice, inasmuch as the focus of Department S as a whole was never so much on plot itself as it was on coolness, wit, sharp dialogue, late sixties lifestyle and the like, and as such this entry is rather magnificent fun, only augmented when seen through a nostalgic lense. So perfection it's not, but great entertainment it definitely is.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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