Robert Day, “The Avengers (Season 5, Episode 1: From Venus with Love)” (1967)
This season of the famous British TV show features several episodes with science fiction themes and elements and “From Venus with Love” plays on familiar SF tropes: laser beams as death rays, UFOs and alien invasions from outer space. Investigating a series of mysterious deaths of amateur astronomers, our intrepid friends Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Peel (Diana Rigg) discover they are members of the British Venusian Society, headed by one Venus Brown (Barbara Shelley). The agents follow a number of leads, some of which are dead-ends, and interview a fair few eccentric gentlemen associated with the society.
The episode establishes a narrative for the rest of the season to follow: a series of strange murders in which the modus operandi is the same if rather contrived, which Steed and Peel investigate, usually independently of each other. The two find themselves following the same lead which turns out not to be the obvious: in this case, the British Venusian Society, which the episode teasingly insinuates might be responsible for the deaths, is the innocent party. Fortunately Steed and Peel use their wits and their verbal wit, along with a bit of brawn, to outwit the villain (Jeremy Lloyd) who is not so harmless as he at first appears.
One of the more fun and inventive episodes in the season, “From Venus with Love” does a fair job of interrogating the possibilites of laser technology as a dispenser of death as well as healer: the murderer works in the medical profession. It’s silly and far-fetched, and the episode doesn’t explain why the murder victims have to be covered in white talcum powder (actually, they’re just meant to be blanched of colour by the laser but the budget didn’t extend towards more sophisticated special effects) but most of the science looks passable if not totally plausible. Viewers have to fill in plot holes with their own imaginations. A humorous scene featuring Jon Pertwee as a retired army officer dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder and recording the appropriate sound effects sets up a potential McGuffin with Ms Brown, who visits him to request more money to support the BVS; the army officer refuses unless he’s allowed to see the society’s accounts as he suspects the money isn’t being used wisely. The viewers are led to believe the BVS might be killing off its members if it can’t shake them down.
The acting is good if rather arch and the action takes place in a rather closed and idealised world of Britain where everyone is upper class and appears unfailingly polite and co-operative, superficially at least. Of course the reality is that such civility masks a very real and sinister malevolence, made all the more so by the extreme contrast between genteel civility at one end of the spectrum of human behaviour and genuine sadism and brutality at the other. Films and even TV shows like “The Avengers” give but just a sanitised peep-hole into the violent and brutal world of real-life corporate espionage.