Production order: Unknown | ITC code: 5106 | Airdate order: 17 | DVD order: 15
Those Responsible
Writer: Philip Broadley
Director: Ray Austin
Where & When
Southern France: July 19th
The Inexplicable Mystery
At a festival in a small town, a photographer spots an unexpected face in the crowd and takes a picture. He sells it to gangster Sy Harlan, who despatches a pair of assassins to kill the man in the photo. But the victim suffers a heart attack before he can be shot... so the hitmen go to the morgue to put two more bullets in the corpse.
The Mystery Explained
The twice-killed man was an innocent dead ringer for wanted criminal Chris Lomax - "the Houdini of crime" according to Jason - who had supposedly died three years earlier. Harlan believed that Lomax killed his brother, thus the vendetta. Knowing Lomax, he also suspected that he had faked his death using a drug that temporarily stops the heart, explaining why the assassins made sure to shoot him post-mortem. (Not that this is ever spelled out in the episode, but it's the only possible reason for the morgue shooting.)
Review
Jerry Seinfeld had a joke about magazine publishing: "95% of it is based on, 'How the hell are we going to fill all this blank space?'" Having worked in the field I can say that's true, but a similar theory also applies to television. Once a series goes into production, it becomes a machine that must work constantly, no matter what - it's too expensive a medium to stop and then restart because it's run out of stuff to shoot.
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| Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich? Malkovich! |
The raw materials used in the machine are scripts, without which there can't be a show: simple as that. To get them, ITC was perhaps even more production-line oriented than most companies, relying on a pool of proven writers to churn out episodes across its various series. When time is money, you go for the known property rather than take a gamble on someone new and untested, which is why Department S had its 28 episodes written by only seven writers. (Over half were written by just two!)
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| Stewart was unimpressed by Seretse's haunted house diorama. |
The downside of this approach is that when writers are knocking out stories at such a rate, they're not all going to be gold. In fact, there's a good chance that some won't even scrape shameful bronze. But the demands of the machine mean that something has to be filmed, no matter what, and if there's a script on the table that will fill the required 50 minutes within the budget and at least seems to work as a story, then that's the something which is going to have to go before the cameras.
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| They're not beer goggles, of course. Jason never touches the stuff. |
'Dead Men Die Twice' is one of those scripts. And it's rubbish.
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| "Yes, I'm a big fan of Firefly, Sir Curtis. Why do you ask?" |
Perhaps inevitably, the man responsible for Department S's first truly dreadful episode is Philip Broadley, who had already shoehorned several generic Mediterranean-set crime stories into the show's format. This time, he doesn't even try to disguise that this is basically an episode of The Baron, with Jason and Stewart sharing the John Mannering role and Annabelle playing Cordelia. (There are even some stolen artworks in Lomax's hideout, like a vestigial stub of the hook that would have been used to draw antiquities expert Mannering into the case.)
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| "Say my dress looks like a cheesecloth again, I dare you. I dare you!" |
The whole affair is a tedious, humourless plod; even Jason is underused, bringing absolutely nothing to the investigation that couldn't have been done by the most junior uniformed cop. About the only redeeming moment is when Annabelle is threatened by would-be rapist 'The Dandy' (a fairly prominent character, but he's never given a real name) only to promptly beat the crap out of him and steal his car - then when he later turns up in her hotel room, she simply draws a gun and watches him fill his trousers. On the other hand, she spends far too much of the rest of the story being leered at and touched up by a series of creepy, sweaty older men, so it's not exactly a celebration of Girl Power.
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| "Oh, God, no! Jimmy Savile?!?" |
'Dead Men' is misguided from its very core, Broadley working with the erroneous belief that we'll find Lomax charming and mysterious, a kind of romantic Robin Hood figure, rather than what he actually is: a boring and cowardly crook who's spent three years hiding in someone's back room pretending to be dead. Yet once he finally appears half an hour in, we're stuck with him as he decides to keep Annabelle in his hidey-hole as a kind of confidante to whom he can drone out his woes.
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| Great cosplay fails of our time #17: Geordi La Forge. |
And then we get to the ending. Our heroes burst into Lomax's hideout to rescue Annabelle, only for Lomax to kill himself. For some reason. The man who went to ridiculous lengths to stay alive, who literally minutes earlier had decreed that to hell with the danger, he was going to step unafraid back out into the world, who has come across as a ruthless and arrogant narcissist who thinks he's better than everyone else... puts a bullet in his own head at the first sniff of danger. It's an unbelievably lazy way to wrap things up - so unsurprisingly, it's something that Broadley has done before. (In 'The Man Who Got A New Face', where the villains randomly die at the end.)
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| "It's all Greek to me. Literally." |
There isn't even a proper attempt to put a bizarre mystery in the teaser. It's a boring, pointless mess - and it's still not the worst Philip Broadley episode. Heaven help us all.
Fancy Quotes
[Department S really doesn't care much for niceties like 'evidence']
Stewart: So what did you get?
Annabelle: Not much. But I'm certain he was behind the shooting.
Stewart: Well, that's plenty.
[Jason suggests using Annabelle as a decoy to flush out Lomax]
Stewart: It should work. A little dangerous for Annabelle, though.
Jason: She stands a much better chance. I'm sure she's much more tempting bait.
Annabelle: [sarcastically] To think all this time that I misjudged you, Jason.
Jason: [with a distinct lack of sincerity] Oh, come come. You know that I really care. Desperately.
Annabelle: So much so, you've just made me expendable.
Lomax: You should grab pleasure when it's offered. You're a long time dead.
Annabelle: Except in your case, of course.
Cheers!
• Jason treats himself to a glass of something as he complains to Annabelle about his long day of visiting every single hotel in Athens to see if Lomax's former girlfriend has checked in.
• Staking out a bar, our man naturally has three glasses of ouzo (according to Stewart) in order to blend in. (Immediately afterwards, he takes the wheel of his Bentley for a high-speed chase!)
Fight!
For once, Annabelle gets some solo rough stuff as she elbows The Dandy in the groin and chucks him into a ditch. You go, girl!
