Place of Angels

Plot

In a lab near Manchester, Dr. Denton and his assistant, Judy Chapman, start growing K14, a lab-made virus. Later, on her drive home, Captain Black blocks the road with a fuel tanker. Chapman crashes and dies, but the Mysterons rebuild her to carry out their plan against the "Place of the Angels." The reconstructed Chapman goes back to the lab, uses mechanical arms to kill a guard, and takes the K14 vial.

She then gets on a plane to New York. Denton calls Spectrum Cloudbase, and Colonel White sends Captains Scarlet and Blue to the lab. There, they find out K14 is the deadliest virus ever, able to kill ten million people if opened. When Chapman shows up at New York International Airport, Scarlet and Blue chase her on the Interstate in a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle.

Following Black's telepathic orders, she leaves her car with a vial that looks broken. Spectrum starts decontamination and quarantines Scarlet and Blue, but tests show the vial is a fake. Chapman is then seen in Los Angeles. Scarlet figures out the threat is against LA, since its name means "The Angels" in Spanish.

Flying a Spectrum Passenger Jet, they go after her along the Colorado River. White tells them she is heading for Boulder Dam, likely to dump K14 into the LA reservoir. Scarlet jumps out and lands on the dam. Chapman shoots him, but he fires back.

She slips and falls off the dam to her death. Scarlet grabs the vial from a ledge just before it drops into the water. White radios in a panic, and Scarlet says the "Place of Angels" is safe.

Production

Leo Eaton was 22 and working as a first assistant director on Captain Scarlet at Century 21 when he got his big break. He had previously assisted on The Saint and made TV ads for Thunderbirds-themed ice lollies Zoom and Fab before being allowed to write and direct an episode. "Place of Angels" marked his first filmed script and his debut as a TV series director. Before filming, several changes were made.

The working title was "The City of Angels," and the Mysterons originally planned to destroy that city's population. A scene that was never shot would have shown Scarlet and Blue arriving at a Manchester lab to find a security guard killed not by hand but by machinery. Eaton included these mechanical arms because he wanted something "a little bit different and make it feel more interesting." The ending also changed: originally, Scarlet was to recover the K14 from a binoculars case where the reconstructed Chapman had placed it before falling to her death.

The opening scene, where Dr Denton activates the virus, uses incidental music first recorded for Stingray. The scale models of the New York and Los Angeles airports were built partly from props seen in two Thunderbirds episodes, "The Duchess Assignment" and "The Cham-Cham." The airliner that flies Chapman to New York reuses the RTL2 Transporter model from "The Cham-Cham," while its puppet-sized cabin reuses the interior of Flight 104 from the Captain Scarlet episode of the same name.

The decontamination helicopter model first appeared in the film Thunderbirds Are Go, and the dome model first appeared as a Frost Line Outer Space Defence System dome in the Captain Scarlet episode "Avalanche." The episode features a rare appearance by Spectrum's Dr Fawn, but because voice actor Charles Tingwell had left the series, the character has no lines.

Broadcast and reception

"Place of Angels" had its first UK-wide network broadcast on 29 April 1994 on BBC2, delayed by ten minutes due to over-running coverage of the World Snooker Championship semi-final. Anthony Clark of sci-fi-online.com describes the plot as "not great" but considers it better-paced than "Flight 104", noting a "reasonable sense of tension and some sharp direction." The episode has drawn comment for its violence; Andrew Thomas of Dreamwatch magazine considers the death of the original Chapman, showing her "mangled body", one of the series' more violent moments.

Andrew Pixley and Julie Rogers of Starburst note the horror of the reconstruction's death, which Shane M. Dallmann of Video Watchdog calls "one of the series' more show-stopping demises." Pixley and Rogers also note the "cryptic" nature of the Mysteron threat. Fred McNamara writes that Spectrum's pursuit is "a tad cumbersome" and the episode feels like an "extended chase sequence," but praises its "menace and mystery," describing the strangulation as "great fun to watch" and the gunfight as "splendid." He considers the episode remarkable for being the only one to incorporate a theme of biological warfare.