New Captain Scarlet's Greatest Episodes: The Achilles Messenger

In celebration of New Captain Scarlet's 20th anniversary and the forthcoming release of its definitive Blu-ray release, we're counting down some of our all-time favourite episodes of Gerry Anderson's last television series. In Enigma, a breakaway member of the Mysterons alerts Spectrum that some individuals within the Mysteron consciousness despise the War of Nerves as much as Spectrum. Can this renegade give Spectrum the secret to defeat the Mysterons?

Throughout Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, it's the provoked Martians who regularly remind Spectrum that it was they who started the shockwave. It would take nearly 40 years to suggest who may end the shockwave. While the classic series frustratingly lacks in anything resembling a finale to the War of Nerves, 2005's New Captain Scarlet would posit several tantalisingly different ways in which the war could end. Dominion appears to bring a very final conclusion to the events of the series, but an entirely different means of ending the war is hinted at with The Achilles Messenger, in which a possible means of defeating the Mysterons falls within Spectrum's reach.

Before we can grapple with the many heart-stopping concepts The Achilles Messenger plays with in unravelling the Mysterons' veiled consciousness, we begin the episode with some of the most bloodthirsty imagery New Captain Scarlet ever produced. As we've previously explored, New Captain Scarlet endeavoured to be witnessed as a mature action series, which the moody, night-time opening scenes set within Castle Balneath communicate with in thrillingly explicit style. S 

The episode's blisteringly violent opening scenes of Captain Scarlet and Destiny Angel seemingly held captive here (what is it with Gerry Anderson series and creepy castles?) is as much of a challenge thrown down to the audience as the similarly bleakly dangerous scenes of Enigma are - can you handle this level of intensity? This might be the only example of Captain Scarlet fiction in which Paul Metcalfe spends the entire episode visibly battered and bruised. This is weirdly impressive for a series destined to be shunted within Saturday morning TV fodder. What transpires to be just a training exercise doesn't dampen the intensity of the moods delivered; if anything, it establishes a grim premise that the subsequent Mysteronisation of the training instructor, Astrid Winters, expands on.

Any incarnation of Captain Scarlet thrills in spy-fi tension of our heroes not being entirely clued into who could be a Mysteron operative and The Achilles Messenger pushes this mentality to the extreme. Naturally, Spectrum treat the Mysteronised Winters, the breakaway agent sent to convince Spectrum that some factions with the Mysterons despise the war, with hostile caution. However, the twisting is thrown down to the audience during the episode's opening moments when it's not entirely clear right from the beginning that Scarlet and Destiny are undergoing training exercises and not, in fact, under the stranglehold of the Mysterons.

The audience is the only one entirely clued into the breakaway Winters' identity, and with no Mysteron Detectors to help. It's still intriguing to consider that this episode links with Captain Scarlet's past, specifically with Dangerous Rendezvous. In that episode, Spectrum initiate a possible stalemate to the War of Nerves. Here, it's a rogue strand of the Mysterons that take that first leap.

The most sumptuous ideas presented here aren't simply that the War of Nerves could end - it's that the Mysterons aren't entirely what we thought them to be. Precisely what the Mysterons are is never explicitly stated in any incarnation of Captain Scarlet. The 1968 annual posits the not entirely convincing idea that the Mysterons depicted in the classic series are in fact their computerised remains, designed to react if provoked. Whatever they may be, what's consistent is the idea that the Mysterons are a collective consciousness, a single entity; that is, until The Achilles Messenger comes along. This episode confirms that dissonance exists within the Mysterons, that factions are capable of thinking differently and don't agree with the war of nerves.  

For much of the episode, we only have Winters' claims of being a renegade to go on. Heroes and audience share in the distrust afoot, heightened by her disdain for humanity's primitive, trigger-happy vices when being allowed to be questioned by Scarlet and Destiny. However, it's only through the most tragic outcome that Winters' words become proven as sincere. Winters' consistent fear of being discovered by the larger, more aggressive side of the Mysterons earns its haunting appeal on rewatches, once we're made aware of the ultimate outcome for her. A pleasing moment of intimacy is shared between Scarlet and the instructor, who is far quicker than Paul himself to remind him of his own uneasy biological relationship with just how he traverses the line between human and Mysteron replica.

Scarlet and Winter's escape from the castle is arguably where the episode succumbs to action spectacle over development of its own thoughtful ideas. Mysteron factions would rarely be explored elsewhere within the series, and what limited runtime we have here becomes devoted to explosive action scenes. Then again, these are New Captain Scarlet's consistently impressive action scenes, which are crafted with a razor-sharp precision of visual bombast.

The Achilles Messenger brings its rousing violence to one of the most downbeat finales in all of any Captain Scarlet fiction. When meeting with Colonel White away from Cloudbase (a final act of unwilling to commit to trusting this renegade), a simple yet deadly effective bullet from Captain Black is enough to silence Winters and ensure that the Mysterons remain enraged. No chance is ever given again for these unsavoury factions of the Mysterons' all-encompassing and volatile state of mind to risk becoming smothered by Spectrum. Yet in a final twist of irony, we know that Captain Black suffers his own crisis of confidence in just how deeply he believes himself to be in the Mysteron cause. 

The Achilles Messenger then becomes another piece of the puzzle in targeting the Mysterons' elusive persona without ever breaking through their hostile intentions. The subtle ingenuity of the episode comes in its efforts to break free of New Captain Scarlet's status quo, which it ultimately maintains by displaying how war-mongering the Mysterons can be.

Prepare to experience the War of Nerves like never before with the forthcoming release of our New Captain Scarlet Collectors Edition Blu-ray, available to pre-order now!

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