"I guess if you analyse the SHADO set-up, it’s kind of a fascist organisation with a law unto itself… answerable to practically no-one. Anarchic, despotic, but somehow, it was working for the total good."

Ed Bishop maintained a perceptive attitude towards his acting contributions to the worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson which he starred in. Along with a major co-starring role in Captain Scarlet, minor roles in The Protectors and Doppelganger (and even a voice-over job for a Terrahawks overseas sales video), Bishop's most outstanding effort was the ice-cool, emotionally damaged yet aggressive dominating figure of Commander Ed Straker from UFO.

Bishop's comments from an interview with Starlog magazine in the early 1980s detonate something of a shockwave. We may think of Gerry's worlds as heroic in nature, but Bishop's comments cast a dark cloud over the supposedly altruistic nature of SHADO, its clandestine war fought not for glory or riches, but for the survival of the Earth. But with SHADO operating as such a law unto itself, can it still be thought of as a heroic outfit? If SHADO is defined as something close to a fascist state, surely other Anderson creations fall under that umbrella? From Terrahawks to Spectrum, many outfits operate under their own rules - most notably, International Rescue.

Compared to the altruistic Tracy family, Straker runs a far stricter operation with SHADO, one that's defined by defensive means first instead of proactively rescuing lives. Can SHADO be thought of as an anti-International Rescue? Let's investigate!

SHADO vs IR

In the name of life-saving rescues or secret-keeping security, many of Gerry and Sylvia's supposedly heroic institutions obey their own self-imposed laws. International Rescue boasts its own network of secret agents. Spectrum's actions are answerable only to the World President himself. SHADO takes this idea to its most logically extreme depiction with the organisation's brutal efforts to defend the Earth against alien invaders.

Jeff Tracy's expositional backstory of how International Rescue's technology could be utilised to destroy life during the events of Trapped in the Sky feel answered by SHADO's war-ready fleet of submarines, aircraft, moonbases, interceptors and ground-based vehicles. SHADO's defensive vehicles are utilised to destroy life - alien life. 

Both SHADO and International Rescue boast an eclectic range of vehicular resources designed to tackle any situation in any terrain. Many of SHADO's vehicles can be thought of as more destructive equivalents of the Thunderbirds. Both Thunderbird 1 and the Moonbase Interceptors fulfil a rapid response unit for both outfits; one aimed at rescuing, one at destroying. SID and Thunderbird 5 maintain a watchful, protective eye above the Earth. The ground-based SHADO Mobiles may be thought of as SHADO's equivalent of pod vehicles. All of these marvellous mechas don't explicitly serve to protect those in danger, but to ward off those who create danger.

SHADO and International Rescue's operational functionality is another cause for juxtaposing viewpoints. Thunderbirds rarely prizes open the practical implications of just how exactly the Thunderbird machines and I.R. headquarters were all constructed. No mentions of the absurd security demands or astronomical financial costs surely incurred by International Rescue's birth are ever made. In the world of UFO, that very factor isn't simply acknowledged - it's a driving force of acrimony between its two most intense characters. 

The terminally ballooning cost of maintaining SHADO is a sore sticking point between Straker and his superior, General Henderson. Many of UFO's most powerfully dramatic moments of high tension aren't restricted to blitzkrieg's between marauding flying saucers and deadly Skydivers. Instead, UFO finds human drama in just how far these bureaucratic power struggles can pack a punch, something that Jeff Tracy, thankfully, doesn't have to contend with.

Destroy or Preserve Life?

Where International Rescue save lives, SHADO frequently looses them. No episode of Thunderbirds can conclude without International Rescue successfully performing some daredevil feat of heroism otherwise impossible to imagine any other outfit being able to perform. In the world of UFO, the efforts that SHADO go to to prevent alien invasions frequently involves the severe and bloody loss of life. 

Unable to survive in Earth's atmosphere for prolonged periods, the unnamed aliens SHADO fight against frequently hijack unsuspecting human beings to perform their acts of aggression. The Psychobombs, Survival, The Man Who Came Back, Timelash - all of these episodes demonstrate unsuspecting humans who cannot be saved from the aliens' iron-grip. During these episodes, SHADO struggle to rescue the individual; instead, it's a question of prioritising the needs of the many over the few. This is in stark contrast to the dangers seen in Thunderbirds, where colossal acts of disaster generally centre around the need to rescue two or three individuals in peril.

Family trauma serves as another juxtaposing factor that unites both Thunderbirds and UFO, while simultaneously pushing them apart in how that trauma is depicted in media. Thunderbirds is notoriously shy with explaining the status of Jeff Tracy's wife. It would fall to spin-off media to explain that she passed away prior to the events of the series, but even then, it wasn't until the 1990s that Alan Fennell tied these disparate events together and crafted a compelling serial to explain how the loss of Jeff's wife served as the catalytic moment to inspire the man to use his vast wealth and industrial expertise to establish an international rescue organisation.

In UFO, another death in the family doesn't serve as a tragic yet inspiring effort to save humanity. Instead, that tragedy is the end result of a marriage made irreversibly broken. In a wildly bleak act of deathly irony, it's the upkeep of that very life-saving outfit that destroy Ed Straker's family relationship. Depicted in such episodes as Confetti Check A-Okay, A Question of Priorities and Mindbender, Straker's devotion to establishing SHADO coupled with the need for its secrecy results in the breakdown of his marriage. With it, the eventual accidental death of his son, Johnny. Emotionally cool as he may be, Mindbender displays this lingering trauma still invades his emotions. 

In the very act of defending the Earth, SHADO possesses the ability to rupture lives. Stark contrast to such Thunderbirds adventures as City of Fire and Cry Wolf, in which lives of families are preserved by the efforts of International Rescue, which itself remains a functioning family unit throughout the series. Where one series depicts family as core to the ethos of the organisation, the other depicts it as an unhealing wound, the pain of which inflicts an otherwise terminally stoic leader. 

UFO and Thunderbirds bear brazenly opposing attitudes towards their depictions of life-saving heroism, both in terms of how SHADO and International Rescue operate, and how these juxtaposing attitudes elicit compelling drama. There's the argument that one is a children's series and the other aimed at an older audience, and that one depicts the adventures of a rescue outfit compared to the other's depiction of a military unit. Naturally, there'd be moralistic differences. 

However, time has gelled much of Gerry and Sylvia's worlds together as a combined universe defined by heroic action and adventure. When prizing into the precise qualities of each individual series, however justified their various actions may be in working for the total good, nuanced yet striking discrepancies remain at play.

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