Welcome to our Thunderbirds Deep Dives! As we celebrate International Rescue's 60th anniversary, we asked you to pick your favourite episodes of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's classic 1965 sci-fi adventure series that should receive in-depth, analytical retrospectives. Based on your picks, we've collated a top 10 selection of Thunderbirds greatest episodes to receive a review - as voted for by you!

We're continuing our Thunderbirds Deep Dives by examining one of Thunderbirds' most celebrated episodes - Terror in New York City! With its combined disasters of Thunderbird 2 being attacked by military forces and the destruction of the Empire State Building, are Terror in New York City's narrative qualities drowned out by a symphony of destruction? Let's investigate!

Terror in A.P. Films?

Much like Sun Probe or The Uninvited, Terror in New York City provides us with an eye-opening snapshot of the creative and practical lengths which AP Films was forced to experiment with when the early months of Thunderbirds' production were abruptly seized by the demand to extend episodes from half hours to fifty-minutes each. Given the rapturously positive legacy that Terror in New York City has been blessed with, it's safe to surmise that such lengths were worth the effort.

But in this episode's case, they paint a compellingly chaotic picture of the vulnerability of International Rescue when its members and technology are subject to attack - albeit accidental. In doing so, the prolonged 50-minute format gains dramatic depth with a pair of rescue operations which dramatically strangle IR's limits: the rapid fire crash-land of the damaged Thunderbird 2 and the achingly prolonged underwater search of TV personality Ned Cook and cameraman Joe, trapped within underground rivers thanks to the spectacular collapse of Empire State Building when their attempts to report on the event result in their near-deaths.

Characters within the Chaos

Terror in New York City cleverly bookends itself with a pair of surprisingly unresolved rescue operations. The episode opens with an oil rig inferno, shown in mid-rescue, and climaxes with that stunningly bleak shot of Thunderbird 4 ensnared by rubble from further seismic disasters triggered by the Empire State Building's collapse. This encircling serves as a novel visual reminder that the world of Thunderbirds is defined by constant, unstoppable disaster - and sometimes, not even International Rescue is immune to them. 

Terror in New York City's two-in-one disasters don't entirely dovetail naturally around each other. The episode's opening scenes of International Rescue returning from the successfully completed oil rig rescue have the air of being material scrambled together to fit the newly imposed required runtime. It becomes easier therefore to envision an embryonic, half-hour version of the episode likely opening with the scenes of the Tracy family watching the dramatic moving of the Empire State Building, seeing the subsequent disaster unfold on live television, and the rescue operation playing out from there. It's remarkable then to consider that TB2's attack and crash-landing came to be not as an integral part of the episode's structure, but as an inspired afterthought.

What binds the episode's juxtaposing heavy-duty dramas are the overzealous Ned Cook and his long-suffering cameraman Joe. Amidst the chaos of the partially destroyed TB2 and the ruining of the Empire State Building, it's oddly reassuring that this human element is at the centre of these disasters. Desperate to report on the heroic actions of International Rescue, Ned weaves comedy and action into the story when attempting to film TB1's take-off from the opening rescue. Ned's overbearing enthusiasm, disregarding all safety for himself and for Joe (although Joe's precarious position atop Ned's truck suggests that danger is a professional occupation for TV journalists in 2065), is the perfect catalyst for International Rescue to scramble into action later in the episode. Ned may be portrayed as annoyingly overbearing, but he's far from villainous, and undergoes a redemptive arc when comforting the stricken Joe as they perilously await their rescue. 

Prior to Ned's arc, however, it's Virgil Tracy who steals the spotlight. The accidental nature of Thunderbird 2's attack is a surprising alternative to the villainous targeted assaults from such enemies as the Hood. Not even he had the nerve the launch a missile strike against International Rescue's transporter craft The rapidly edited back-and-forth scenes between Virgil's evasion of the marauding US Sentinel and the naval craft launching its missiles, initially believing TB2 to be an enemy vessel, are in stark contrast to the crawlingly stretched pacing of Gordon's later rescue. Shane Rimmer's tensely concerned Scott and David Holliday's weary, vulnerable Virgil are exquisite vocal performances that cut through the pyrotechnics and serve as a reminder of the sustained quality of Supermarionation's voice actors. 

Worldbuilding of Disasters

Terror in New York City is defined by its showstopping scenes of spectacular disaster. The crashlanding of Thunderbird 2 may not have been the first instance of an International Rescue craft severely attacked, but the razor-sharp attention to detail in heightening the unnerving quality TB2's uncertain descent eclipses TB1's equivalent scenes from The Uninvited. From the smoke and flames enveloping Virgil at the controls of his machine to the jaw-droppingly held-breath suspense of witnessing TB2 bounce off its runway to make a final, devastating touchdown, the whole sequence is meticulously crafted chaos. 

Elsewhere, the collapse of the Empire State Building reads like a bleak statement of intent on the series' depiction of its futuristically tech-enhanced world. Super vehicles such as the Fireflash, the Sun Probe, and the Sidewinder may have been the product of fanciful imaginative storytellers, but the Empire State Building is a very real thing, connecting the puppet-fantasy of Thunderbirds to the viewer's real world. Its collapse gains a sombre note of realistic terror that has since invited comparisons to real-world terror attacks. 

It's a testament to Terror in New York City's emphasis on character-centred drama that the destruction of such a noteworthy architectural monument is barely commented upon. The focus now is on the uncertain fate of Ned and Joe. Through the hauntingly isolated status of the injured pair, the episode carves out some intriguing details of Thunderbirds' worldbuilding backstory. The moving of the Empire State Building is thrown asunder when long-forgotten underground rivers trigger the seismic shockwaves that cause the ground to split open and swallow the building. These rivers slowly rise, inching their way towards the stricken Ned and Joe, threatening to drown the pair.

Thunderbirds exists in a world of technological and engineering advances that often eschew safeguards, enabling fantastic disaster scenarios to spring into life at a moment's notice. Terror in New York City provides us with one of the series' most engrossingly dangerous examples of this, from the hellish downfall of the Empire State Building to the comparatively quiet but not less horrifying risk of consumption by underground rivers. There's no provoked villainy at work, here - just a world of unchecked disaster allowed to run riot. 

Gordon's rescuing of Ned and Joe involves a redemptive actions of the US Military in transporting TB4 to the danger zone at high speeds. Thunderbirds' depiction of underwater worlds perhaps lacked the kaleidoscopic energy of Stingray, but the claustrophobic nature of Ned and Joe's situation, and its subsequent impact on Gordon's search for them, is marvellously realised here. From a production design standpoint, Thunderbirds' underwater worlds rarely looked as grimly uninviting as they do here, wide expanse of oceans strangled into becoming tightly compacted underground rivers. The visual characteristics of the underwater production design emphasise the treacherous terrain Gordon is forced to explore.  

Terror in New York City unveils its climactic masterstroke that pulls the rug from audience's expectations. Gordon succeeds in rescuing the flailing Ned and Joe, but not before yet another skyscraper atop collapses, sending further debris into the underground rivers. Unable to evade the ensuing carnage in time, the rescue operation concludes with the dramatic shot of TB4 being consumed by rubble, the audible carnage bizarrely surging into the drum roll of The Ned Cook Show. It's a brilliant example of Thunderbirds' razor-sharp editing.

It's rare for a Thunderbirds episode to conclude without an obvious moment of triumph for another rescue operation successfully completed, but the sight of Ned Cook cast in a wheelchair and declaring his gratitude for International Rescue takes on a meta-fictional function, with Ned speaking to both his audience and the very real audiences watching the episode itself. With the lovely panning shot of the Tracy family sneakily in the backrow of Ned's audience (and savvily opening with Gordon, confirming his own safety), Terror in New York City brilliantly succeeds in concluding its unstoppable disasters on a note of heartfelt triumph, as much for the Tracy family's recovery and for Ned's humbling, a character whose surprisingly layered personality is made possible thanks to Thunderbirds' stretched-out running time. Within this 50-minute epic, high-stakes disaster and well-realised character beats find equal balance that yields one of, if not the most, satisfyingly dramatic episodes of Thunderbirds.