Welcome to our Stingray Deep Dives! As we surge towards the super-sub’s 60th anniversary, we asked you to pick your favourite episodes of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic 1964 sci-fi underwater series that should receive in-depth, analytical retrospectives. Based on your picks, we’ve collated a top 10 selection of Stingray’s greatest episodes to receive a review – as voted for by you!
We’re continuing our countdown of Stingray’s top 10 episodes with the encroaching threat of… pink ice?! This strange, unstoppable substance begins to ensnare itself around the world, giving the WASPs its greatest challenge yet!
“A whole ocean, just a sheet of ice?”
Is there any other episode of Stingray that can claim to have such a globe-threatening danger as the one depicted in Pink Ice? Throughout Stingray, threats are generally localised to a finite space within the vast depths of the world’s oceans. In Pink Ice however, we’re shown just how ambitious Stingray can be in its wide breadth of underwater science fiction and how the series’ special effects regularly rose to meet the strenuous demands laid before them by the series’ imaginative scriptwriters, in this case, Alan Fennell.
Pink Ice sees the Stingray crew race against a surreal threat of pink-coloured ice that’s springing up in specific spots around the world’s oceans, and proceeding to enlarge across the seas, risking a new and terrible ice age that will consume the Earth. This catastrophic, all-encompassing premise is brought to life in an episode that’s… not the most energetic that Stingray had to offer. Within the characteristically brilliant special effects utilised to craft the ice-themed threat as convincingly as possible is the rather noticeable absence of welcoming characterisation or narrative that would otherwise inject some much needed personality into the episode.
Patrolling the Plot
But let’s at least begin with the positives. Pink Ice is one of Stingray‘s most absorbing episodes to simply *look* at. AP Film’s special effects unit was clearly lapping up the increased budget and advanced resources now at their disposal, thanks to Lew Grade’s investment in the company. The sequences of the ice enlarging and quietly crawling through the oceans lend a palpable terror, whilst the juxtaposition of the ice’s depiction between surface-level and underwater scenes is pleasingly convincing. Stingray is easily dwarfed by the physical stature of this runaway substance, a strong visual summary of how devastatingly large this danger is to the world. In today’s heightened awareness of climate change, this premise remains unfortunately relevant.
Elsewhere, however, the episode struggles to match this visual enthusiasm. Pink Ice is peppered with weirdly prolonged sequences of Commander Shore trapsing back and forth between Marineville and its parent organisation, the World Security Council, to discuss the best possible means of eliminating the icy threat and discover what, or who, is triggering this disaster. Oddly drawn-out discussions of how the WASP crew will go about saving the day rather litter the episode, robbing the urgency that this threat presents. The early scenes of Shore’s interaction with the W.S.P. crew may offer an intriguing insight into the working relationship between the two outfits, and the engineering display of how Shore reaches his and Atlanta’s flat when transported by helicopter is a win for the series’ disability representation. However, these scenes ultimately drag the episode’s action-drama down. Any other episode of Stingray would have devoted this precious running time to showcasing the antagonist of the week, highlighting their personality, motives and visual design.
Instead, we’re mostly shorn of such details. We come away from Pink Ice totally oblivious to the enemy’s identity and motivation, aside from the memorably curious design of their submarine, which is capable of deploying bomb-like devices that rise to the surface and commit their ice-themed atrocities. This lack of inclusion of enemies is a weird move to make for a series which delighted in showing us a morally eclectic array of underwater alien creatures, not all of whom wanted to conquer the terranean world. Still, this absence of the enemy lends an amoral horror to the pink ice, pushing the episode’s climate change similarities still further. With little surprise or deviation from established formulas, the Stingray crew eventually succeeds in evading the noose-like ice and targeting the enemy submarine. Once the enemy is eliminated, the slow dispersal of the ice itself eventually ensues.
A Less Memorable Episode than Others?
It’s interesting to note that several of Fennell’s TV Century 21 scripts feature similar climate change-related premises. Stingray‘s World Weather Station Mystery and Thunderbirds‘ Solar Danger feature similar ideas of WASP and International Rescue facing impossible odds against seemingly unstoppable natural disasters. Both of those stories balance their disasters with some welcome personal jeopardy for our characters, and to it’s credit, so too does Pink Ice. The scenes of Operation Ice Blast make for tense viewing with the acknowledgement that Marineville doesn’t claim total control over its own hydronic missiles. With Stingray quickly ensnared by the ice, the only solution is to bombard the area with Marineville’s trademark missiles. In the absence of a memorable villain, this potential human error has to suffice, injecting a dollop of personal drama into an otherwise flat episode.
It’s a shame that one of Stingray’s most terrifying dangers couldn’t be complimented with the series’ usual healthy balance of wit and characterisation. But if nothing else, as a showcase for Stingray and AP Films’ special effects and general film-making craft, Pink Ice still succeeds in being a memorable outing.
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