The Most Special Agent
"The Most Special Agent" is the first episode of Joe 90, a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed by their production company Century 21 for ITC Entertainment. Written by the Andersons and David Lane and directed by Desmond Saunders, it was first broadcast on 29 September 1968 on Associated Television and Tyne Tees Television.
Set in the future, the series follows the adventures of nine-year-old schoolboy Joe McClaine, who becomes the "Most Special Agent" of the spy organisation World Intelligence Network. With the help of the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer, a mind uploading device created by his adoptive father Professor "Mac" McClaine, Joe takes on the expertise of leading specialists to carry out dangerous missions for WIN, his youth and innocence allowing him to perform espionage without arousing the enemy's suspicion.
In the first episode of the series, Mac transfers his knowledge and experience to Joe to demonstrate the BIG RAT's potential to his friend Sam Loover, a WIN agent. In a meeting at WIN's London headquarters, Shane Weston, Loover's superior, describes a speculative scenario to explain how Joe and the BIG RAT could be valuable assets in the fight for world peace. Critical responses to "The Most Special Agent" have been mixed: while the episode has been praised for its technical direction, some commentators have questioned the use of a Cold War-influenced hypothetical mission as a way of explaining the series' concept.
Plot
Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine invites his friend Sam Loover to his Dorset cottage to view his latest invention, the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer. The device is capable of interfacing with the human brain, allowing the knowledge and experience of one person to be transferred to the mind of another. To demonstrate, Mac transfers his own "brain pattern" to his nine-year-old adopted son Joe. After the transfer, Joe immediately displays his father's expert knowledge of supercomputers.Although Mac plans to sell his device, Loover, an agent of the World Intelligence Network, persuades him to keep it a secret, believing that Joe and the BIG RAT combined would be a valuable asset for the organisation. The McClaines travel to WIN Headquarters London in Mac's flying Jet-Air Car to meet Loover and his superior, WIN commander-in-chief Shane Weston. To show the merit of WIN's proposal, Weston invites the McClaines to imagine a scenario in which Joe, aided by the BIG RAT, is assigned to capture a Russian aircraft ...
At a press conference in London, a Russian pilot is answering questions on his country's new MiG-242, the world's most powerful fighter-bomber. He is unaware that Mac and Loover are using a concealed antenna to record his brain pattern and transmit it to the McClaine cottage, where it is later transferred to Joe via the BIG RAT. Joe is then given a pair of special glasses that give him access to all of the pilot's knowledge and experience. His mission is to steal a MiG-242 and fly it to England for study, thus removing the Russian tactical advantage over the West.
Travelling to a Moscow airbase, Mac and Joe join a group of aviation experts who are viewing MiG-242s at close range. Joe slips past security and takes off in one of the aircraft. The soldier guiding the tour insists that the MiG-242 was stolen by a child but is arrested on the orders of the disbelieving base commander. In the air, Joe shoots down a squadron of MiG-242s intercepting him and then bombs a missile base targeting him from the ground. He reaches England and lands at Manston Airfield. Abandoning the MiG-242 before it is surrounded by armoured vehicles, he is collected by Loover in the Jet-Air Car and flown to safety. A local farmer's eyewitness account of the incident is met with scepticism by the airfield controller ...
Ending his story, Weston reminds the McClaines that this scenario has little basis in fact: the MiG-242 does not exist and Russia and the West are at peace. He asks Mac to pledge Joe and the BIG RAT's services to WIN. Mac is outraged by the idea, insisting that Joe is too young. An argument ensues, but then Loover points out Joe and the BIG RAT's extraordinary potential and Mac reluctantly agrees. Joe joins WIN as its "Most Special Agent".
Production
The episode was written by series creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson with assistance from producer David Lane, who was uncredited for his contribution. Although it had no on-screen title, it was referred to in all production documentation and promotional material as "The Most Special Agent". The fictional MiG-242 was inspired by the similarly-numbered MiG fighter aircraft of the Soviet Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau.In the first version of the script, completed in the autumn of 1967, Joe was to have joined the CIA. The character of Shane Weston was originally written as the Deputy Director of the CIA and the meeting between Weston, Loover and the McClaines was to have taken place at the Embassy of the United States in London. The name of the organisation was changed to WIN, and Weston's position to that of WIN's London controller, when script editor Tony Barwick and scriptwriter-actor Shane Rimmer composed a writers' guide for the series.
The original script featured a brief scene, absent from the finished episode, in which a London police officer stops in amazement at the sight of Mac's futuristic Jet-Air Car parked in the street. Also revised in the course of the production was the sequence showing Mac and Joe's flight to Russia: a scene set on board the plane had Mac telling Joe that Russia is giving foreigners the opportunity to view the MiG-242 because it is trying to present the aircraft as a "purely defensive weapon". For the completed episode, this was reduced to a single shot of Mac and Joe without dialogue.
Filming and music
The episode's puppet filming began on 13 November 1967 and ran for three weeks, finishing in early December. This coincided with the production of "The Inquisition", the series finale of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Director Desmond Saunders, who also served as Joe 90s production controller, had previously directed the first episode of Captain Scarlet.The sequence in which Mac gives Joe his brain pattern served as the series' title sequence. In some episodes, including this one, it was preceded by a teaser and formed part of the plot. The puppet playing the Russian commander was originally sculpted for Captain Scarlet but did not appear in any episodes of that series. The argument at the end of the episode was unscripted; it was presented using a series of still photographs of the characters overlaid with the voice actors' improvised dialogue.
Both the incidental music and the series theme music were recorded on 18 January 1968 in a four-hour session at Olympic Studios using a band of 28 instrumentalists. The music introducing the Moscow airbase imitated the Russian folk tune "The Song of the Volga Boatmen".
Design and effects
The scale model footage of the airliner flying the McClaines to Russia was originally filmed for the Captain Scarlet episode "Flight 104". Some of the models representing the Moscow airbase were recycled from Century 21's feature film Thunderbirds Are Go. The shots of Joe's bombing of the missile base were originally filmed for Thunderbird 6 as the chain reaction that follows the destruction of Skyship One.The MiG-242 model and puppet-size cockpit were adapted from the Angel Interceptor model and cockpit from Captain Scarlet. Model designer Mike Trim was instructed to base his concept around the shape of the Angel cockpit because, in his words, the Century 21 art department "wanted to get their money's worth by using in as many ways as possible." Trim purposely incorporated "Russian features" in the aircraft's overall design. The re-dressed Angel cockpit went on to appear in several other episodes of Joe 90.
The Russian "hover-tank" and airbase "hover-bus" were also designed by Trim, who thought it "made sense from a design standpoint to make them similar." In a DVD audio commentary for the episode, he remembered that while the script did not specify the nature of the bus that transports Mac, Joe and the aviation experts around the airbase, he chose to design it as a hovercraft because he felt that a conventional wheeled vehicle would have looked "boring". The ground-to-air missiles that are fired at Joe's MiG-242 were based on a real Russian design.
Broadcast and reception
The episode was incorrectly announced as "The Most Special Astronaut" in some UK TV listings. It was first broadcast on 29 September 1968 on Associated Television and Tyne Tees Television to an audience that included an estimated one million adults. Prior to its first broadcast on London Weekend Television on 5 October – directly opposite the fourth episode of Doctor Who serial The Mind Robber on BBC1 – Len Jones, the voice of Joe, stated that his character would "slaughter that soppy Doctor Who. He may only be a puppet, but he is more realistic."The episode had its BBC1 premiere on 23 April 1994, when it was seen by approximately 250,000 people. On 27 August 2000, it was shown on Channel 5 as part of a Gerry Anderson-themed day of programming.
Critical response
Writing for the Anderson fanzine Andersonic, author Sam Denham gives the episode a negative review, describing "The Most Special Agent" as "visually and technically a triumph" but otherwise a "disaster". According to Denham, the episode "makes no attempt to present as interesting or appealing" and its "cop-out" plot and use of a "photomontage" argument merely " to the air of disappointment." He concludes that "The best that can be said about 'Most Special Agent' is that it has some explosions in it." By contrast, Jim Sangster and Paul Condon of Collins Telly Guide describe the photomontage as "more emotionally fraught than anything that had gone before", regarding it as an example of the series' superior direction compared to earlier Anderson productions.Marcus Hearn, author of Thunderbirds: The Vault, believes that the plot was partly inspired by events from Gerry Anderson's youth. He suggests that the Russian pilot whose brain pattern is copied was based on Anderson's elder brother Lionel, an RAF pilot who was killed in action during the Second World War. Hearn also believes "Manston Airfield" to be based on RAF Manston, where Anderson and Keith Shackleton, the head of Century 21 Merchandising, completed their National Service in the 1940s.
The episode has also been analysed with reference to the Cold War. Jonathan Bignell describes Joe's fictional mission, which references an arms race, as an "unusually precise reference to the 1960s context" in which Joe 90 was filmed. Tat Wood of TV Zone magazine questions the logic of the episode's "'what if?'" scenario, criticising the use of Russia as the enemy given that Shane Weston is eventually forced to explain that there is now peace between East and West: "This rather limits the possibilities of the World Intelligence Network's 'Very Special Agent'." Stephen La Rivière, author of Filmed in Supermarionation: A History of the Future, finds this late admission from Weston amusing. According to media historian Nicholas J. Cull, the fact that the ending stresses this lack of hostility shows how Anderson "took an end to the Cold War as a given in his work." In an interview with Cull, Anderson said that while he had been "inspired by some aspects of Cold War technology", he felt that he "had a duty to the rising generation to avoid perpetuating Cold War stereotypes". In another interview, he commented: "I'd always tried very hard not to put my ten cents into creating World War III."
Other media
Scenes from the episode were later re-edited to appear as a flashback in the clip show series finale, "The Birthday". In 1969, Arrowtabs released two abridged, silent, black-and-white versions of the episode on 8 mm film. The same year, footage from the episode was used in a Joe 90-themed TV advertising campaign for Kellogg's Sugar Smacks breakfast cereal. "The Most Special Agent" also forms a segment of the feature-length Joe 90 compilation film The Amazing Adventures of Joe 90, produced by ITC New York for US television in 1981.The 2003 Joe 90 DVD box set by A&E Home Video includes an audio commentary for the episode with designer Mike Trim.