The Avengers: Castle De'Ath

Castle De'Ath (1965)

Starring: Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Robert Urquhart, Gordon Jackson, and Jack Lambert

Director: James Hill

Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Two of Britain's top government agents, Steed & Mrs. Peel (Macnee and Rigg) go undercover to investigate a strange death at an isolated castle and its possible connection to a decline in the fish population off the coast of Scotland.

"Castle De'Ath" is both a great episode and a terrible episode, with the bad outweighing the good (however slightly). 

The good is that it has an excellent cast, with guest-stars Robert Urquhart and Gordon Jackson playing the pair of Scottish brothers who own the castle, and who are as different as night and day, being at the top of the list for well-deserved praise. Either one--or perhaps even both--may be behind a devilish plot to destroy Scotland and England's fishing industry. Of course, they may also just be eccentric and/or greedy; These two characters and their conflict with each other and with our heroes are the main drivers of this episode, with Urquhart and Jackson striking just the right balance between dubious and sincere, restrained and ridiculously over-the-top in their performances to keep the audience unsure as to what's truly motivating either one of them.

The usual amount of praise must also be given to Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee. Their portrayals of their characters are a little less playful this time out, because there's limited opportunity for it; Steed and Peel are both undercover, supposedly don't know each other, and arrive at the castle at different times, so they can investigate from different angles. Interestingly, their cover-stories are reversed from the usual approach; Steed is posing as a writer and Rigg is a tourism executive with an interest in turning Castle De'Ath into an attraction. Rigg also gets to sneak through the castle in a flimsy nightgown, so that's another definite plus for the episode.

The last-minute reveal of the true identity of the villainous mastermind in the show is an exciting moment, as is the battle royal that surrounds it. In several episodes of "The Avengers", the climactic action of an episode is often dragged down by poor staging and badly rehearsed stage fighting; that is not the case here. The action is fluid and fun (well, for the viewers at least... for some of the participants in the fight, it's quite deadly), and the only complaint I can field is that I wish the final fate of one of the Brothers De'Ath was a little clearer.

Speaking of complaints, I have a major one with "Castle De'Ath"--one so big that it almost ruins the entire episode. While the script here was generally well-written and the story constructed well enough to keep the viewer guessing who the real villain in Castle De'Ath is, everything falls apart once the Big Reveal happens. It's not that things don't make sense in the context of the clues that an attentive viewer would have picked up on, it's that the villain's actions both prior to and during the events of the episode are so monumentally stupid that they were certain  to invite circumstances that would almost certainly expose himself and his co-conspirators to discovery. A somewhat smaller complaint is that some of the episode's humor felt forced--such as Steed performing a clownish Scottish dance while Peel plays miniature bagpipes--but when combined with the the botched logical underpinnings of the story, this Avengers outing only rates Six Stars.