Welcome to Murdersville! You'll Never Leave!

As BBC FOUR’s re-run of the colour Emma Peel Avengers episodes draws to a close we come to Murdersville, an odd little episode which both epitomises the Steed/Peel era and is also paradoxically atypical. While scintillating chemistry, witty banter and cheeky innuendo familiar from the era abounds there is also something else in the mix that hints at the changes on the horizon for Avengerland. The episode starts off by giving us a rare glimpse into Mrs Peel’s past when a childhood friend, newly arrived in England after years abroad, invites her to his place in the country. Needless to say, sinister things are afoot in the seemingly picturesque village near said friend’s house and soon he is dead and Emma is left to face the entire deranged community single handed.

What makes this episode so unusual is the level of realism and violence the characters encounter which at times becomes genuinely sinister and upsetting. Take for example the scene in which the colonel’s assistant is attacked and killed by two villagers who take a sadistic delight in smashing the colonel’s belongings (which the assistant is meant to be looking after) before finishing off the jovial assistant. It’s a far cry from the usual comic-book shenanigans and diabolical masterminds we’re used to every week.

In some ways the episode pre-figures the Tara King season to come in which the ‘mastermind’ storylines and more fantastic elements of the Peel era were dropped in favour of a more realistic flavour. While this move was undoubtedly a major miss-step in the show’s format, Murdersville shows how such a move could have been successful. While the sense of danger is heightened and Mrs Peel seems in genuine danger for once, the show retains its’ clever sense of humour, brilliantly depicted in the scenes in which Steed arrives to rescue Mrs Peel from the dungeon in which she is held.

As such the episode feels like it bookends the Peel era, exemplifying the period’s style but also harking forward to Tara’s tenure. One can’t help but feel that with a few tweaks, the episode would have mad a perfect swansong for Emma Peel. Simply by swapping Emma’s ‘childhood friend’ for ‘missing husband’ and having him survive the episode we could have had a poignant and exiting final Peel episode. What we actually got was a complete train wreck, in the form of The Forget Me-Knot, but that’s another story entirely…