Operation Time

"Operation Time" is the eighth episode of the British Supermarionation television series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. First broadcast in the United Kingdom on 17 November 1967 (1967-11-17) on ATV Midlands, it was written by Richard Conway and Stephen J. Mattick and directed by Ken Turner.

In this episode, a Mysteron vow to "kill time" confuses Spectrum until the target is discovered to be a military general who is due to receive revolutionary neurosurgery. The Mysteron weaknesses discovered in "Operation Time" are developed in "Spectrum Strikes Back", its sequel episode.

Plot

When Spectrum receives a puzzling Mysteron threat to "kill time", Colonel White dispatches his senior officers to major cities to watch for targets. No promising intelligence surfaces until Captain Magenta learns that General Tiempo, the Commander of Western Region World Defence—whose surname is also the Spanish word for "time"—is soon to undergo a brain operation that will be given by leading neurosurgeon Dr Theodore Magnus, of the London Hospital. After Magnus is flown to Cloudbase along with Tiempo and a surgical team, he insists that the procedure—to be carried out with the aid of the pioneering technology of the "Cerebral Pulsator"—be performed immediately as scheduled, despite security concerns. Spectrum is unaware that the real Magnus is dead—killed in a car accident engineered by Captain Black — and that a Mysteron reconstruction has taken his place.

In the operating room, the duplicate deliberately overruns the Cerebral Pulsator and the patient is killed by the resulting seizure. However, since the patient's face was covered throughout, the reconstructed Magnus had no way of knowing that Tiempo had in fact been replaced by Captain Scarlet. Although the duplicate manages to break out of Sick Bay, it is soon cornered by Captain Blue in the Cloudbase generator room, where it is fatally electrocuted by an uncovered cable. During this time, an inexplicable phenomenon has appeared on an X-ray of Tiempo's head: Magnus's hand, which was inadvertently caught in the scan, has not been penetrated by the X-rays and has instead registered as a normal, photographic image. Later, once Scarlet has been revived, White announces the development of equipment designed to exploit the Mysterons' imperviousness to X-rays and their vulnerability to electricity.

Production

Writers Richard Conway and Stephen J. Mattick named Dr Magnus's colleague Dr Turner after the episode's director, Ken Turner.^[1] In the script, it was proposed that the sequences presenting the development of Tiempo's cranial X-rays be filmed on location at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, near the Century 21 film studios, but this ultimately proved to be unnecessary.^[1] Incidental music for "Operation Time" was recorded by Barry Gray on 14 May 1967 (1967-05-14)—with music for the later episode "Renegade Rocket"—in a session running for four-and-a-half hours and incorporating a 12-member orchestra.^[2]

"Operation Time" features voice actor Gary Files' first contributions to Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Files was unavailable for the voice recording of the first five episodes because he was voicing parts for the film Thunderbird 6, to which he had been signed on as a "try-out" for Captain Scarlet.^[3]

References

External links

• "Operation Time" at TV.com
• "Operation Time" at Fanderson.org.uk
• "Operation Time" at TheVervoid.com