2-02. The Most Promising Girl of Her Year.

Callan pressures a young scientist (Elizabeth Bell)
who has abruptly decided to resign.

Air Date: Jan. 15, 1969. Written by: James Mitchell. Directed by: Peter Duguid. Produced by: Reginald Collin.


THE PLOT:

Joan Mather (Elizabeth Bell) suddenly announces that she wants to quit her government-funded job. No problem for most people... but Joan is a biochemist, whose work could potentially be used for germ warfare. A further complication is Joan's photographic memory, enabling her to recall details of all her work under Dr. Bradford (Raymond Young)

Hunter assigns Callan to make sure Joan isn't a security risk, but he already knows that she is. Not due to any political views, but because she has fallen in love with a West German scientist (David Hargreaves) - a man who is actually an East German agent targeting Joan for her specialized knowledge!

Hunter assigns Callan a straightforward, simple little job...

CHARACTERS:

Callan: Tells Joan that he doesn't enjoy killing - only for her to see right through his lie and state that she can tell that he loves it. He snaps back with an unaccustomed ferocity, all but confirming her assessment even for viewers who have forgotten him admitting as much the previous season. He's uncomfortable from the start, assigned the exact kind of job he hates. At the end, when the wrong person gets a little too smug with him, he lets his rage out by administering a beating Meres would likely be envious of.

Hunter: Michael Goodliffe's Hunter is more hateable in this episode than Ronald Radd's ever was. His soft spoken, reasonable tone makes him less human rather than more, as he trades in lives with the some detachment as a bookkeeper transferring balances. His manipulation of Callan is expert - first lying to him that the job is to prove Joan's innocence, then keeping him on the job by threatening to assign Meres (translation: use violence). Radd's Hunter was callous because he had to be, but you occasionally sensed distaste underneath; Goodliffe's Hunter comes across as a man with no empathy at all.

Meres: Grins openly when it's time to attack an enemy agent. Snell (Clifford Rose), the Section's doctor, later reproaches Meres for hitting him "harder than I think advisable, if I'm to work on (him) afterward." Later, as the prisoner is interrogated using hallucinogens, we get an unsettling shot of the drugged man's perspective of Meres' face, elongated so that it looks like something out of a horror film.

Lonely: When Callan assigns him to tail Joan, he initially jokes that Callan must be in love... a joke he drops fast after a hard look. He does his job well throughout the episode, even sneaking into Joan's flat while she and her roommate are inside sleeping. His paranoia over Callan's final plan - which hinges on Lonely having access to a phone box at the right moment - proves justified, though I'm sure Lonely would know better than to say, "I told you so."

Joan: Practically a case study in how a person can be simultaneously intelligent and naive. Joan's sharp mind and photographic memory led her to go straight from university to lab work, leaving her with minimal experience of the real world. This makes her easy prey for the most basic of traps. The character could easily have come across as too idiotic to care about. Fortunately, Elizabeth Bell gives a letter-perfect performance as a woman suddenly caught up in events entirely out of her control, while the script allows her intelligence to shine through at key moments, such as when she sizes Callan up as an ex-soldier for speech patterns that remind her of her father.

Lonely breaks into Joan's flat to search for evidence.

THOUGHTS:

"You poor little idiot. What are we doing with you?"

The Most Promising Girl of Her Year succeeds by putting Callan and Joan into a vice and gradually increasing the pressure. Callan initially believes Hunter's lie that he's just there to prove Joan's innocence; Joan initially believes Dr. Bradford's lie that she is not considered a security risk. After all, when we're told things are as we would like them, we tend to want to believe it's the truth.

By the midpoint of the episode, both characters know better. Joan's anguish is more obvious than Callan's, but his stress rises steadily throughout. He demands to know what Hunter has planned for Joan after this operation - a question Hunter answers in that calm, reasonable tone that makes everything sound so much worse as he lays out how surveillance of Joan will continue indefinitely.  By the end, Callan is snapping at people and even physically beating them, as much out of frustration at being involved in this particular case as out of any direct circumstances.

Edward Woodward is always good, but he's particularly superb at showing Callan's mounting discomfort, frustration, and finally anger. Elizabeth Bell matches him well, and all the regulars bring their best. Other than some very 1960s nonsense involving all-but-magical hypnosis, the resulting episode is a particularly strong one.


Overall Rating: 9/10.

Previous Episode: Red Knight, White Knight
Next Episode: You're Under Starter's Orders



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