Ordeal

There is no peace for the wicked. Colonel Paul Foster gets some time for rest and recreation.

Foster goes to a party and then to a health spa for SHADO operatives.

Unfortunately he is abducted by aliens. The guy gets no luck and the security of the health spa is seriously duff.

This is very much a filler episode. Foster spends most of the time bare chested in the sauna. I was expecting Jason King to join him!

As for the party scene. Given that UFO is set in the 1980s, shot in the early 1970s. The party looked like something from the psychedelic 1960s. Where was ska? Where was the new age post punk music? I think there was drugs in that party. They should had a Police record, like Walking on the Moon.

Billington stars in a dumb episode about alien abduction, only he's the abductee!

It starts off with a Swinging '60s party opening with sexy dancers as the Beatles' "Get Back" plays -making one wonder how the Andersons managed to cough up enough money to license it way back when, long before the music of the Fab Four, Rolling Stones and so many other top acts became staples of TV commercials. He falls asleep at a sauna and it appears to the attentive viewer that we're in for an "it was all a dream" crappy story, given the overemphasis on Michael's sleepiness.

In this story, SHADO discovers the incident at the sauna and goes after the alien ship, with Ed typically ruthless as he orders the spaceship to be shot down, even though missing Paul is assumed to have been taken aboard. Sewell objects to sacrificing their man, but to no avail. The pilot misses his shot, earning Ed's wrath but of course the audience is on Paul's side.

With the alien craft headed for the moon, Gabrielle Drake gets to become involved (for a change) with the story, going out personally to confront the aliens. But a crash landing on the moon allows Paul to be retrieved, and he's stuck in an alien spacesuit, breathing liquid, making it a dodgy task to save him. Fortunately we can stare at Drake's big breasts in her tight uniform for a diversion. And she carefully tries to save his life in the delicate removal of his helmet.

A terrible shaggy dog story goes down the drain ever so tediously, wasting such a rare case of licensing a Beatles performance for TV circa 1970.

I enjoyed this episode but couldn't help noticing the reported speed of the incoming UFO - one point five million miles per second!

By my calculations, that is just over 8 times the speed of light. I don't know what they used to detect it but it must be pretty impressive !