Enemy agent Arcos has invented a form of instant plastic surgery and he uses it to imprison Steed and create a double, who is sent to throw a spanner in the works at an important peace conference at a country house. Although Steed overpowers his jailer and escapes, Miss King still has to deal with the matter of more than one doppelganger for her colleague though none seem to survive for very long. Until Steed arrives she is assisted by a dashing blond German count. A peace conference is due to take place in a country house somewhere in England. Enemy agents Arcos ( Ray McAnally ) and Zerson ( Norman Jones ) want to sabotage it by creating a double of John Steed, who is there - along with Tara King - as an 'observer'.<br/><br/>Unhappy with the initial result, Arcos orders that the real Steed be kidnapped and brought to him at once. This is then done. But Steed manages to throw a spanner in the works - and suddenly the conference is awash with lookalikes of himself ( does not say much for the security there, does it? ) who murder each other. Tara is confused, especially as a dead man with Steed's features was found in a hotel room. She joins forces with Baron von Curt ( Ian Ogilvy ), a dashing Teutonic aristocrat with a fondness for the ladies and sword-fencing…<br/><br/>Originally to have been filmed on location in Spain ( under the title 'Too Many Oles'! ), this is a sprightly little adventure, benefiting from a great performance by Ray McAnally ( a fabulous actor who died well before his time ) as the villain, and a blonde Ian Ogilvy - a decade before inheriting Roger Moore's halo - as 'von Curt'. One has to wonder whether the character was in any way inspired by 'Adam Adamant', the Victorian adventurer portrayed on B.B.C.-1 a few years earlier by Gerald Harper ( and for whose series Brian Clemens had written ).<br/><br/>A running gag in the Thorson series was 'Mother' ( Patrick Newell ), the head of Steed's department, forever turning up in unusual locations, such as a swimming pool or the top of a double decker bus. Here he is in an underwater office! Not to be outdone, the villains have an unusual base of their own - beneath an abandoned car in a quarry. Patrick Macnee gets the chance to have some fun playing evil duplicates of his character.<br/><br/>The explosion at the end was stock footage - and looks it. I wonder which picture it came from. In the run up to a peace conference foreign agents have come up with a dastardly plan to sabotage the event; they will create a duplicate Steed. There first attempts, working from photographs, aren't quite good enough so they kidnap the real Steed. While in captivity they explain to him, and the viewer, how they will create their new Steed a process he dubs 'instant plastic surgery'. While Steed is held captive Tara is busy looking for him along with Baron Von Curt; a man she met when he asked her to pretend to be his wife in order to shake off a couple of woman he'd mistakenly arranged to meet at the same time. Steed briefly escapes his captors and messes with their plans he may not be able to prevent them making a new Steed so he arranges it so they create several and they all turn up at the conference at about the same time!<br/><br/>This was a fairly typical Avengers episode; a devious and far-fetched plot to undermine an important conference and plenty of humorous moments. The idea of instant plastic surgery is of course science fiction but the sight of numerous Steeds was entertaining; especially when they spoke and sounded nothing like our Steed. Tara's pairing with Baron Von Curt a bit of a weak point although even this provided some laughs; the best being when Tara got out of his car and jumped into a lake to visit Mother's underwater office leaving the Baron wondering where she had vanished to the show's creators were certainly inventive when picking locations for Mother's various offices! This inventiveness also provided a good base for the bad guys; a large underground lair accessed through an apparently abandoned car in a quarry. Overall this was a fun if rather light instalment.
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