https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po9oO3M1TjE
For some shows, a Christmas episode represents the perfect opportunity
to gather together friends and family, to celebrate the essential bonds that ultimately unite the people that populate a given fictional universe. But for the 1960s puppet espionage show Joe 90, Christmas was the perfect opportunity to mix together haunted churches, counterfeiters, fake angels, and jetpacks, with one intrepid, glasses-wearing 9-year-old boy on hand to tie it all together.
Joe 90 was the penultimate show made using Supermarionation, the high-tech puppetry process created by Gerry Anderson and his team in the 1960s. I’ve never been shy about sharing my love of the likes of Stingray, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons — my credentials may be found here and here — and today I come to share with you one of the oddest Christmas episodes ever made, the Joe 90 episode “The Unorthodox Shepherd.” The video up top includes the entire episode, but I’ve set it to begin at the climax, in which intrepid child spy Joe McClaine becomes a jetpack-clad avenging angel.
https://gizmodo.com/and-now-the-most-ludicrously-over-the-top-launch-seque-5923503
https://gizmodo.com/how-not-to-make-a-1960s-british-sci-fi-puppet-show-5817812
Like I say, this is not your traditional Christmas episode, particularly compared to the other two yuletide Supermarionation entries: the Stingray episode “A Christmas to Remember” and the Thunderbirds story “Give or Take a Million.” Both of those are relatively straightforward stories in which the shows’ heroes decide to give adorable little kids (an orphan in the first case, a children’s hospital patient in the latter) the ultimate Christmas present: a trip to their top-secret bases, complete with oversize toy version of the shows’ incredible machines, which I’m going to go ahead and assume were available at the time from all fine retailers. Both episodes throw in a little excitement to balance out the general yuletide good cheer, as the Stingray crew investigates a mysterious alien submarine and the Thunderbirds episode includes an elaborate bank heist that doesn’t actually involve any members of the International Rescue team. Also, the entirety of the Thunderbirds episode technically involves International Rescue head Jeff Tracy describing at length to a young child the goals and achievements of a planning committee, but what the hey. By Thunderbirds standards, that’s normal enough. So let’s turn to Joe 90, because I need to share this with you nice people.
Admittedly, “The Unorthodox Shepherd” is a Christmas episode much as
something like Die Hard is a
Christmas movie; they’re both set on the holiday, but the yuletide festivities
are mostly incidental to the story at hand. The story of “The Unorthodox Shepherd” is bonkers in the way
most Joe 90 episodes are, in that writer
Tony Barwick somehow has to contrive an espionage story that can only be
resolved through the efforts of a nine-year-old boy whose glasses give him the skills
and knowledge of the world’s most brilliant minds. In this case, counterfeiters
are forcing a reverend in a tiny English town to help them pass almost
undetectable forgeries into circulation. To that end, they have wired up the
church with automation that makes it appear haunted, all so that villagers will
be too frightened to go around snooping. Also, Christmas is approaching, which
if nothing else provides a convenient excuse for young Joe McClaine and his
father to actually bother to go to church. In its way, this is one of the more
quietly religious Christmas episodes I’ve seen, if only because there’s no talk
of trees or presents, but the story does end with a trip to the church for the
Christmas service.
In any event, Joe gets to show off a pair of brain patterns
in this episode, first using the knowledge of a bank executive to confirm the
phony bills are indeed counterfeit and later using the skills of a jetpack
expert to capture the forgers by pretending to be an angel. Wait… I feel like
that requires slightly more context. Although there’s really only so much more
I can say: Our heroes’ scheme rests on the fact that one of the forgers is the
nephew of the legendary criminal who masterminded the theft of the currency
plates in the first place, and said legendary criminal is now buried on the
church grounds. Joe, his father, and their spy ally Sam Loover take the crooks’
idea of scaring people with a fake haunting and crank it up to 20, as Joe
dresses up as the avenging angel of the deceased master criminal.
It’s a foolproof plan, other than the minor detail that the
dangerous criminals whom Joe intends to scare all have guns and aren’t scared
of using them. As you can see in the clip above, there’s no indication that Joe
is wearing a bulletproof vest or any other sort of protection – he’s just
working on the assumption that the crooks will be too petrified to shoot
straight. Which, all things considered, isn’t actually that terrible an
assumption—he’s certainly proven correct, inasmuch as this episode of Joe 90 doesn’t end with its young hero
gunned down by protagonists—but it still seems like a seriously insane risk to
build a plan around, particularly when Joe’s own father is one of other main visionaries
behind the scheme. Still, if dressing up your own son as an angel and having
him fly a jetpack straight at a bunch of armed, desperate counterfeiters isn’t
the true meaning of Christmas, I don’t want to know what is.
