1. Plot

2. Production

3. Reception

4. References

5. External links

"Renegade Rocket" is the 16th episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and produced by their company Century 21 Productions. Written by Ralph Hart and directed by Brian Burgess, it was first broadcast on 19 January 1968 on ATV Midlands.

In this episode, Spectrum fights to stop a hi-jacked incendiary rocket from destroying an unknown target.

Plot

Space Major Reeves, a rocket expert and friend of Colonel White (voiced by Donald Gray), leaves Cloudbase after completing a tour of the facility. He departs in a motor yacht for the island military installation Base Concord, unaware that Captain Black is watching from the shore. Black uses the Mysterons' powers to induce nausea in Reeves, who falls overboard and drowns in the yacht's slipstream.^[2][3]

A Mysteron reconstruction of Reeves arrives at Base Concord, shoots the control room officer and launches an incendiary variable-geometry rocket (VGR) under the control code "ZERO". He then escapes in a J-17 fighter carrying the flight program unit, leaving the base personnel no way of knowing the VGR's target or which of the 10,000 listed codes must be transmitted to trigger its self-destruct. In addition, for reasons unknown the VGR is not appearing on radar.

The commander alerts Spectrum and White dispatches Captains Scarlet and Blue (voiced by Francis Matthews and Ed Bishop) to Base Concord. Meanwhile, the Angel squadron are launched to track down Reeves and recover the unit. Reeves is quickly intercepted but refuses to surrender, instead crippling Melody's (voiced by Sylvia Anderson) aircraft with the J-17's machine gun and forcing her to eject before she crashes into the ocean.

At Base Concord, Scarlet, Blue and the base personnel realise that the VGR would be invisible to radar only if it were travelling upwards, and that because its descent would be equally vertical the only plausible target is the base itself. A replacement unit is installed and the personnel use it to transmit codes one after the other in a desperate effort to find the one used by Reeves. In the air, Reeves ignores Rhapsody's (voiced by Liz Morgan) order to surrender and deliberately crashes his fighter, causing the original unit to fall to the ocean floor.

Minutes before impact, and with Base Concord fully evacuated except for Scarlet and Blue, White radios his officers and instructs them to leave. However, in a last-ditch effort to save the base, Scarlet and Blue disobey White and carry on trying codes. "AMEN" is rejected, but at the same time the sunken unit is knocked over by an underwater current and the impact causes it to re-transmit "ZERO", triggering the VGR's self-destruct.^[3]

Scarlet and Blue return to Cloudbase believing that they miraculously found the correct code. When the truth is revealed, White reprimands the officers for their insubordination but stops short of court-martialling them, recognising the value of their bravery in the fight against the Mysterons.

Production

"Renegade Rocket" was filmed on Century 21's Stage 3 over two weeks beginning on 27 February 1967.^[1] The miniature model of the J-17 fighter was built with parts from an Airfix Dassault Mirage III model kit.^[4]

The incidental music, performed by an ensemble of 12 instrumentalists, was recorded during a four-and-a-half-hour studio session held on 14 May 1967. Music for "Operation Time" was recorded during the same session.^[5]

Reception

Anthony Clark of sci-fi-online.com describes "Renegade Rocket" as "just about average" and "about as dull as [Captain Scarlet] gets". He views the episode as an example of the series' "patchy" quality and questions Scarlet and Blue's motives for disobeying White given the extremely low chances of their finding the correct code.^[6] Shane M. Dallmann of Video Watchdog magazine suggests that the plot "could have similarly serviced a sitcom" and regards the episode as considerably less "gripping" than "Point 783".^[7]

In a review for the Andersonic website, Vincent Law argues that "Renegade Rocket" is one of many Anderson productions to focus on the dangers of "runaway machinery". Noting that the Mysteron reconstruction of Reeves effectively pulls rank on an officer to launch the VGR, he compares the character to a Cold War double agent and the episode as a whole to the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove. He criticises the dialogue and characterisation – questioning, for example, White's lack of emotional response to the death of his friend Reeves. Despite praising the episode's visuals, Law sums up "Renegade Rocket" as "a forerunner of effects-led films like Independence Day and its ilk — flashy, nice to look at but insubstantial and ultimately unfulfilling."^[8]

Chris Bentley, author of Captain Scarlet: The Vault, criticises the editing of the sequence in which the VGR makes its final approach to Base Concord, pointing out that White, who is counting down the seconds to impact, reaches zero even though the rocket is destroyed before it hits. He calls the sequence "baffling".^[1]

References

External links

• {{IMDb episode|0775185}}
• {{TV.com episode|captain-scarlet-and-the-mysterons/renegade-rocket-165457}}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20120224065032/http://www.thevervoid.com/media/scarlet_17.htm "Renegade Rocket"] at TheVervoid.com

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