497e39180f Found wandering in a snowy field Helen Pritchard claims to have seen a man who was supposed to have been a corpse but was very much alive. This leads Steed to investigate the Happy Meadows funeral parlour and the cheery Mr. Bagpipes Happychap. Unfortunately the undertakers seem unable to keep their &#39;stiffs&#39; from walking and Steed has to arrange his own funeral in order to find out more, though ultimately he and Miss King do get a send-off that is out of this world! &quot;Bizarre&quot; is not the best episode to end the series on, but it is what it is. A young woman (Sally Nesbitt, &quot;The Joker&quot;) is found unconscious in a snow covered field, having been thrown off a train after discovering a coffin with a very live occupant. All the clues lead to The Happy Meadows, a cemetery run by &#39;Bagpipes&#39; Happychap (Roy Kinnear, &quot;Esprit De Corps,&quot; &quot;The Hour That Never Was,&quot; &quot;The See-Through Man&quot;), in particular the section knownParadise Plot, reserved only for the privileged. Steed must die to learn the secrets behind Paradise. The climactic fight is no holds barred, scored with a new version of the familiar theme, a fitting last hurrah. Also featuring Fulton Mackay (&quot;Return of the Cybernauts&quot; and &quot;You&#39;ll Catch Your Death&quot;), John Sharp (&quot;Traitor in Zebra&quot; and &quot;Murdersville&quot;), Patrick Connor (&quot;Death on the Slipway&quot;), and Ron Pember (&quot;Double Danger&quot;). This final episode ends with Steed and Tara blasting off for parts unknown, without a care in the world (at least until the champagne runs out). The series completed its final episode in March 1969, and Patrick Macnee would not return for THE NEW AVENGERS until 1976. This, the final episode of the original &#39;Avengers&#39; opens with a woman, Helen Pritchard, walking barefoot in the snow, dressed in her nightwear. She collapses and there is no obvious indication where she came from. The case is to be investigated by Steed, Tara and Captain William Cordell. Cordell surmises that Helen must have either fallen or been thrown from the night train she doesn&#39;t remember much but when asked about the train starts ranting about being on a train and seeing a dead man in a coffin who wasn&#39;t dead! There was indeed a coffin being transported on the train; its destination the Happy Meadows cemetery. Steed goes there to investigate and learns that the body has been buried. That might have been the end of the matter but soon afterwards a man tries to kill Helen; Tara stops him and he is killed in the attack rather surprising given that he died and was buried at Happy Meadows some time previously! It turns out many people wanted for financial crimes &#39;died&#39; and were buried at Happy Meadows. Exhumations reveal a lot of empty coffins.<br/><br/>This episode is a lot of fun and certainly lives up to its title even by the standards of The Avengers it is delightfully bizarre. At first there is the question of what is happening to the bodies; then when we learn that they aren&#39;t dead there is the question of how they have been certified dead; Steed even confirmed that one of them was dead. We learn that these &#39;undead&#39; are in fact living a good life attended by beautiful women in a cavern under the cemetery; this is a vision of paradise that could only have been imagined in the sixties! The guest cast were entertaining; most notably Roy Kinnear who played the delightfully named Bagpipes Happychap and Fulton Mackay who plays the character behind the mystery. As one would expect Patrick Macnee and Linda Thorson do fines jobs in this final episode although Macnee would of course return in &#39;The New Avengers&#39;. Watching the series again I can&#39;t help feeling that the &#39;Tara King&#39; stories are somewhat underrated and her character overlooked compared to Cathy Gale and Emma Peel. The ending does feel a little tacked on and has no connection to anything we&#39;ve seen before clearly the writers knew this was to be the last series and decided to give Steed and Tara a memorable send-off the succeeded!
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