A group of young boys find the body of an elderly Nazi in an
oil barrel dumped beside a river. Well! We’re already off to a bleak start,
aren’t we? The remainder of this episode will vacillate between sexy shenanigans
and campy B-movie plot twists that come out of nowhere, but this opening
sequence is a bit of a tough sell. U.N.C.L.E. is able to identify the man from
his old SS tattoo: He’s a former guard named Neubel, who was assigned to
protect a Nazi scientist named Wolfgang Volpe. Both Volpe and Neubel
disappeared following a laboratory explosion in the final days of the war and
were presumed dead. The appearance of Neubel’s fresh corpse leads U.N.C.L.E. to
suspect Volpe may still be alive.
Lending more credence to this theory: Items from Volpe’s
priceless stamp collection, long assumed destroyed, have been put up for
auction, suggesting Volpe might be secretly trying to raise some quick cash. So
Napoleon and Illya brush off their tuxes and skulk around the stamp auction in
search of clues. Napoleon finds Illya hanging out at the punch bowl, looking
characteristically moody and uncharacteristically flustered. Napoleon asks if
he’s been recognized by someone. “Not recognized.
Greeted like a long-lost brother,” a still-unsettled Illya replies, his tone filled
with blistering contempt.
Napoleon peeks into the auction room and spots the object of
Illya’s consternation: a slinky blonde THRUSH agent named Angelique (Janine
Gray), who, just FYI, has been recreationally shagging Napoleon off and on.
Illya disapproves of his partner’s habit of sleeping with his mortal enemies: “Someday
you must tell me what it’s like, romancing someone who would kill you without a
qualm,” he says. “It adds spice, Illya,” Napoleon cheerfully replies.
Napoleon and Angelique canoodle quietly during the auction. Napoleon
suggests sneaking off for some nookie (“Your place or mine?”), but Angelique,
who is a bastion of steely professionalism compared to Napoleon, firmly places
the mission first: “If we don’t do our jobs, they won’t let us play together.”
They head into the hallway to discuss their respective
assignments, while Illya shoots them some magnificent stink eye. Angelique
observes to Napoleon, “Your friend is much too grim.” “The truth is, he’s
jealous,” Napoleon replies. Angelique jumps to the immediate—and correct—conclusion
that Napoleon means Illya is jealous of her for monopolizing his partner, not
jealous of Napoleon for scoring a smoking-hot THRUSH babe. Angelique thinks
this is all very silly: Illya should realize it’s healthy and normal for blood
enemies to occasionally shag each other.
Both THRUSH and U.N.C.L.E. are working toward the same end—they’re
both hoping to use Volpe’s stamp collection to find Volpe—so Napoleon and
Angelique agree on a temporary truce. They pool their resources and
successfully bid on one of Volpe’s stamps, which they take to a philatelist for
a professional appraisal. Plotwise, absolutely nothing useful happens here—the philatelist
mentions that the stamp used to be one of a connected pair, which is a story
thread that goes nowhere—but this whole scene is worth its weight in gold just
for the way Napoleon and Angelique openly flirt with each other while Illya seethes
in the background.
More formidable stink eye ensues. Angelique, for her part,
looks bemused and intrigued by Illya’s bristling hostility toward her.
Amazing. This woman is a champagne cocktail away from
proposing a Napoleon-Illya sandwich.
As soon as Angelique leaves, Illya immediately starts
trash-talking her to his partner: “She seems happy. Who is dead?” He notices
that the carnation boutonnière Angelique gave to Napoleon contains a deadly
spider: “One of Angelique’s relatives, perhaps?” Illya, babe, your claws are out this episode.
Illya and Napoleon stake out the auction house and watch as
squeaky-clean college lovebirds Chuck (Burt Brinckerhoff) and his fiancée Terry
(Brooke Bundy) pick up the cash received from the sale of the valuable stamp.
THRUSH agents swarm the auction house and spray knockout gas everywhere. They
kidnap Chuck, but Napoleon and Illya leap into action and protect Terry. From
the safety of U.N.C.L.E.’s headquarters, a shaken Terry explains the whole
scheme to Napoleon and Illya: An anonymous party contacted Chuck by mail and
asked him to sell the stamp at the auction in return for a ten-percent
commission.
Brooke Bundy, by the way, popped up on the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation as the
Enterprise’s chief engineer, who appeared in a single early episode (“The Naked
Now”) and then was never seen again. Someday I’m going to treat you all to my
rant about how TNG did a stellar job of
placing women in cool nontraditional roles—the chief engineer and the security chief
were both female, hooray— then nuked all that valuable progress by swiftly replacing
them both with dudes. Sorry, Brooke.
Angelique, meanwhile, poses as an U.N.C.L.E. agent and
“rescues” Chuck from his THRUSH captors, with the intention of fooling him into
leading her to Volpe. Napoleon whisks Chuck out of her clutches, then has the
police haul her off to jail for, uh, finding employment in the U.S. in
violation of her visa. This is hands-down the strangest way Napoleon has ever
thwarted a THRUSH agent.
Soon, the anonymous party contacts Chuck and tells him to
bring the auction funds to a deserted warehouse. Napoleon sends Chuck into the
warehouse alone with the money while he waits outside with Terry. Terry objects
heartily to this plan, but Napoleon reassures her that Chuck is very well
protected. This seems to be an outright lie: Inside the warehouse, Volpe hides
in shadows and stalks Chuck with a gun, and indeed seems quite ready to shoot
him until Terry rushes inside to save her fiancé. Volpe detonates an explosion
that injures Terry, then escapes through a tunnel.
Terry is taken to the hospital. Chuck and Napoleon drop by
the university to pick up her coursework. Napoleon sends Chuck into the school
by himself while he hangs around outside to exchange sexy banter with
Angelique, who, being a resourceful lass, has already bailed herself out of
jail. Napoleon is not doing a bang-up job of protecting Chuck in this episode.
Inside the school, Chuck runs into his kindly science
teacher, Professor Amadeus (Alexander Scourby), who, naturally, turns out to be
Wolfgang Volpe. “Professor Amadeus”? What, was “Doctor Mozart” too glib? Volpe
knocks out Chuck and takes him to his home, where he’s joined by Angelique, who
wants to recruit him to THRUSH’s side. Volpe, however, has zero interest in
joining THRUSH. He ties up Angelique and Chuck in his secret subterranean
laboratory, where he’s been carrying out diabolical stamp-funded experiments on
reanimating the dead. The SS guard, Neubel, was an earlier failed reanimation attempt.
Napoleon sneaks into Volpe’s laboratory, where he finds a vat
containing—wait for it—Hitler’s preserved corpse.
HITLER’S PRESERVED CORPSE. I did mention early on that this
episode has some schlocky B-movie aspects to it, right? Yeah, Volpe’s been
keeping Hitler in suspended animation in a lair beneath his garage for the past
twenty years while he’s been working on some way to bring him back to life. Anyway,
Napoleon passes out from the noxious fumes emitting from Hitler’s corpse—things
sure have taken a super-fast and unexpected turn for the ludicrous, haven’t
they?—and wakes to find himself strapped to a gurney while Volpe explains his
fiendish plan: He’s going to use Napoleon’s blood to bring Hitler back to life.
To thwart Illya and the other U.N.C.L.E. agents searching
for Napoleon, Volpe sets fire to his own house, which is directly above his
secret lair. This is not his best plan: The gas tank explodes, bringing flames
and debris raining down on everyone in the lab. It saddens me to report that
Angelique, who has been such a monumental force of sexy, fun awesomeness
throughout this episode, abruptly becomes pretty worthless here. Distraught and
hysterical, she pleads for Volpe to shoot her quickly so she won’t have to die
in the fire.
Napoleon gets himself loose before Volpe can kill Angelique.
Fisticuffs ensue, and… well, all you really need to know is that at some point,
Napoleon hurls Hitler’s rapidly-reviving corpse into the flames, whereupon an
anguished Volpe throws himself into the inferno after it while bellowing, “Noooooooo!”
Angelique tries to pull a half-assed double-cross at the
last minute by pointing a gun at Napoleon and stealing Volpe’s research, but
Illya pops up out of nowhere and scuttles her plan. Angelique slinks off in
defeat.
Back at U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon tries to give Volpe’s valuable
stamp collection to Chuck and Terry as a reward for their help, but they decide
they’d rather be poor, the weirdos. Illya grimly informs Napoleon that he has a
visitor out front: “You’d better attend to it before the place gets a bad
name.”
Sure enough, Angelique is waiting for Napoleon, in the mood
for some frisky good fun now that the assignment is over. The episode ends with
Napoleon and Angelique heading off together to shag each other senseless.
This episode is a doozy (HITLER’S REANIMATED CORPSE), but
Angelique is wonderful enough to singlehandedly lift it into the ranks of the
classics. This is her only appearance on the series, which is a crying shame,
because she’s a terrific character. I only wish they’d kept her around to shag
Napoleon and enrage and befuddle Illya at semi-regular intervals.
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