The Avengers Forever: The GLG Reports

	The GLG Reports Page 59 of 67

The Last of the Cybernauts...??
By Grant L. Goggans

"Steed never worries. He never, ever worries. Unless he's worried." Talk about a missed opportunity! The final Cybernaut story is a major disappointment. While it's true the original two stories were hardly high art, they certainly helped to establish a far stronger presence for the robot killers than this one does. Unfortunately, the impact the Cybernauts in this story had on American audiences is almost negligible, as we only got to see two of the robot's three missions, accounting for less than four minutes of screen time. To fit in the ad-heavy CBS Late Night Movie slot, more than five minutes were taken out of each New Avengers installment, and this one seems to have taken a lethal blow, with the second Cybernaut mission, the entire character of Dr. Marlow, and a running subplot with Steed's struggle with red tape totally cut. What we did get that was worthwhile was some of the best Gambit-Purdey interplay ("Nobody's perfect!") of the entire series, a pretty good fight with the Cybernaut on a spiral staircase, and the awesome scene of the cybernized Kane shoving a car into Gambit. Unfortunately, we also got a rather tame "revenge" story which starts with the silliest car chase in TV history (around and around a parking lot) and ends with Kane covered in brown "plastic skin," whatever that is. Kane is a pretty good villain, but he could have been an exceptional one. This story should have seen Dr. Armstrong's dreams finally come to fruition and produce an army of Cybernauts bent on destruction, but instead it gives us Robert Lang in a boiler suit and sunglasses. Frankly, I'm not sure that this story should have been produced at all until several more drafts and an entirely new take on the Cybernauts. What they gave us, even taking into account what was excised for US TV, really wasn't a fitting end to the Cybernaut saga.