This was an excellent series, but I do wish that they had shown a little more continuity in the episodes.

Captain Scarlet's ability to sense a Mysteron presence came and went at the convenience of the scriptwriter--sometimes within the same episode!

First Mysterons can be killed by ordinary means. Then they decided that they could only be "permanently" killed with high voltage. Then they went back to dying by ordinary means again. (Unless there are a bunch of Mysteron agents who picked themselves up and sneaked away at the end of the episodes!)

They demonstrated the Mysteron detector, showing how you snapped a picture, waited a moment, then pressed a button to pop up the image--either a skeletal shot or a regular image. When they used the detector later, all they did was peer through the view-finder. No Instamatic picture.

Why is it that only Paul Metcalfe was able to shake off the Mysteron influence? If it was the long fall, then Judith Chapman should have recovered as well. I read somewhere that Metcalfe's strong personality aided his recovery, but a lot of the people who were killed looked like fairly strong-minded people, too.
My personal take on this is that it was the Mysterons themselves. Having seen what happened to Captain Scarlet, and not wanting to gift the Earth with a host of loyal, indestructible people, they somehow altered their technique of retrometabolism, so that what happened to Scarlet would never happen again.

It says in various places that Captain Black was killed and replaced, like all the others, but I don't really think so. In the first place, they never showed the "new" Captain Black shoving the dead old one out of his seat in the Mars vehicle. It showed Conrad Turner sitting there, listening to the Mysterons, then a few moments later, they showed him still sitting there, looked horribly changed. Neither Captain Scarlet, nor any of the other retrometabolized people lost their complexions when they died. Only Captain Black. I think that it's appropriate that he should be different from the rest.

In the "biographies", Captain Scarlet is described as being a serious, reliable and efficient agent while on duty. Off duty, supposedly, he changes completely, becoming carefree and full of fun. I wish that they had shown that on the show, because I personally can't see it--he's much too intense to let loose like that. While he does have a sense of humor, he really doesn't seem like a party animal. (The only hint of it was in "Flight to Atlantica", where he was put in charge of organizing the party.)

I've also seen speculation that Captain Scarlet and Rhapsody have eyes for each other. Is this simply because they are both British? Because there is absolutely no indication of it in the series. Destiny was the one called on to identify Scarlet in the first episode, and she and Melody went out with Scarlet and Blue one night, although it was difficult to say who was escorting whom. Scarlet also held hands briefly with Symphony (right in front of Col. White!) In "Attack on Cloudbase" when Rhapsody is apparently killed, Lt. Green is the only one who really reacts to her death. Captain Scarlet seemed quite cool about it. (Of course, he was on duty.)

I wish that they had had some scenes in the early episodes showing the other Spectrum personnel adjusting to the "new" Captain Scarlet. They all seemed to accept the change a little too easily.

Except for the one time when some doctors came along and revived a dead man ("Treble Cross"), all of the Mysterons' murder attempts were sucessful. You'd think that just occasionally the person in question would only be injured. The Mysterons also managed things so that, no matter how violent the cause of death, the body was always left intact, except in "White as Snow" where the radio station was blown to smithereens.

Reading the descriptions in the episode guides, Captain Scarlet apparently gets killed time and time again. Did they always have to be fatalities? Couldn't he have just gotten badly hurt sometimes?

It was nice that they had women fighter pilots, but didn't they have women in any other areas of Spectrum? For that matter, were there no male fighter pilots? Did they object to being given pretty code names and being called Angels?

It's stated in the biographies that Captain Magenta used to be an organized crime boss. If the viewer has no access to these "biographies", he or she would never know that. It would have been nice if they had alluded to the backgrounds of the characters a little in the episodes. (Captain Magenta, BTW, with his puppyish eagerness to please, doesn't really fit my idea of a crime boss. Captains Grey or Ochre would seem better suited.)

I would like to know about this "Room of Sleep". The references make it sound like a single room. Is it a unisex dormitory? Do you just walk in and jump into the first empty bed you find?

For that matter, where do people keep their extra uniforms, civilian attire, and other personal possessions?

Wouldn't it seem more sensible to have, perhaps, a dormitory area for the majority of the personnel, with private or semi-private rooms for the upper ranks? Actually, given the tense conditions that they work under, small private rooms for everyone would be good for morale. Cloudbase certainly seems large enough. Some of the descriptions of Cloudbase indicate that they have plenty of recreational facilities, so why not allow for people's need for a little personal space?

Of course, the mental image of Col. White saying, "I'll be in the Room of Sleep", going in, and flopping down next to an off-duty Angel is rather intriguing....

There are a few episodes where Scarlet was just injured.

And I've always thought of the Room Of Sleep like the dream machines in the Dredd comics - somewhere where they can cram the equivalent of a few hours sleep into a few minutes, leaving them rested and alert enough to get straight back on duty.

Of course, this could be only a temporary measure, meaning they have to get some real sleep every so often, but as a stopgap in a critical situation, enough to get by on.

My main critisicm is the number of times they plan to launch all three angels for a mission (and leaving Cloudbase undefended whilst they're off), yet the two not on standby have to go up in the lift rather than being ready to lift off with the first angel.

I have the four-disc set in my Amazon.com cart. I understand that the UK version is five discs? I'd really like to see some behind-the-scenes stuff for this show. I'll be ordering this set very soon.

It's 6 discs for the U.K region 2 boxset, not 5... (The 6th is the documentary disc).