RIP David McCallum

[vivdunstan]

How very sad. RIP David McCallum. A magnificent Scottish actor. I particularly enjoyed watching him in Sapphire & Steel, but was always delighted to see him pop up in things. Always a strong performer. For example he was an assured Eugene Wrayburn in the 1958 BBC version of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.

Comments

[a_cubed]

Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invisible Man, Sapphire and Steel. My childhood was peppered with his work. I don't watch that kind of thing generally, but when visiting people who did (Mum,, maybe) I caught a couple of epsiodes of NCIS where he had a main cast role for pretty much its whole run (20 seasons!). He was also in one of the very early Babylon 5 season 1 episodes, of course.

[vivdunstan]

He was really good in that Babylon 5 episode. It wasn't a great episode, but he pretty much stole every scene he was in.

[a_cubed]

JMS has said it was the first episode he wrote after getting the green light for the show one year after the pilot, and that he felt he didn't do a great job because he hadn't got the main character voices back in his head yet. However, many of the crew thought the script was great, and I personally think it was OK in general and as you say, elveted by DM's performance. I think JMS is more critical than others because he sees its inconsistencies with what he had planned for the main characters, whereas viewers and others are just still impressed by the standard he set for the show.

Grey 17 is Missing, on the other hand, is agreed by everyone including JMS, to be a failure. But, as he said himself, "if you never fail, you're not pushing the envelope hard enough".

[vivdunstan]

From season 1 TKO is the nadir for me, by quite a way. Some rewatches we skip the very poorest episodes, but this time are watching everything. The Ivanova/rabbi stuff really hit me hard this time, for obvious reasons. But that’s a rare quality moment in an otherwise very poor episode.

[a_cubed]

I agree that TKO has one of the weakest A-plotlines. The B-plot with Ivanova nicely follows on from the earlier ongoing minor mystery and is a nice bit of character development for her.