After looking back at the popular puppet series, Nick Lay returns to pick the top five episodes from the cult TV show as the second half of Thunderbirds Are Go! season two hits our TV screens. Beginning with…
Trapped in the Sky
The original and arguably still the best, Gerry Anderson’s 1965 Thunderbirds pilot established many of the series’ classic elements. The “Hood” makes his first hypnotic appearance prior to implementing his now traditional dastardly scheme. His debut effort consists of attaching a bomb to the new Fireflash, an atomic passenger jet (that’s right, multiple stages of planning and likely millions of dollars’ worth of research still failed to muster up enough common sense to stop someone using a live nuclear reactor to power a commercial airliner) capable of flying six times the speed of sound. If it touches down using its landing gear…boom!
Cue Thunderbird 5 intercepting a distress call, Thunderbird 1 launching through the pool at Tracy Island, Lady Penelope pursuing the “Hood” in a high-speed chase up the M1, and Thunderbird 2 unleashing its first set of pod vehicles. What follows is one of the most well-executed rescue sequences of the series, with Barry Gray’s main theme sending a shiver down the spine as it kicks in during Fireflash’s final approach.