Recap / Thunderbirds S 1 E 22 Brink Of Disaster

The One With… the monorail.

When the new, fully-automated Pacific-Atlantic Monorail goes into action, it'll make its investors rich, provided it ever gets the funding it needs. Determined to find see the project through, the president of the corporation, Warren Grafton, starts hunting around, starting with the well-known Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward. While Lady Penelope has no interest in the project, she directs the president to her friend Jeff Tracy.

Unbeknownst to Lady Penelope, Grafton is a crook who has taken the opportunity to case her house - and disable the alarms - prior to calling in more of his criminal friends. While Grafton takes Jeff, Tin Tin and Brains on a demonstration tour of the new monorail, the criminals break into Creighton Manor and gain access to the safe beneath the drawing room. While they succeed in removing Lady Penelope's famous jewelry collection, the safe's alarm system is on an independent circuit (thus it was not disabled by Grafton), so Penelope and Parker are alerted to their presence. Armed with machine guns, they disable the criminals' getaway car, forcing the thieves to hotwire FAB 1. Unfortunately for the crooks, FAB 1 can be remotely controlled by Lady Penelope's bedside lamp, leaving them to be locked in FAB 1 while it drives in circles around the fountain, until morning.

However, things are not going as smoothly on the monorail. A storm has a bolt of lightning strike a helijet into the support column of a bridge, severely damaging it. The automatic signalling equipment is damaged and the monorail will not stop (as it is fully automated, with no crew onboard) until it plunges into the abyss. The Thunderbirds race to the scene to save their family, while striving to retain their cover over the radio link.

Thundertropes Are Go!:

• Accent Slip-Up: Parker's response to Grafton's remark about Lady Penelope being "worth waiting for":
  (in his Cockney accent) Oh, quoite so. (immediately correcting himself in an upper-class accent) Quaite so.
• Action Girl: Lady Penelope is at her most badass here.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The fully automatic monorail is unquestionably cool and offers massive savings on labour. Indeed, many modern companies are implementing such systems on real trains. Grafton's execution of the idea, however, is downright shoddy, and Jeff is rightly alarmed at how no attempt has been made to replicate the emergency responses a human operator could apply without a thought.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Jeff does this to Grafton when the latter whines about the train "still going too fast" after the brakes have been applied.
• Book Ends: In the opening scene, Grafton remarks that he's got "plenty of time" to wait for Lady Penelope (before searching for her jewellery vault). In the last scene when Grafton and his associates wind up in prison, he snarkily remarks:
  Grafton: Time.... Well, I guess that's one thing we've got plenty of.
• Break the Haughty: Happens to Grafton, twice. First, he insists the monorail is perfectly safe (for its cost anyway). Of course, that turns out about as well as you'd expect in a Thunderbirds episode. Then, after he's been saved, he insists he'll be able to keep his ass out of jail. This doesn't fare much better.
• Collision Damage: How the bridge gets damaged, thanks to a lightning bolt striking a helijet that hits the bridge supports.
• Con Man / Corrupt Corporate Executive: Warren Grafton, the president of the monorail company; he and his associates are gangsters who use illegal ways to get their funding, such as burglary and fraud. It's also clear that Grafton cares more about making profit than the safety of his monorail until he personally is at risk.
• Contrived Coincidence: When the hoverjet gets struck by lightning, it defies the odds and crashes into the tressel of the monorail bridge.
• Conveniently Cellmates: Grafton and his lackeys somehow end up sharing the same cell in the closing scene.
• Cool Train: Subverted by Grafton's monotrain, which looks and acts the part with its automation completely replacing all train staff, but proves to be carelessly executed to an almost fatal level.
• Dirty Coward: During the ill-fated monorail ride, Grafton starts panicking as soon as he realizes how much danger he's in, which annoys Jeff no end.
• Dissonant Serenity: Lady Penelope and Parker when dealing with the burglars, even when they believe it might be too late.
  Parker: (calmly) They appear to have gained access to FAB 1.
  Lady Penelope: (equally calmly) Oh dear, I hope they don't scratch the paintwork. I'm going to Ascot in the morning.
• Failed a Spot Check: Grafton apparently forgot to disable the alarms on the vault itself or didn't know there were any in the first place, as that's what wakes Lady Penelope and Parker up and winds up botching the whole operation.
• Gentleman Snarker: Jeff gets pretty snarky towards Grafton and becomes increasingly less polite about it as his patience wears off. By the time the emergency is reaching its climax, it's clear that he's absolutely done with this greedy moron.
  Grafton: We're still going too fast!
  Jeff Tracy: (tersely) Oh, shut up!
• Gilligan Cut: At the end of the episode, Grafton brags how he will never go to jail despite all that has happened. Cut to him and his associates in prison.
• Handy Remote Control: Lady Penelope has a remote control system for FAB 1, which she uses to make FAB 1 go around in circles when the burglars try to steal it.
• Humiliation Conga: What Lady Penelope puts the burglars through.
• Made of Explodium: The broken bridge in the climax isn't content with falling apart quietly. It bangs and it booms while flames, sparks and smoke leap from every strut that falls off.
• Meaningful Name: The main villain is a Corrupt Corporate Executive named Grafton.
• Messy Hair: Parker when he is woken by Lady Penelope's vault alarm. On the other hand, Lady Penelope's hair is immaculate.
• No OSHA Compliance: The monorail; everything about it is automatic, with no possibility for a human engineer to override the computer and take over control of the train. There isn't even something like a manual controlled emergency brake; Brains and Tin Tin have to make one on the spot after the train goes haywire, and it takes three goes to get it to behave like a brake rather than an accelerator. And any competently designed automated system would cause the train to brake in the absence of the signal, not keep hurtling towards catastrophe like this one does. Although Thunderbirds is no stranger to this trope, this is one of the rare cases where it is lampshaded.
• No-Sell: Lady Penelope attempts to deter the crooks following her twice, first with a smokescreen, then with an oil slick. The crooks are able to get past both, so Lady Penelope is forced to shoot them off the road.
• Off-the-Shelf FX: The giant white button on the monorail's computer is quite obviously fashioned out of a cheap doorbell.
• Parachute in a Tree: Grafton is trying to persuade Jeff to invest in his completely automatic monorail, which is patrolled by heli-jets. One of these is struck by lightning, causing it to crash into the railway. The pilot of this jet ends up dangling from the railway by his parachute. When somebody turns up to rescue him, he tells his rescuer to contact the train first, because the automatic signals have been damaged. Without these, the train cannot stop, and is heading towards the damaged track.
• Pop The Tyres: Lady Penelope and Parker shoot out the tyres to the burglars' car, forcing them to try and steal FAB 1.
• Rule of Three: Brains' improvised emergency brake takes three tries to actually work.
• Runaway Train: The "totally safe" monorail becomes one after the bridge is damaged and the automatic signals are interrupted.
• Schiff One-Liner: "Time... that's one thing we've got plenty of."
• Shout-Out: The countermeasures that Lady Penelope deploys from the Rolls-Royce against the gun-toting crooks are identical to those from the Aston Martin in Goldfinger.
• Starter Villain: The two crooks chasing Lady Penelope at the start of the episode.
• Tempting Fate: Practically Grafton's defining character trait along with being a Corrupt Corporate Executive. He keeps insisting nothing can go wrong with his train to the extent that Jeff and Brains aren't wondering if an accident will happen, but when. Even after all this, he boasts that he will be able to avoid prison... cue Gilligan Cut to him in prison.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: There is the main story about the monorail disaster, and a B-story about Grafton's henchmen breaking into Lady Penelope's house to rob her vault. The episode switches back and forth between the two, with both coming to a conclusion shortly after one another.
• Women Drivers: Averted; in sharp contrast to her previous driving experience in "Vault Of Death", Lady Penelope actually drives very well in this episode, even while being chased by two crooks.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Warren Grafton keeps insisting his monorail is absolutely safe. Jeff and Brains are not convinced and are proven right.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Thunderbird 2 lifts away the single carriage containing the passengers, then we see the rest of the train plummet into the ravine as the bridge collapses. However, an overhead shot of the wreckage hitting the ground only shows pieces of bridge, the remaining carriages and engine nowhere to be seen.
• Your Size May Vary: A carriage on the monotrain is depicted as being about the same size as a modern railway carriage. Despite this, the shot of the mighty Thunderbird 2 lowering the rescued carriage to the ground shows the two being roughly the same size.