Daredevil thief Christina carries a special winch to assist her manoeuvres at the International Gallery – later described in stage directions as “a super-compact-techno-winch, sleek and black, Mission Impossible-style”. The reference is revealing, because her two big stunts seemingly owe more than a little to a much-parodied scene from big-screen TV revival movie Mission: Impossible (1996) – in which Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) uses two super-thin cables suspended from his belt to drop from the roof of a high-security computer room, without tripping sensors in the floor. But that Mission: Impossible scene itself seemingly owed much to a sequence in the heist thriller Topkapi (1964). There, acrobatic ‘human fly’ Guilio (Gilles Ségal) employed a not-dissimilar winch to descend from a high point above a room in Istanbul’s supposedly impregnable Topkapi Palace in order to swipe an ancient royal treasure – not a golden cup, but an emerald-encrusted dagger – leaving a replica in its place. (Strangely, Planet of the Dead also features a sort-of ‘human fly’ – two of them, in fact.)
The episode begins with a daring robbery.
Christina escapes the scene of the crime.