The lead characters are ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy, founder of International Rescue, and his five adult sons, who pilot the organisation's primary fleet of vehicles: the Thunderbird machines.

The night before the Crablogger leaves its base camp on its first expedition, project leader Jansen takes the crew out to dinner at Sanchos, a restaurant with extremely poor hygiene.

Jeff dispatches Scott, Virgil and Brains in Thunderbirds 1 and 2, then contacts Lady Penelope in England and tasks her with obtaining the Crablogger's emergency shutdown sequence from Jim Lucas, the vehicle's designer at Robotics International.

As the Crablogger tears through San Martino and moves on to the dam, Penelope and Parker proceed to Robotics International's headquarters in FAB 1 only to find that Lucas has gone home for the night.

[9] "Path of Destruction" was the final APF production of director David Elliott, who believed that his friendship with Gerry Anderson had broken down and left the company shortly after completing his work on the episode.

[5][10][11] Marcus Hearn calls the episode a "classic" as well as "one of the most compelling" Thunderbirds instalments, boasting a "heady cocktail of food poisoning, nuclear contamination and flooding".

[14] Mark Braxton writes that the Crablogger itself "strains credibility", arguing that the combination of a nuclear-powered design and obscure shutdown procedure turns it into "a disaster waiting to happen".

He believes the restaurant scenes display the Andersons' skill in devising "comic, even grotesque characters and situations" and counts the rat-infested kitchen – complete with a real mouse scurrying across a table – among the "great triumphs" of series art director Bob Bell.

[13][15][16] According to Hearn, "Path of Destruction" is one of several Thunderbirds episodes that portray humanity as being "dangerously over-reliant" on atomic power – to such an extent that the fictional world of the series "seems to teeter on the brink of a radioactive nightmare".

He comments that "in a splendid example of [science fiction's] magnification of effects", the episode takes the idea of a "commercial vehicle inconveniencing local traffic" and expands it to create the "rather more dramatic scenario of an out-of-control nuclear-powered wood pulp factory about to destroy an entire town.