"The Most Special Agent" is the first episode of Joe 90, a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed by their production company Century 21 for ITC Entertainment.
Set in the future, the series follows the adventures of nine-year-old schoolboy Joe McClaine, who becomes the "Most Special Agent" of the World Intelligence Network (WIN).
In the first episode of the series, Mac transfers his own brain pattern to Joe to demonstrate the BIG RAT's potential to his friend Sam Loover, a WIN agent.
The episode has received a mixed response, drawing praise for its technical direction but some criticism for its use of a Cold War-inspired fictitious scenario to explain the series' concept.
Computer scientist Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine invites his friend Sam Loover to his Dorset cottage to view his latest invention, the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer (BIG RAT).
Although Mac plans to sell his device, Loover, an agent of the World Intelligence Network (WIN), persuades him to keep it a secret, believing that Joe and the BIG RAT could prove highly valuable assets to the organisation.
He is unaware that Mac and Loover are using a concealed antenna to record his brain pattern and transmit it to the McClaines' cottage, where it is transferred to Joe through the BIG RAT.
A farmer's eyewitness account of the boy's escape is met with scepticism by the airfield controller ... Ending his story, Weston reminds the McClaines that his scenario has little basis in fact: the MiG-242 does not exist and Russia and the West are at peace.
[3][4] Shane Weston was originally written as the Deputy Director of the CIA, with the meeting between the characters taking place at the Embassy of the United States in London.
[5] The original script included a short scene, absent from the finished episode, in which a London police officer pauses in amazement at the sight of the Jet-Air Car parked in the street.
[4] It also featured an extended version of the McClaines' flight to Moscow, with Mac telling Joe that Russia is letting foreigners view the MiG-242 because it wants the world to see the aircraft as a "purely defensive weapon".
[17] In a DVD audio commentary for the episode, Trim said that while the script did not specify the type of bus that carries Mac and Joe around the airbase, he chose to design it as a hovercraft because he thought that a wheeled vehicle would have looked "boring".
According to Denham, the episode "makes no attempt to present [Joe] as interesting or appealing", while its "cop-out" plot and the closing "photomontage" argument merely "[add] to the air of disappointment."
"[22] By contrast, Jim Sangster and Paul Condon, authors of Collins Telly Guide, describe the photomontage as "more emotionally fraught than anything that had gone before", viewing it as an example of the series' superior direction compared to earlier Anderson productions.
Jonathan Bignell describes Joe's fictitious mission, which alludes to an arms race, as an "unusually precise reference" to the series' "1960s context".
[6] The 2003 Joe 90 DVD box set by A&E Home Video features an audio commentary for the episode with effects designer Mike Trim.