Tuesday 12 July 2016

Secret Army, Season 3 (1979)





Season 2 of Secret Army ended with the D-Day invasions.  The end of the war in Europe is now in sight, but if you think our heroes' troubles are over, you've not been paying attention to the kind of show this is.

While the advance of the Allies is naturally a cause for hope and celebration for the members of Lifeline, it does present them with a whole host of new problems.  The most immediate is that their escape lines have been severed by the front lines of the war, and they are unable to send aircrew to safety any more.  Instead, they must settle for merely hiding the men in the Ardennes forest.

Less immediate but still pressing concerns are their communist resistance rivals, who are already preparing for the post-war struggle between east and west, and the continuing efforts of the German authorities to find them.  While Lifeline have carefully protected themselves by pretending to collaborate with the occupying forces, there is a new Luftwaffe officer in town and he is closer to finding them than anyone has been before.

The most distant but most serious threat, however, is the fact that those very same Germans may soon be leaving.  Pretended collaboration may have protected Lifeline from the Third Reich, but it has made them despised by their neighbours, who know nothing of their clandestine activities.  Being lynched by a misguided and vengeful mob before the Allied forces arrive is a very real danger.

And so Lifeline must try to juggle all these new challenges and survive to the end of the war.  It's quite the challenge, and if you think everyone is going to come through it unscathed ... well, then you really haven't been paying attention to the kind of show this is!

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