Reception
Commenting on her website, Thunderbirds co-creator Sylvia Anderson praises scriptwriter Alan Fennell's "vivid imagination" and his complex plot for "30 Minutes After Noon", adding her opinion that "This was more a vehicle for live action than for the limited emotions of our puppet cast." Of David Elliott's decision to invigorate the production with more innovative shots, Supermarionation historian Stephen La Rivière expresses disappointment that the earlier sequences of "30 Minutes After Noon", in his view, are made up of standard camera work, being "filmed as normal" and detracting from the interest of the "quirky visuals" in the scenes depicting Southern's infiltration of the Erdman Gang.
La Rivière further discusses the structure of "30 Minutes After Noon", writing that the episode is divided into a pair of distinct plotlines (the intervention of the British Secret Service following the Hudson Building inferno). He argues that, in this manner, it is comparable to the first episodes of Thunderbirds, for which the production team doubled the runtime from 25 to 50 minutes and therefore needed to expand the stories with subplots or extra rescues performed by the Tracy family.
Historian Nicholas J. Cull links this episode to another of Fennell's Thunderbirds scripts, "The Man from MI.5", in which the star character is a British Secret Service agent called Bondson. For Cull, "30 Minutes After Noon" is one of several Thunderbirds episodes which incorporates visual homage to the James Bond film series. In particular, he comments on Southern's briefing scene, in which the characters of Southern, Sir William Frazer and an unnamed assistant are represented by hats placed on a stand: "Southern's hat is a trilby, tossed onto the stand in best James Bond fashion."
In a review published in Thunderbirds-related fanzine NTBS News Flash, "30 Minutes After Noon" is said to be "a thrilling, well-paced episode that brings together a very sadistic bad guy scheme and some innocent, and some not-so-innocent victims in peril, all providing plenty of action for International Rescue." The author considers the pacing to be "especially good" and also credits the "inventive camera work", commenting, "I don't think I've seen more use of 'real hand acting' in any other episode." The concept of the exploding bracelets is related to the Saw horror films, in which victims are seen to be trapped in dangerous situations and risking death if they do not carry out certain tasks put before them.
The episode achieved ratings of 5.2 million viewers when repeated on BBC2 in 1992.
Read more about this topic: 30 Minutes After Noon
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