Posted by D Persica on
URL: https://www.shado-forum.com/Speaking-of-Wanda-tp1505621p1505624.html


----- Original Message -----
From: <[hidden email]>
I'm a big fan of Lake.
>
> Amelia
>
I'm just the opposite and tend to agree with Samantha. I hope I don't get
flamed for this, but I never quite liked her entry into the show. I think I
felt the same way when I first saw the series in US syndication in the
1970s.
Don't get me wrong, she's a beautiful woman, and after listening to her
commentary, I came to like her as a person. Her character, though, struck me
as sort of "conventional."
Hard to explain, but most of the characters in the show were a kinds of
1960s, slightly trippy, definitely unconventional group of people. As a guy,
of course, I was more intrigued by the women in tight clothes, the purple
hair etc.
Col. Lake, however, seemed more conventional. Of course, she didn't wear any
of the same kind of clothes the other women wore. She mainly wore pantsuit
type clothing, though occasionally with a kind of daring blouse. Her hair
seemed more like something out of a Breck commercial in the early 1960s than
the rest of the women in the show, which I considered kind of post-Beatles,
quasi-Carnaby Street in their looks. (All of this is generalization, I
realize, and I'm using some stereotypes to try to make my point, and they
may not completely work.)

And then her role for the most part seemed to be to make longing looks at
Straker. I don't know if she was considered a star in UK before this show. I
almost get the feeling that she was put on the show for her star quality and
she wasn't expected to do or be much other than window dressing. The only
example I can think of -- a pure fabrication -- was if you took a TV show as
unique and atypical as, say, "Seinfeld" and then gave a regular part to say,
Liza Minelli, simply because you wanted to bank on her star quality.

And then of course, there was the burgeoning chemistry between her and
Straker, which I'm sure would have been developed in a second season. There
was that one episode where he takes her coffee cup from her, drinks from it,
brings it to his SHADO office, puts it down and then she picks it up again
and starts drinking from it again. Hmmmm...