Forgive me for Man From UNCLE-ing on main, but I was thinking about Illya the other day and there's this little thing I love. So, temperamentally, Illya is meant to be something of a foil for Napoleon: the pessimist to Napoleon's optimist, the fatalist to Napoleon's romantic, the voice of cool and wry reserve as opposed to flirtatious warmth. The Soviet pragmatist to Napoleon's American showboater. And he is all those things.
But there is this episode where Illya is supposed to be guarding a child who is a cultural and spiritual touchstone for his fictional!country -- a lightly fictionalized version of the Dalai Lama, basically. The child has come to America for a surgery and is being attended by an American nurse. All three of them are taken prisoner by the bad guys. Illya orchestrates a prison break and gets everyone to the brink of escape, but then because this is the '60s and the show has its fair share of stupid and sexist writing, the nurse exclaims, 'oh, I forgot my purse!' and runs back into the cell, where she is inevitably caught and held at gunpoint.
The pragmatic thing to do here would be to leave her behind, escape with the child, and stay focused on his primary mission (protect the foreign potentate). He's not in a position to save the nurse, so what logical point would there be in going back to die with her? And yet, that is exactly what he does. He sends the child off, turns back himself, assesses that if he tries to fight he's just going to get the nurse shot, and so surrenders his weapon and wordlessly comes to the nurse's side, shuffling her gently sideways until he's the one directly in front of the gun barrel, absently wrapping an arm around her shoulder while she cries. He doesn't know her, and he's not saving her. But he stands with her; and whatever happens to her will have happened to him first.
Someday I will learn to gif and capture that little moment, because there's something about the stoic silence of it, the gentleness and dignity in it, that touches me.
And Illya is just that way. He's strategic and pragmatic up to a point, but then he WILL throw himself in front of whatever today's oncoming train is, EVEN WHEN he knows he can't save the day by doing so. There's a moment in another episode, beloved to shippers everywhere, where he and Napoleon are undercover on a ship, and Napoleon draws the ire of the captain, who orders him flogged. The logical thing to do here would be for Illya to stay undercover, especially since it's not like throwing himself in the path of the whip is going to achieve anything except getting two of them hurt instead of just one. And yet, that is exactly what he does. He steps between Napoleon and the whip and takes the blow on his own arm, after which he gets tackled and carried off to the brig. He accomplishes nothing tangible. But he does it anyway.
There's a line Napoleon taunts a villain with in another episode: they are working through a deadly maze, and Napoleon forces his antagonist to walk in front, saying: "Where I step, you will have stepped first. And where I die, you will have died first."
And if you reverse that sentiment, it's kind of Illya's motto: "Where you step, I will have stepped first. And where you die, I will have died first."
Fifteen years after the series ended, they made a crummy TV movie which I mostly elect to ignore. But there's this one moment in it where Napoleon and Illya are about to split up to go deal with different dangers. They're standing for a moment in a control room, knowing it's time to part, and Napoleon just says, "Illya..." and trails off, unable or unwilling to finish the thought.
And Illya looks at him with the slightest crinkle to his eyes, and he says, sounding faintly amused, "I will if you will."
And they leave it at that; the 'stay alive' stays unspoken, as it should for these two. But it is that vintage where you go, I go spirit that I love to see.
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