The Sad Sinking of the Submarine Moskva (and what little is actually known about Lieutenant Kuryakin’s naval career)
If you’ve been in UNCLE fandom on tumblr a while, you might have seen a post or two going around quoting wikipedia, quoting an “MGM press release” about Illya Kuryakin having served on the ‘submarine Moskva’.
The bad news: it look like that press release never existed.
(Well, the bit about the igloo is legit, but it doesn’t come from a press release, and... let’s start at the beginning.)
I’d have loved for there to be a legit press release out there about Illya’s naval career, so I took the quote to The Man from UNCLE Inner Circle group over on Facebook (a great source, since a lot of members there are fans going back to the original run of the show, some of whom own huge collections of documents and memorabilia) to check if anyone there had ever seen it. Lots of interesting discussion, but the short answer was a ‘no’.
One member did suggest looking back through the wiki edit history for whoever had originally added that line, which led me to the discovery that the ‘original’ citation for that edit was, in fact, a fanfic known as “Lieutenant Kuryakin's claim to fame” by MLaw -- which never actually claims the Submarine Moskva was canon in any way.
Clearly, someone had made a mistake.
Fig 1: Illya Kuryakin in full naval uniform. You’re welcome.
This may be a good point to step back and provide a little context. See, even if the Submarine Moskva is fan-invention, the idea of Illya having a naval background comes from canon. We famously see him in naval uniform in The Neptune Affair -- which may have simply been borrowed as a disguise for that mission -- but there’s also a line in the first season movie The Spy With My Face where he claims to have been “the first lieutenant in the Russian navy to set fire to an igloo.” Again, it’s possible the story was something Illya invented on the spot to entertain his companion, and little else about that movie can easily be reconciled with TV canon, but the evidence for some sort of naval career is starting to stack up.
The Shark Affair throws a bit of a spanner in the works, since that episode shows Illya complaining that the sea is "too big, too wet, too salty," and apparently getting quite seasick. Fans, ever determined to make sense out of a muddy canon, have sometimes bandied about the idea Illya’s naval career might have taken place on a Russian submarine, where sea sickness might be less of a problem (a quick google search suggests to me this is far from a perfect solution to sea sickness, but the fanon theory took hold nonetheless). Various shots of David McCallum on board a submarine while shooting Around the World Under the Sea in 1965 probably didn’t hurt the popularity of the theory either.
Fig 2: David McCallum in a submarine that is not the Moskva, or in any other way related to his role on UNCLE, but rather a scene from an otherwise forgettable 1966 film called Around the World Under the Sea. Sorry.
Which brings us to “Lieutenant Kuryakin's claim to fame”, an otherwise perfectly innocent little fic written to provide some backstory to that igloo incident mentioned in The Spy With My Face. Unfortunately, it seems one of MLaw’s readers misunderstood which parts of that story were actually inspired by canon, perhaps assuming that the name of the submarine must have come from some press release or other, since it certainly never appeared in the show. (FWIW, I’ve now exchanged several messages with MLaw, who is quite baffled to find themselves quoted on wikipedia, since as far as they know, the whole submarine thing was pure fanon.)
Really, it was an easy mistake to make.
I’d love to be wrong about all this, but unless anyone does manage to turn up that mythical press release somewhere, I’d suggest not editing anything about a submarine back into that wiki page, kthx.
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s presumably that one should never trust anything on wikipedia that doesn’t cite a primary source that you can actually check for veracity (and this goes double for more or less anything you hear on tumblr). Or maybe it’s that I, personally, am an absolute sucker for this sort of meaningless trivia -- I’ll leave that up to you.
I don’t especially have a conclusion, so I’ll leave you with a video I once saw linked as a very amusing alternate explanation for how one might reconcile Illya’s apparent antipathy to ocean travel with his alleged naval career.
We joined the navy to see the world
And what did we see? We saw the sea
We never get seasick sailing the ocean
We don't object to feeling the motion
We're never seasick but we are awful sick of sea
To play the leading lady's role in the MGM/NBC pilot, the producers had decided on Janice Rule, at that time married to my friend, actor Ben Gazzara. Quite by accident, I found out that Janice's deal stipulated she be photographed from her left side.
Since my early films made after I returned from the Army, I had, after viewing "dailies," asked whenever possible to be photographed from the left, and since so many scenes were between only Janice and me, I used my acquired power and Janice did not get the job.
Robert Vaughn, A Fortunate Life, page 142
Reading Vaughn’s autobiography, I ran across this little gem, and oh my god, I think I would be appalled if this wasn’t so ridiculous! XD
And this coming not long after a lengthy account of Steve McQueen’s paranoid diva behaviour on the set of The Magnificent Seven and assorted other anecdotes about his encounters with “the fragility of a star’s ego.” I’m not even sure if he noticed the irony.
(This is, of course, part of how the role of the innocent in the UNCLE pilot came to be instead played by Patricia Crowley, and she’s wonderful in the role. FWIW, there are some charming anecdotes later in the book about the time Vaughn spent with Janice and her husband while shooting The Bridge at Remagen (”Janice was a very gifted dancer, and she made even me look slightly more than adequate.”) so they seem to have got on well otherwise. But goddamnit, there was only room for one actor with a preference for the left in this production, and it was going to be Bobby Vaughn!
It’s probably for the best he didn’t know about David at the time. *g*)
From The Man from UNCLE Book: The Behind the Scenes Story of a Television Classic, pg. 114:
One member of the cast, Leo G. Carroll, actually requested more time in front of the camera. Carroll went to Rolfe and asked for more action scenes, as his grandchildren were wondering why he sat behind a desk all the time. So a script was changed to allow him to administer a karate chop. Because of his age, several takes were necessary, but when he did get it right the entire crew erupted in spontaneous applause.
The author didn’t bother to record which episode it was that featured Waverly’s karate chop, but I’m guessing it was this little spot from towards the end of The Deadly Decoy Affair.
The Man from UNCLE Novels in Zine History and Fanon
@man-from-uncle-slash-recs
So, I happened upon this very interesting discussion about older zine fic, where someone wondered if some of the stranger fixations of the era might come from the influence of the novels, and thought, ooh, I can answer this one! I'm actually quoted earlier in the post, but since then I've gone and got hold of digital copies of the entire Man from UNCLE paperback library, and boy do I ever have thoughts on the subject! (You can find some reviews here, and some more general analysis here, but I’ll stick to what’s really relevant below)
I'm not going to reblog the whole discussion because it's already so long it's getting unwieldy (though you should totally read it), but to summarise: early UNCLE zine fic a) tended to portray Napoleon as a wildly OOC sadistic asshole, and b) was weirdly fixated on kink and torture (yes, even by fanfic standards). To quote one of the final comments:
@wansti-me
Do you think the officially published novels had a greater impact on the early fiction as they could be easily reread many times? Seeing an episode once or reading a book several times might have had a different impact?
Short answer: the tie-in novels definitely had a massive impact on fandom, and that is certainly one of the reasons why (see the full discussion for others). It’s easy to forget how different being fannish was in the days before home video, but UNCLE fandom went decades before the show even reappeared in repeats.
The importance of the novels to the fandom of that era was so massive that I can cite actual published sources that talk about their impact (chiefly Cynthia Walker of that other UNCLE book). But the simplest proof I can offer is to list some popular fanon that comes not from the show -- not even from the official writers notes -- but was invented wholesale by the novels. For example, you may well have seen older fic try to tell you:
Napoleon is known for his infamously good ‘Solo Luck’. (Actually, no-one in the show ever comments on Napoleon’s luck, even in passing)
Napoleon owns a yacht called the 'Pursang’ (The notes do mention his owning a yacht, but it’s never named)
Napoleon’s title is 'Chief Enforcement Agent’ (Mentioned in some versions of the writers’ notes, but never once used in the show)
THRUSH stands for “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity” (THRUSH was never presented as any sort of acronym in either the notes or the show, and title cards don’t even bother to render it all caps)
UNCLE Section VIII is titled 'Research and Development’ (It’s possible this comes from some version of the notes, but every official version I’ve ever seen names this Section 'Camouflage and Deception’ instead)
Napoleon and Illya while away their time on stake-outs playing word-games like Botticelli and Superghost (If this ever happens in the show, I have not caught it)
UNCLE agents apartments are protected by special security systems (Logical enough, but never even alluded to in the series)
UNCLE agents are required to move regularly for security reasons (Nope, the only description of their apartments I can find anywhere makes them sound pretty permanent)
You get the idea. In fact, all but the last one on that list comes from just one author, David McDaniel -- the most prolific and by far the most popular of the paperback authors (and not without reason, as he's also, IMHO, the only one who could write IC dialogue worth a damn).
It's much harder to demonstrate how much impact the novels might have had on Napoleon’s characterisation -- and in any case, @olderthannetfic is dead right that bashing one half of your OTP is a very strange but very real fandom tradition, and in no way unique to old muncle fic. That said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the OOCness can be traced to the novels. See, other than McDaniels, most of these writers varied from 'bad' to 'so, so bad'. Like, 'have these people actually watched the show at all?' levels of bad.
One of the more popular books is The Assassination Affair by J. Holly Hunter (longer review here), which I gather has some popularity with hurt/comfort fans since it revolves around Napoleon being graphically tortured by the villain, then slowly recovering over the second half of the story. Thing is, the Napoleon in this story is kind of a prick. He’s regularly impatient and snappish, he’s hideously rude and dismissive to the story's teenaged innocent, and at one point, he even attempts to scare her away by leering at her as sexually/threateningly as possible. Holly clearly knows Napoleon is supposed to be suave and charming, but doesn’t have the skill make Napoleon’s actual behaviour back this up. Quoting my own review: In fact, having read (barely a couple of chapters of) this thing, I'm starting to wonder how much of the worse characterisation I've occasionally seen in fic in this fandom took this as their inspiration.
Hunter isn't the only writer to portray Napoleon as a vicious lech either -- Harry Whittington writes a Napoleon who spends a whole paragraph drooling over a captured female agent who's been stripped, tied down, and is about to be tortured, then insults her for letting herself get captured for most of the next scene. Seriously, words can scarcely convey the depths of my contempt for Whittington’s ‘writing’. He is vile. But he still managed to publish one novel and several short stories in the UNCLE series, and got in early enough that you can find clear tells of his influence in other authors who followed.
The other thing that stands out about tie-in stories is their obsession with misery and torture. In fact, the first two novels were so grim that, according to Walker, the publisher had second thoughts after their release, and thereafter went out of his way to find authors who could inject a little more levity into the series (if with mixed success). If you’re really interested in some specifics, I got into that in the opening of my reviews post, but suffice to say that outside of McDaniel’s work, it’d be pretty easy for a fan with only hazy memories of the show to get the impression that ‘dark and twisted’ was exactly the aesthetic they should be aiming for.
I’d emphasise here that I’m largely speculating -- I didn’t join the fandom until 2015, and would still have been in school at the peak of the the zine era. There’s no easy way to prove what influence the novels might have had on early fanfic characterisation in any case (though people who were there might have some more useful impressions to share). Still, if older zine fic had a real problem with characterising Napoleon as the lovable guy we all know from the show, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if some of the tie-in novels were one of the key sources we have to blame.
So, I made a post recently about the varying models of Napoleon’s office (which Illya sometimes seems to share with him and sometimes doesn’t), and @mrsspooky reblogged it with a suggestion that maybe Illya got his own office (ie, after The Shark Affair) when he was promoted to Number 2 of Section II. That got me wondering, since AFAIK Illya’s been Number 2 from the start*. But then again, given that we don’t know exactly how or when he got that promotion anyway, maybe there’s at least space for a headcanon where it happened somewhere mid-series? Out of curiosity, I checked my subs files to see if I could find the first time he’s referred to as “Number 2, Section II” in the dialogue.
As it turns out, Illya’s only ever referred to by rank twice. The first instance was in the S2 ep Foxes and Hounds (the second time is in Foreign Legion, but they botch it -- Illya introduces himself as Number 2 of Section I, which is clearly a mistake that no-one caught). So if you want to theorise he was promoted sometime in S1, it’s always possible.
Anyhow, surprised that so little was made of Illya’s position, I checked how often Napoleon is referred to as Number 1 of Section II, and blew my own mind slightly, because the answer?
Never.
Not once is Napoleon ever called Section II Number 1 in dialogue, or any variant thereof. Nor is he ever called Chief Enforcement Agent †, or CEA, or any of the other titles fans call him by in fic. Closest I could find anywhere in the first three seasons was a Thrush agent making the very vague statement that he was “considered the top agent in UNCLE” in a scene that only appeared in the movie The Spy With My Face. In fact, I couldn’t find anything in the show itself about his rank whatsoever until season 4, where both his and Illya’s ranks as 1 and 2 of Section II appear in text when we see their Thrush files during Thrush Roulette (he or Illya are also referred to as being among UNCLE’s top agents in Deep Six, Survival School, and Master’s Touch. Season 4 seems unusually big on telling us Napoleon and Illya are supposed to be important). Waverly, by contrast, is referred to as Number 1 of Section I on a regular basis, but he’s reminded Napoleon that he’s expendable more times than he’s mentioned Napoleon’s rank, as far as I can find.
Even so, the message that Napoleon's important still gets across to the audience, because if Napoleon isn’t somewhere near the top of the pyramid, why would he be the one taking command when Waverly is out of action in Brain Killer; why are he and Illya working directly out of Waverly’s office while Waverly’s away in King of Knaves and Green Opal? And if Illya’s Number 2, Napoleon’s obviously got to be the rank above him, right? Besides, we can presume that Illya and Napoleon’s ranks must’ve been part of some version of their bios, given the story Vaughn and McCallum have told about how they wound up with those badge numbers ‡. The scriptwriters apparently just didn’t see it as being something the audience needed to be reminded about very much, if indeed at all.
I don’t know that there’s anything very important to takeaway from this, but it’s a neat little bit of trivia, if you like useless trivia as much as I do.
* True, he’s wearing badge 17 in the pilot, but he’s definitely in badge 2 by The Shark Affair, and I’m not sure it’s worth reading too much into badge numbers as an indication of rank in any case. (See point ‡ below)
† Though I have seen him called "Chief Enforcement Agent” in promotional articles that came out while the show was on air, so fans didn’t get it from nowhere.
‡ McCallum picked “2″ since he was “Number 2″ of his division, Vaughn picked “11″ thinking it was the roman numerals for 2, since he was head of Section II. Apparently no-one on set commented on this at the time, so it stayed that way.
Rewatching season 1, I noticed a couple of details that might hint at how long Napoleon and Illya have been working together before the first episode. Canon never does give us a definite answer, but I’m gonna make a case it’s most likely somewhere between 2 and 7 years.
In The Shark Affair, Illya mentions having heard a Russian pianist play at Carnegie Hall (in Manhattan, New York) two years previously. Whether Illya was partnered with Napoleon immediately on arriving in New York we don’t know, but given that they know each other so well even THRUSH makes a point of it (The Double Affair), at least two years of partnership seems like a good starting point.
In The Terbuf Affair, we learn that he doesn’t know Clara Valder, whose relationship with Napoleon ended about seven years previously. Given that Clara knows Napoleon works for UNCLE (she called his apartment to find him, and his work was supposed to be the main thing that came between them), it seems safe to assume that Napoleon’s been working for UNCLE New York for at least seven years, whereas Illya’s known him less than seven years.
There’s fiddle room if you want to alter those dates for fic (maybe Illya was only in New York on holiday when he visited Carnegie Hall, or maybe he and Napoleon met 10 years ago but only started working together 5 years ago). But the 2-7 years figure could be something to start from, if it’s useful to you.
If you want to add some season 4 canon into the mix (which I’m generally a little hesitant to do, given how much the production team had changed by then and all the ways the different seasons contradict one another -- but hey, canon is still basically canon), you could also add in the fact that The Survival School Affair tells us that Illya graduated from UNCLE Survival School in 1956. If Illya’s of similar age to David McCallum, he’d have been about 23, and thus was presumably working for UNCLE for around 10 years by the time that episode aired, or about 7 years when we first meet him in season 1. That means Illya may have joined UNCLE around the time Napoleon was breaking up with Clara. Odds are pretty good that Illya may have worked at some other UNCLE office before transferring to New York, but there’s just enough leeway in that timeline that he could have gone straight to New York too -- either works.
In conclusion, I’m pretty sure I’ve now given this subject more thought than anyone behind the scenes ever did, but that’s basically fandom in a nutshell.
(Links here all go to my LJ -- the full article is way too long to fit a tumblr post)
Most UNCLE fans would probably be familiar with Lisa Rogers, who played a recurring role as Waverly’s secretary in season 4 -- but Lisa was by no means the first UNCLE staff girl to score multiple appearances. Though they may not have made the opening credits, characters like Heather, Sarah and Wanda had been a recurring part of the show since the first season (and several of whom, I would argue, got more development and far more interesting stuff to do on screen than was ever granted to Miss Rogers when she finally joined the cast -- but I’m getting ahead of myself already).
Surprisingly little ever seems to have been written about either the characters or the actresses who played them -- a crying shame considering that in researching them, I’ve wound up reading about real-life women who took up psychotherapy or trained as bull-fighters, who wrote scripts for other 60′s classics like The Wild Wild West and Mission Impossible, or played pioneering roles in stunt acting. And then there’s the whole bizarre “Wanda” situation, which I had to make a legit Venn Diagram for just to make sense of at all. (No, really. Some of the casting and re-casting of roles got weird somewhere along the way.)
What started as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to put together a proper character bio for Sarah Johnson and sort out just how many Wandas there were gradually grew into a major piece of detective work covering half a dozen different characters. The result is probably going to be of most interest to trivia junkies and fic writers looking to flesh out their supporting casts, but if ever you find yourself in need of a (relatively) definitive resource on the female support staff of UNCLE, well, here you go.
You can read the full write-up here, or click on any of the the characters below to go direct to their section.
Besides the main cast and a few returning guest stars, a number of different women actually had recurring roles as UNCLE staff members, and nearly all of them, it seems, were called “Wanda” at some point.
I’ve linked one before to my post about the various under-appreciated women who got to play recurring roles as UNCLE support staff, but I had to make at least one more to share the Venn Diagram I wound up making while trying to get my head around the The Wanda Situation, because, well...
It kind of has to be seen to be believed.
Three different women played “Wanda” in the first season. Three others played “Sarah”, the first and most recognisable of whom would return late in S2, now confusingly called “Wanda” herself. The stewardess from the pilot episode was very nearly cast as Heather McNabb in S1, but when she did rejoin the show in S3, she too had become “Wanda”. Maude Waverly appeared all of twice, ever, and only in extra scenes created for the UNCLE movies, yet by her second appearance she, too, had joined the Wandas. One hapless woman even managed to morph from a “Sharon” into a “Wanda” in the space of a single episode. No-one escapes Wanda’s terrifying gravitational pull for long. No-one.
You can read up on the full Wanda situation here. Presumably, by the end of the show it had become some kind of behind-the-scenes in-joke. Or maybe someone felt that UNCLE NY just wasn’t complete without at least one Wanda around at all times. We may never know for sure.
