A Canadian plane crashes under mysterious circumstances in Ireland. Steed's leads take him to the Shamrock airport and a convent, while Dr. King performs autopsies on the dead passengers hoping to find a clue pointing to the wreck's cause. As this episode opens a flight from Montreal to Ireland is approaching its destination when the crew get a message claiming to be from air traffic control telling them that they are five minutes from arrival, not twenty as they believed, and are too high. They descend and the last thing they see is a headland; they try to pull up but the plane crashes and explodes. Steed and Dr King fly to Ireland to discover why the plane crashed and what happened to the £250,000 that was in the hold. Dr King goes to the local convent, where the bodies were taken, and it soon becomes apparent that there was one survivor; a stewardess who was found later some distance from the plane. There are a couple of other anomalies; the pilot was strangled and the co-pilot is missing. Later the stewardess is also murdered and Steed intends to call in the Garda but the convent's mother superior reminds Steed that he is in Ireland not England and the authorities will not be entering the convent. With a second flight carrying money due soon it is imperative that Steed and Dr King get to the bottom of the case swiftly.<br/><br/>This episode gets off to a great start with a plane crash with a death toll that is surprisingly high for this series. The actual crash may not be exciting by modern TV standards but for the shows age and budget it was pretty impressive. The plot was interesting; the villains are modern versions of the old wreckers only instead of luring ships onto the rocks they are luring planes into the ground. The setting was good; one could believe that a convent in '60s Ireland would be considered beyond the suspicions and reach of the law or at least that an Englishman might be persuaded that it was. There were a few surprises to be had; I certainly didn't expect the surviving stewardess to be murdered and the identity of the person behind the atrocity involves a good twist. Overall I found this to be a pretty impressive early 'Avengers' episode. The second episode for Jon Rollason's Dr. Martin King, "Dead on Course" was the last of the three to be broadcast, set mainly at an isolated convent on the Irish coast, where a suspicious plane crash reveals the pilot to have been strangled to death, but the air hostess still alive. Steed calls in Dr. King to look after things at the convent while he investigates the missing money that disappeared from the plane. Steed and King spend most of the episode working separately, and third billed John McLaren is hardly on screen in a small role as the airport official who grants Steed complete freedom. Played with deadly seriousness by a mostly dull cast, Donal Donnelly easily stands out as an informer from the local pub, with Liam Gaffney (1966's "Island of Terror") behind the bar as the suspicious owner, whose public telephone has a secret connection to the convent. Donnelly went on to bigger and better things, nominated for a 1966 Tony Award for his Broadway work, and among his rare film ventures were features directed by John Ford and Francis Ford Coppola (1990's "The Godfather Part 3"). "The Sell-Out" would be Rollason's farewell appearance, although televised before this one (Honor Blackman would debut in the season's fourth episode, "Death Dispatch").
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