The Avengers Forever: Illuminations

	Illuminations Page 8 of 14

Sometimes a secret is so important that someone must die to protect it. A string of words, each placed in the correct order, can be valued above the life of an individual with all his complexities and his expectant tomorrows. A couple can raise a daughter—nurture her from vulnerable infancy through difficult adolescence and into the adult world of love and joy and pain and bewilderment—only to find their offspring slaughtered in the name of national security and, specifically, to contain the identification of a sequence of letters. This can happen, has happened, and will happen. Conversely, a person can be murdered to give life to a secret that does not exist.

"The See-Through Man" is about this process of making the transparent seem apparently substantial. The villains are perfectly willing to kill others in order to appear to have secrets worth keeping. Their plans are realized in the shape of an invisible man—a nemesis who may or may not actually be there but whose mere likelihood is all that is necessary to threaten other nations while making the perpetrators rich. It is the idea itself that becomes the enemy, forcing our heroes to shine an illuminating beam through its ephemeral emptiness in order to stop the needless waste of human life.

This episode is perhaps The Avengers' most revealing of The Cold War. At its heart is the idea that Russia is our enemy, an idea that makes it possible for wicked opportunists—regardless of national affiliation—to exploit the rational and irrational fears that emerge in such a climate. In the end, the enemy need not even exist for people to be killed. Of course, it helps if others act on this fictive character's behalf.