From TES issue 70 (July 2011)
Series 6
Quest: The Sword of Freedom.
Dungeoneer: Chris Green. Advisors: Nicholas, Gavin and Simon.
Home town: Ruislip, North London.
Team score: 6 out of 10.

Taking up the entirety of the final two episodes of series 6, Chris and team were instrumental in the destruction of Red Death, and did a pretty good job keeping us interested during the build-up to this fairly exciting pay-off for the underlying plot of the series.

Level One: Before Chris enters the Dungeon, Hordriss appears on the screen and announces that he intends to divest himself of his last vestiges of ambiguity and viewer appeal by joining the Powers That Be (thanks to Lord Fear’s disgraceful behaviour), and that he is dispatching Sidriss into the Dungeon to help Chris with his quest, a prospect that Pickle does not relish. When Chris finally embarks, he steps on the Sword at the Hall of Choice (at least it wasn’t the Crown again!) and then finds his level one clue objects on a wooden bench. A spyglass sequence reveals Lord Fear demanding confirmation from Skarkill that he has captured Elita and locked her in a chest. Skarkill says he has, and that Julius Scaramonger has the key, which he intends to sell to the Grimwolds, who have apparently always wanted their own elf!
From the bench, Chris picks up a bar of gold and a mallet, which the clue scroll identifies as “The Acme Persuader”. Both items are put to use in Wolfenden, where a drunken and depressed Julius Scaramonger agrees to part with the key to Elita’s chest in exchange for the gold, but only after he has been bashed on the head several times by a giant manifestation of the mallet. When Chris arrives at the causeway, Sidriss turns up to reveal the code. A scroll has to be picked up on the way across, revealing the password – “passport” – which is duly used to pass a blocker. Chris then turns up in Wolfenden again, where he releases Elita from her chest prison. She takes him to Smirkenorff – who is very grumpy because Elita hasn’t been feeding him recently, thanks to Skarkill – and they all fly to level two.
Level Two: Chris makes use of a spyglass (the only one ever to show a sequence not featuring Lord Fear) and sees Greystagg and Heggatty chatting about their coven’s lack of witch amber, and the heavily related subject of Greystagg’s refusal of Lord Fear’s proposed alliance. Chris picks up a bag of gold and a wooden grinder, both of which he then swaps with Ah Wok for a witch’s robe and a working broomstick. This disguise fools Sylvester Hands, who is persuaded to part with some witch amber in exchange for a bit of phoney wart charming, and then Chris flies across a chamber on his (unpredictably stubborn) broomstick while Peggatty throws firebombs at him… or at the floor, really, while Chris is up in the air!
Chris then encounters Greystagg, who is angered by his disguise and insists that he gives it up. She agrees to help Chris in exchange for the witch amber, and tries to coax him to say what he wants from her. The advisors have forgotten that Greystagg mentioned a blocked-off causeway during the spyglass sequence, and when it becomes obvious (after an unnecessarily long time) that they are not going to remember this snippet, Greystagg mentions the causeway herself, and reveals that a pooka is guarding it. The pooka’s name is written on a scroll, and must be dispelled to get rid of the creature. The causeway must then be crossed on even numbers. Using this information, the team gets rid of the pooka – which apparently goes by the name of Falgo – and Chris crosses the causeway successfully.
Before they can do anything else, it’s time for the exciting end to the series. Hordriss turns up on the screen and warns of Red Death’s impending attack, so Treguard tasks Chris with retrieving Captain Nemanor’s lightning rod from the Cloudwalker. Conveniently enough, a dwarf tunnel leads Chris straight to the ship, where he soon persuades Nemanor to donate his rod to help Treguard bring down Lord Fear’s red dragon. Chris runs back through the dwarf tunnels with the lightning rod in hand, and the team is “accidentally” dismissed when Pickle strikes the quest table with the mace in order to activate the rod.
Summary: They seemed pretty sharp to me – I too had no idea what Greystagg was trying to coax them to ask her for the first time I saw this – but they were only ever going to get the chance to be final episode fillers.

[Previous team: Team 6 of Series 6
Next team: Team 1 of Series 7]

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