The second volume of Avengers Lost Episodes continues to provide authentic recreations of lost episodes from the first season of the Classic TV series, “The Avengers,” with Julian Wadham recreating the role of John Steed, Anthony Howell as Doctor Keel, and Lucy Briggs-Owen as Carol.

Below are the summaries of the four episodes:

“Ashes of Roses” features Steed looking into an arson and he recruits Steed’s nurse Carol to go to undercover as a customer of a posh hair salon he suspects of being tied to the arson.

Overall, this was a great mystery story and it’s really helped by Carol taking such a big role as she plays very well off Steed. The guest characters are great and there’s a good amount of both suspects and red herrings to keep the listener fully engaged.

In “Please Don’t Feed the Animals,” the death of a man in a private zoo’s crocodile pit is tied into an attempt to steal government secrets. It’s an intriguing story with great action and suspense, helped by a superb premise and there’s also a good guest villain.

“The Radioactive Man” was easily, the most different episode from what the Avengers would become so far as Steed and Keel take a backseat to an Eastern block refugee who walks off with a radioactive isotope, endangering himself and everyone around him.

The plot  has problems. Not only is the case far from anything that Steed would typically handle, there’s no reason for Keel to be called in. In addition, as our hook, we’re given the plot of some of the refugees wanting to blow up a cargo train but it doesn’t really amount to much in the larger story. Plus how and why the refugee takes the isotope is a bit far fetched.

The story has some interesting ideas, how refugees as “strangers in a strange land” relate to the wider culture and choose to assimilate and become part of it (or not) and whether they can trust each other. What holds up this odd script is the acting and Big Finish’s superb recreation job. Like the previous episodes, it maintains a genuine 1960s feel. It’s just the story it tells genuinely doesn’t fit well with the Season 1 template we’ve heard so far.

“Dance with Death” is an interesting tale as it begins with the actions of Keel as he’s called to an office where a woman has nearly been asphyxiated. When she visits her dance studio the next day, she finds the rest of the staff carrying on as if she had died. Then, when she is murdered, Keel becomes a suspect.

This starts out as a fairly clever mystery with a twist solution where the murder of the dance studio’s co-owner is a means rather than an end, and Steed and Keel have to thwart the ultimate end. This could have been a bit more suspenseful, but still this is an entertaining conclusion to the set.

Overall, the set continues to offer an amazing degree of authenticity, feeling very true to the early 1960s the scripts were originally performed in. The acting remained solid, and I think the scripts in the set were better than in the previous set even if, “The Radioactive Man” wasn’t to my taste.