Perry Mason season 2 part 2

A few episodes from the 1958-59 second season of Perry Mason. The character had to be toned down quite a bit for television but this series was still a great deal of fun. This is a series that raised the bar in terms of complex plotting in American series television.

In The Case of the Fraudulent Foto we get to see Perry in a new rôle - as Deputy District attorney for Waring County. He’s standing in for the Waring County D.A. who is currently on trial for murder. And Perry is defending him. It’s a tangled tale of political and bureaucratic corruption and blackmail with some personal complications thrown in.

The Case of the Romantic Rogue is fiendishly complicated. An heiress is being pursued by a con-man, the con-man is being blackmailed, the con-man’s girlfriend is unhappy about all of these things, the heiress’s uncle who ran off with his secretary has been missing but may or may not have been found. Only Perry mason could unravel a case like this. This one is slightly unusual since the final revelation does not come in a courtroom scene. A good episode but you have to concentrate.

In The Case of the Jaded Joker Danny Ross is a comic whose career is faltering but a new TV show promoted by his pal Charlie Goff will put him back on top. The new TV show goes ahead but without Danny and he’s pretty devastated, as is his buddy/aide/general factotum Freddie. Even Buzzy, the beatnik piano player who is the other member of Danny’s odd little entourage, is almost moved to express some emotion at the news. When Charlie Goff is found dead it’s Freddie who is arrested but there are several other people who also have plausible motives.

It seems like alibis will be crucial but for some reason when the case comes to trial Perry seems a lot more obsessed over the details of the murder method.

Show business is always a good background to murder but this story also gives us, as a bonus, a glimpse into the crazy world of the beatniks. It’s a solid episode.

The Case of the Lost Last Act is another show business murder story. Successful playwright Ernest Royce has written a play about playwright named Steve who gets murdered before he can write the last act of his new play. And now the last set of Royce’s play has disappeared.

This is a play that has made Royce a lot of enemies even before it’s finished. It’s a bitter angry play and everyone who has read the first two acts has good reason not to want the play finished.

When Royce is shot, exactly the way the character in his play was shot, ex-racketeer Frank Brooks figures there’s a good chance he’ll be charged with the murder so he hires Mason to defend him. Brooks had put a lot of money into the play because it was going to make his girlfriend Faith a star but once he figures out that Royce is taking much too close an interest in Faith Brooks decides to pull both his money and his girl out of the play.

Frank Brooks might have a murky past but he’s not the only one. A lot of things happened around the time that Brooks got out of the rackets. Things that people would like to forget, but they can’t.

Perry’s courtroom pyrotechnics are well and truly up to his outrageous standards. His antics aren’t just theatrical, they are actual theatre. There are the usual nifty plot twists. A very good episode.

The Case of the Bedeviled Doctor begins with a stolen tape-recording, a recording of a session with a psychoanalyst. The recording could be very embarrassing if it fell into the wrong hands and as Perry points out the fact that it’s been stolen suggests that it already has fallen into the wrong hands. Murder is the result. Ordinarily in a case of blackmail leading to murder the blackmail victim would be the obvious suspect, but not in this case. In fact there are six people with very plausible motives for the murder.

This story doesn’t have the bravura use of arcane points of law or ingenious alibis that you get in the best Perry Mason episodes. This is a routine episode, but even a routine Perry Mason episode is still pretty enjoyable.

Always a good series to revisit.

Thriller - Late Date (1961 episode)

Late Date is episode 27 of the first season of the 1960-62 Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller TV anthology series. It first went to air in April 1961. I love all the American anthology series of that era. Thriller is uneven, but that’s part of the appeal an an anthology series - you never know whether you’re going to get a clunker or an absolute gem of an episode.

Thriller started out very much in the mould of the very popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, focusing on twisted crime stories with nasty stings in the tail. Initially audiences were a little underwhelmed by Thriller but as the series began to focus on supernatural horror audience enthusiasm started to build. There’s a noticeable and dramatic difference between the crime episodes and the supernatural horror episodes. Most fans prefer the horror stories and it’s arguable that the crime episodes are a little underrated.

Late Date is very much a crime story. It’s a suspense thriller story with a bit of a Hitchcock vibe and some definite film noir flavouring. It’s based on a Cornell Woolrich story so you expect some darkness.

It opens with a woman’s dead body on a bed, and a distraught man on the stairs. The man is Jim Weeks (Edward Platt) and the woman was his wife. His much younger brother Larry (Larry Pennell) assures him that the woman had it coming to her, and that everything will be OK. Larry has a plan to get his brother off the hook.

It’s a very elaborate plan. Maybe too elaborate for a plan that will have to be improvised. Right from the start everything that could go wrong does go wrong. In fact so many things go wrong that the story veers in the direction of black comedy, and black comedy in the Hitchcock manner. But it never quite becomes a black comedy. The emphasis remains on the suspense.

And there’s plenty of nail-biting suspense. Larry is quick-thinking and resourceful but he’s always just a millimetre ahead of disaster.

Of course there’s going to be a sting in the tail.

There’s some fascinating moral ambiguity here. We know Jim is a murderer but we see everything from Larry’s point of view and we like Larry and we admire his resourcefulness. We also admire his loyalty to his brother. We really want Larry’s scheme to work. We feel he deserves to get away with it - he’s tried so hard and he’s been through so much.

I haven’t read the original Cornell Woolrich story but Donald S. Sanford’s script feels very Woolrichian (within the limitations of what you could get away with on network television in 1961).

Herschel Daugherty directs with plenty of style and energy. Daugherty and cinematography Ray Rennahan achieve a very film noir atmosphere and a surprisingly cinematic look. Lots of shadows. This is a story that really benefits from being shot in black-and-white. There are some beautifully composed shots. This episode was made by people who cared about what they were doing.

Jody Fair is very good as Jim’s stepdaughter Helen. Edward Platt is fine. However this episode belongs to Larry Pennell and he’s excellent and very sympathetic and very human.

I love the inexorability of fate in this tale. You can see the things that are going to go wrong before they happen and that adds to the tension. As soon as you see Larry take the spare tyre out of the boot of his car (so there’ll be room for the body) you just know he’s going to get a flat tyre. The audience knows it, but Larry doesn’t know it. And there’s nothing he could do about it anyway.

Late Date is definitely worth seeing. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of other episodes of Thriller - here, here, here and here.

The Outer Limits - three season 2 episodes

I love horror/thriller/science fiction anthology TV series and The Outer Limits which aired on the American ABC network from 1963 to 1965 is one of my favourites. It certainly plays fast and loose with science but it was consistently inventive and original. It was created by Leslie Stevens.

I’m just starting to delve in the second (and final) season so I thought I’d review a couple of episodes.

Producer Joseph Stefano (who also wrote many of the scripts) had been the main guiding force but left the series after the first season. There was a slight change of emphasis in the second season, with fewer monsters.

Some of the stories were crazy but they were almost always at least interesting.

We do have to confront the special effects issue. This series has gained a reputation for the extreme cheesiness of many of the special effects. And yes, they are cheesy. Often very much so. The problem wasn’t really the technology of the time. The problem was that The Outer Limits was trying to do ambitious science fiction stories on a 1963 TV budget. It couldn’t be done. They went ahead and did it anyway. Younger viewers today may have real problems getting past the cheesy effects. You just have to accept them and concentrate on the stories.

The Invisible Enemy

The Invisible Enemy was written by Jerry Sohl and directed by Byron Haskin. It aired in October 1964. It concerns the first manned mission to Mars. It ends disastrously, with Mission Control hearing the screams of the astronauts before contact is lost.

The second mission is supposed to be better prepared. They have a super-computer at Mission Control. And the four astronauts are under strict instructions never to get out of sight of one another. They also have a bazooka that fires nuclear-tipped projectiles.

Predictably the first thing that happens is that one of them does get out of sight of the others and he is never seen again.

The audience knows from the start what’s going on. The sandy plain where they landed isn’t a plain, it’s a sand sea. And there are sand shark monsters lurking in that sea. The astronauts take a long while to figure this out. In the meantime another member of the crew vanishes.

Mission Control is really annoyed. They’re inclined to blame the spacecraft commander, Major Merritt (Adam West, yes Batman). They want the mission completed. They want the bad guys destroyed. They want to open up Mars for colonisation.

It becomes a test of survival, with a race-against-time factor.

This episode reflects ideas about Mars that would soon become untenable when unmanned space probes reached the Red Planet. The assumption here is that Mars has a breathable atmosphere. This was presumably so the actors wouldn’t have to wear helmets the whole time. The low gravity on Mars is ignored.

It has to be admitted that the sand sharks are incredibly cheesy.

The main interest of the story is the tough decisions that may have to be made by Mission Control and by Major Merritt, and the price that may have to be paid for the conquest of space. It’s not a bad story.

Wolf 359

Wolf 359 was written by Richard Landau and Seeleg Lester and directed by Laslo Benedek. It first went to air in November 1964. This one is really wild.

Jonathan Meridith heads a research project out in the desert. He and his team have created a miniature replica of a planet eight light-years away. It’s like a computer model except it’s real. The replica planet has a diameter of a few feet. Time is speeded up several millionfold on the miniature planet. Dr Meridith wants to watch the process of evolution on a distant planet take place before his very eyes in his laboratory. He has a special viewer gizmo that magnifies things a millionfold.

The problem is that something really is going on on that tiny world. Meridith has seen something very weird through that viewer. What he sees loses a bit of its impact because the special effect comes across as a bit too goofy.

The science is of course totally nonsensical and there’s lots of loopy technobabble but it has to be said that it’s a clever and original idea.

I, Robot

I, Robot was written Robert C. Dennis, based on Eando Binder’s robot stories published in the Amazing Stories pulp in the late 30s and early 40s. It was directed by Leon Benson. It first went to air in November 1964.

An eccentric scientist has built an almost-human robot. He has named it Adam. Adam appears to have the ability to think for himself. He also appears to have some capacity for emotion.

The scientist is now dead and the robot is blamed. Cynical but smart newspaper reporter Judson Ellis (Leonard Nimoy) smells a story. Trial lawyer Thurman Cutler (Howard da Silva) is coaxed out of retirement to handle the case. The robot is tried for murder. The events that led up to the scientist’s death unfold in a series of flashbacks.

There is some attempt to grapple with the problems posed by artificial intelligences. Adam appears to be capable of thinking but is he really? He appears to have emotions but are these merely simulated emotions - is he simply copying human behaviour without understanding it?

There’s a bit of speechifying at the end but mercifully it doesn’t get political.

The robot does have that classic Tin Man look but he doesn’t look any sillier than robots from big-budget movies of the time. It’s a reasonably successful episode.

Final Thoughts

These three episodes are typical of the series in combining incredibly cheesy special effects with reasonably good writing. They’re all worth a look. Wolf 359 is the best, with the coolness of its ideas.

The Twilight Zone - The After Hours

Of the many and varied horror, science fiction and mystery anthology series that were such a feature of American television in the late 50s and early 60s The Twilight Zone is probably the one with the most glowing reputation. I have always had slightly mixed feelings about this series. There are many episodes that I love unreservedly and at its best it had a unique atmosphere that was profoundly unsettling rather than overtly scary.

On the other hand it could at times be a bit sentimental, and rather preachy. It’s the episodes written by Rod Serling with which I mostly have issues. Serling was definitely prone to sentimentalism and he could be very preachy. At his worst the preachiness could be clumsy. He did write some great episodes, but he wrote quite a few that I find difficult to enjoy.

Having said all that, my all-time favourite episode was in fact written by Rod Serling - The After Hours.

This is episode 34 of the first season of The Twilight Zone. It originally went to air on June 10, 1960. It was directed by Douglas Heyes (arguably The Twilight Zone’s ace director).

It’s a tricky episode to discuss, because I really don’t want to spoil any of the twists.

It starts innocently enough. Marsha White (Anne Francis) has gone to a department store to buy a gift for her mother. She’s looking for a gold thimble. She is advised to go to the ninth floor. Which she does. That’s something that will later be disturbing and perplexing for both Marsha and the store staff.

She finds the thimble but later finds, to her intense disappointment, that it is damaged. Naturally she complains and for some reason which she cannot fathom this causes great consternation to the staff. Then she has a shock. She is advised to lie down and rest. She has a sleep and when she wakes up things start to get really strange.

Marsha finds herself in a very frightening situation and it’s the kind of situation which would lend itself to a horror plot. But there’s no actual horror here. No gore. No bloodshed. No violence. No monsters. Nothing except a gradually increasing atmosphere of strangeness and disorientation. To the extent that it is horror, it is very subtle existential horror.

This is more akin to the literary genre of weird fiction than to horror. The temptation would have been there to give the story a horror story ending but Serling cleverly resists this temptation. This is The Twilight Zone and Serling here achieves exactly the feel that he had in mind when he created the series.

One of the great strengths of this episode is that this time Serling has no real axe to grind. He’s simply trying to make us feel uneasy. And he succeeds admirably.

Douglas Heyes as usual does a fine job as director. The visuals are impressive and a bit creepy. There aren’t any special effects as such. Everything is achieved through fine directing and good production design. 

And some very special props.

Anne Francis is excellent, playing Marsha as a woman who is bewildered and disoriented rather than hysterical. The supporting cast is very good, but this episode belongs to Anne Francis. There are some lovely nuances to her performance. You don’t fully appreciate just how good her acting is until you get to the end of the story, and then you realise what her performance has been leading up to. And according to director Douglas Heyes most of the really clever touches were her own ideas. Anne Francis was a very fine actress but I don’t think she was ever better than this.

The After Hours is a great example of what is now a lost art - short-form television drama. The half-hour television episode or standalone television drama was a very distinctive form and while it has its weaknesses it had very considerable strengths as well. It required discipline, focus and economy. Information that the viewer required (information about what sort of people the characters are, what kind of place it is that forms the setting of the story) had to be conveyed with extreme economy. 

Which meant that the sets, the set dressing, the lighting, the costumes and the makeup had to be carefully thought out because most of that vital information was going to be conveyed through an immediate visual impression. There just wasn’t time for detailed explanations. 

And the actors and actresses had to give the viewer an instantaneous impression of the characters they played, with no time for them to tell their life stories.

In The After Hours Serling and Douglas Heyes give us a master-class in this lost art. There’s not a single wasted shot, or a single unnecessary line of dialogue.

The After Hours is beautifully shot, and by 1960 television standards it’s visually very very impressive.

I’ve seen The After Hours at least three times now and I think I like it even more with each viewing. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed some other Twilight Zone episodes here and also here.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-67), part two

Of all the girl spies of 1960s television I think April Dancer may well be the one with the coolest name ever (which is not surprising since it was Ian Fleming who came up with the name at the time when he was involved in the initial planning for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.). April Dancer was of course The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which was a spin-off from the highly successful series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Unfortunately by the time it went into production the decision (a very bad decision) had been made to turn The Man from U.N.C.L.E. into pretty much a pure parody camp-fest and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. got the same treatment. So April Dancer never really had much of a chance.

I watched a handful of episodes of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. a few years back (and I’d seen quite a few episodes years ago) and I wrote about the series here but was inclined to be a bit dismissive. Having just watched the episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that introduced the character I thought I should at least briefly revisit The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

One of the odder thing about this series (and this applies to a considerable extent to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. also) is that many of the stories are set in tiny feudal European statelets ruled by princes and grand dukes that seem straight out of The Prisoner of Zenda or the adventure stories of Dornford Yates. It’s a world that had ceased to exist long before the 1960s but it does give the series an intriguingly old-fashioned flavour.

Stefanie Powers took over the title rôle for the series. One thing that soon becomes evident is that April Dancer is not really a kickass action heroine. That may have been a major factor in the failure of the series. Personally I like the fact that April is a fairly realistic female spy - she relies on her wits and her feminine wiles rather than her martial arts skills (of which she has very few).

The series had some very good moments and some very bad moments. It might be best to dispose of some of those bad moments first.

The Paradise Lost Affair is an outstanding example of the series at its absolute worst. For most of the episode the spy thriller plot is totally forgotten in favour of a mixture of slapstick and bedroom farce in the South Seas. But if you’re going to aim for out-and-out comedy you need actual gags. Having people in silly costumes running about and shouting isn’t enough. And the actual gags just aren’t there. And since there’s virtually no spy thriller story here the unfortunate result is that there’s just no entertainment value whatsoever.

The Faustus Affair and The Drublegratz Affair both illustrate the pernicious influence of Batman and the network’s incredibly ill-advised decision to try to make the series more like Batman. The episodes with the strongest Batman influence are the worst episodes by far. Fortunately not every episode was afflicted by the Batman curse.

There are other episodes that are basically good but with a few weaknesses, such as The Garden of Evil Affair. An ancient evil cult has devised a means of restoring to life the founder of their cult, but they need a direct descendant of the founder and they believe that such a descendant, a young woman, is to be found in Berlin. The cult has been working with THRUSH but now they’re planning a double-cross - they want all the power for themselves.

This story suffers a little from the unfortunate tendency of the series often to try too hard to be zany and campy, especially in the middle with the rather pointless sub-plot about filming a western in Berlin and the rather silly slapstick chase sequence. Aside from this the story isn’t too bad, the THRUSH agents are a pack of delightful villains, the sets are good and there’s plenty of action.

Luckily there are those good moments, and when this series was good it was very good. And the good episodes do outnumber the bad ones by a very hefty margin.

The Atlantis Affair was written by Richard Matheson, one of the great television writers, so it’s no surprise that it’s a very strong episode. It has lots of fun ingredients. There’s a crazy professor searching for the entrance to the lost continent of Atlantis, there are crystals that could destroy the world, there’s an eccentric Frenchman who has recreated the aristocratic lifestyle of the 17th century on a Caribbean island, and there are the usual THRUSH goons. There’s some nice location shooting and some decent sets. It works because it goes for a subtly surreal feel rather than high camp, and the action scenes are played for thrills rather than slapstick. It works because it feels inspired rather than contrived. It’s far-fetched but it never descends into mere silliness.

This is also a story that gives April Dancer a decent fight scene. She might not have the usual martial arts skills but it turns out she’s a pretty good fencer, which is handy when you’re up against a 17th century villain.

If only the entire series had been as good as The Atlantis Affair then NBC might have had a hit on their hands rather than a flop.

The Lethal Eagle Affair is very nearly as good. It’s outlandish but it does have an actual spy thriller plot. Gita Volander is a senior THRUSH agent who has forcibly retired but now she’s come up with a scheme to put herself back into THRUSH’s good books. She has found a scientist who has devised a machine that can transport living things instantaneously by dematerialising them at one point and rematerialising them somewhere else. April and Mark Slate have infiltrated her operation. The Viennese setting provides some nice period charm. There are some effective moments - April tied to the top of a car and being attacked by an eagle is certainly an opening scene that is guaranteed to get the audience’s attention. It’s fast-paced, fairly exciting, it has some witty moments and the action finale is amusingly over-the-top.

In The Romany Lie Affair April has to infiltrate a circus and arouses the enmity of a gypsy girl which gives April one of her better fight scenes. The episode overall shows that given a good script Stefanie Powers was a decent actress. This is one of the best episodes of the entire series.

The Little John Doe Affair gets April mixed up with a mobster and a wonderfully creepy assassin. The easy assassination scene is superbly done. This is the series at its best - slightly strange and surreal but without degenerating into camp or silliness. A great episode.

The Furnace Flats Affair takes April and Mark to the Wild West. April has to compete in a bizarre race against two other girls, each of whom has to cross Death Valley with a horse, a canteen of water and a bottle of whiskey. One of the other competitors is a murderous psychopath. It’s a very amusing romp with Ruth Roman chewing the scenery to great effect.

The Low Blue C Affair has a bit of a Ruritanian flavour to it. A gangster is trying to murder his way to the throne of a tiny principality which happens to have one major asset - an extremely profitable casino. The only way to stop him is to persuade his cousin, a female major in a religious charity that bears an extraordinary resemblance to the Salvation Army, to exercise her right to the throne. Of course the gangster will try to kill her to close off this threat. Broderick Crawford has a lot of fun as the strangely likeable gangster. It’s quite a good episode, with the campiness kept under strict control.

The Petit Prix Affair is rather confusing to say the least. April and Mark are in a small French village where a go-kart race is about to take place, but the race is being used as a cover for a plan to snatch a million dollars from an armoured car. The plan is to be carried out by students at a school for commandos and the money is to be returned afterwards. The mastermind of the plan, Professor Plato Pamplempousse, also intends to explode a bomb, but the bomb in question dates from the Franco-Prussian War so it’s almost a hundred years old. The Professor also hopes to run away with Desiree, a former Resistance heroine who like the rest of the school seems to be still living in the past.

Mostly it’s an excuse for outrageous and wildly exaggerated phoney French accents, and for generally indulging in mocking every stereotype of the French. Even including, rather daringly, making fun of the Resistance. It’s an episode that tries very hard to be zany, and succeeds at least moderately well. And it’s all quite good-natured.

The Phi Beta Killer Affair actually deals with a poker game. The richest poker game in history, with the stakes in the billions. The real problem is that the players’ bodyguards, all trained at the same bodyguard school, have been programmed for assassination. Mark and April have to infiltrate the bodyguard school and then infiltrate the poker game. The opening scene is an amusing version of the assassination of Julius Caesar but with gangsters. The episode features a couple of over-the-top villains. It’s all comic book stuff but enjoyable.

The Double-O-Nothing Affair uses a device that was used a lot in the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - a well-meaning innocent bystander who gets caught in the middle of some nefarious THRUSH plot. In this case it’s a nerdy accountant who comes into possession of a tape that holds the secret to the location of THRUSH’s New York headquarters. In this one the camp and spoof elements are kept within bounds. Not a bad episode.

The U.N.C.L.E. Samurai Affair takes Mark and April to Honolulu, their mission being to track down a Japanese war criminal. His sister is heading up some mysterious THRUSH operation in Hawaii. Mark poses as a surfer, the fact that he appears not to be able to surf being apparently not considered to be a potential problem. This is one of the episodes that strikes the right balance, being just outrageous enough to be amusing without veering too far into parody. Signe Hasso was Swedish so naturally she was an obvious choice to play a Japanese super-criminal. Quite entertaining.

In The High and the Deadly Affair THRUSH scientist Dr Merek has developed a deadly new chemical for which he has sinister plans. His first step is likely to be the assassination of the scientist who has developed the antidote. This may take place on a flight from London to Ankara so April goes undercover as a Mesopotamian Airlines stewardess, while Mark poses as a blustering big game hunter. The plot revolves around the problem with the two U.N.C.L.E. agents not only do not know which passenger is the evil mad scientist, they also don’t know which passenger is his intended victim. And it’s all rather fun. A very good episode.

In The Kooky Spook Affair an assassin is gunning for April while Mark discovers he is now the 14th Earl of Maddington. His newly inherited country house seems like a good place for April to hide out. But there isn’t just one dastardly plot afoot - there are no less than three and everyone at Maddington Manor seems to have murder in mind. A fun episode.

Final Thoughts

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. had a lot of potential. Stefanie Powers and Noel Harrison were a slightly quirky pairing that worked rather well. They have very good chemistry - there’s some romantic chemistry but there’s also an affectionate playfulness between the two characters. They’re both adept at light comedy. They both have charm and they’re both likeable. Noel Harrison is particularly good - he’s a very unconventional TV spy but in an interesting way.

If only this series had appeared a year earlier and had been done completely in the style of the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. it might well have been a success. The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. went to air about six months after The Avengers made its American TV debut. It does have the occasional clever and surreal moments but it never quite achieves the consistent wit and style of The Avengers.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. does have an odd flavour of its own, it has likeable leads and it has plenty of genuinely very good moments. Despite its faults I just can’t bring myself to dislike this series and I’m going to recommend it. In fact I’m going to highly recommend it.

Only 29 episodes were made but it did spawn a series of original spin-off novels several of which I’ve reviewed, including The Global Globules Affair, The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair and The Birds of a Feather Affair.

I’ve reviewed The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode which introduced April Dancer, The Moonglow Affair.

Dick Tracy TV series (1950-51)

The VCI boxed set containing all three Republic Dick Tracy serials (and I’m a huge fan of movie serials) which I bought recently includes as a bonus an episode of the 1950-51 Dick Tracy TV series which aired on the ABC network. It's a series I had never seen.

The episode in question is Hi-Jack, episode 16 of season one.

I don’t consider myself a huge Dick Tracy fan but I love the Republic serials and the 1940s RKO Dick Tracy movies so I guess maybe I am a bit of a Dick Tracy fan after all.

The episode was a disappointment, but it is an interesting example of some of the problems of very very early TV crime drama series. American television was developing rapidly and by 1955 was starting to become reasonably sophisticated, but series from the early 50s do tend to be clunky.

There were reasons for this. The half-hour TV drama is a distinctive format of its own, quite different from one-hour dramas and feature films. There was a real art to writing a successful half-hour drama. You really had to plunge the viewer straight into the action and you had to get on with it. It was essential not to waste time on sub-plots or irrelevant scenes that failed to advance the action. You would probably only have time for one major plot twist so it had to be a good one.

It’s hardly surprising that in 1950 these rules were not yet fully understood. Hi-Jack wastes a lot of time early on with a long boring completely irrelevant dialogue scene with no connection at all to the story. Once we get into the action there’s just not quite enough plot and there are no major twists. Even at a half hour it drags a bit.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a car-stealing racket. Which is a rather mundane case for someone like Dick Tracy (at least it would be a very mundane case for the Dick Tracy of the serials and the RKO movies). The bad guys are switching the engine and chassis numbers on stolen cars and they’re also planning to double-cross each other.

The villain is unfortunately rather colourless.

Another problem with early 50s U.S. TV is that it looks stodgy. This was possibly due more than anything else to the limitations of the medium at that time. TV sets had very small screens and picture quality was not good. There was little point in trying for artistic lighting effects or imaginative framing (even if there had been time for such luxuries which there wasn’t). Sets were very basic. These early TV shows looked cheap.

Of course it’s possible that this just happens to be a dud episode.

It doesn’t help that image quality is atrocious.

What seeing this episode has done for me is to increase my admiration for the achievements of American television in the late 50s. The improvement was staggering. Series like Decoy (1957), M Squad (1957) and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) were to demonstrate just how good half-hour episodic television could be.

Dick Tracy was possibly just made too soon. Six or seven years later it might have been possible to make a truly excellent Dick Tracy TV series.

On the plus side the series does have Ralph Byrd, the definitive screen Dick Tracy. And that’s a major plus.

So overall more of a curiosity than anything else.

I’ve also reviewed a couple of the RKO movies - Dick Tracy, Detective (1945) and Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946).

Man from Atlantis (TV-movie, 1977)

Man from Atlantis started life as a series of four made-for-TV movies in 1977. They were quite successful and NBC gave the go-ahead for a weekly series which lasted just 13 episodes. I haven’t seen the series but the consensus seems to be that it was nowhere near as good as the TV-movies.

Patrick Duffy starred. He would soon go on to major stardom in Dallas.

The premise is rather silly, but then if you start worrying about the silliness of the premises of science fiction movies and TV series you’ll pretty much have to give up on the genre altogether. I figures that if I can accept impossibilities like faster-than-light travel then I can accept a water-breathing man.

The man (later given the name Mark Harris) is found washed up on a beach. He is taken to hospital but all attempts to resuscitate him seem doomed to failure. Then Dr Elizabeth Merrill figures out the problem. This man breathes water! She insists that he should be thrown back in the ocean, whereupon he immediately revives.

But where does a water-breathing man come from? The Navy’s super-computer has the answer. He must be from Atlantis.

The Navy sees possibilities in this young man, as a weapon. Dr Merrill doesn’t want him used in that way. Mark is also not interested in being used in this way. Mark is eventually persuaded to carry out one mission. The Navy has lost a super-secret deep-sea research submarine. It’s lying at the bottom of the sea, 35,000 feet down. That’s no problem for Mark.

What Mark finds at the bottom of the sea is not what he expected. He finds himself a prisoner of sorts. And mixed up in a terrifying plan for world domination.

It was clearly intended from the start to make this a series of TV-movies so, quite sensibly, lots of questions are left unanswered. They did after all want people to watch the next movie in the hope of getting those answers.

Mark, very conveniently, has amnesia. He has no idea of his own origins. All he knows is that the sea is his home and that he understands the language of whales. Maybe he is an Altantean. If so, does Atlantis still exist? Is he the last surviving Atlantean? Where was Atlantis? Was it really a fabulously ancient highly advanced civilisation? We don’t know and Mark doesn’t know.

He is suspicious of the US Government (this was 1977 so it’s the era of 70s paranoia) but we’re left unsure what plans the Government has for Mark. Those plans might well be somewhat sinister.

His relationship with Dr Merrill remains unclear. She has obviously developed an emotional attachment to him but whether it’s a kind of displaced maternal affection or whether there’s a romantic elements to it, and possibly a physical attraction, is uncertain. Mark may have developed an attachment to her but that is less clear.

All of this offers potential for further development, which is a sound storytelling strategy in this context.

There’s an over-the-top mad scientist/diabolical criminal mastermind involved, which is always a good thing.

Visually it’s reasonably impressive for a TV production.

There’s some action but it probably needed a bit more and it definitely needed a bit more zing.

The biggest weakness is that there are not enough exciting underwater action scenes. Such scenes are pretty much an essential ingredient for such a series. What they really needed to do was to get hold of someone like John Lamb, the man who did the underwater photography for Sea Hunt and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Lamb knew how to do that sort of stuff and make it look good on a tight television budget. As it stands the underwater sequences are OK but just a little disappointing.

The action climax also needed to be a bit more spectacular but there was of course a limit to what you could do on a 1970s TV budget.

Patrick Duffy is OK. He’s supposed to be a kind of alien so his slightly detached performance works well enough. Belinda J. Montgomery as Dr Merrill is an adequate female lead and does the idealistic doctor thing convincingly. Victor Buono makes a fine mad scientist.

The four original TV-movies have been released on DVD in the Warner Archive series and they look quite acceptable. The TV series has also had a DVD release. I believe the first TV-movie is also available on Blu-Ray.

Man from Atlantis isn’t great but it’s fairly entertaining and just interesting enough that I’ll probably watch the second TV-movie.

Lost in Space (TV tie-in novel)

Lost in Space by Dave van Arnam and Ron Archer is as its name suggests a TV tie-in novel inspired by the classic TV series.

One intriguing thing about TV tie-in novels is that some are very close in spirit to the TV series while others are quite different. Some were commissioned at a time when only one or two episodes had gone to air. The novels sometimes reflected the original concept for the series, rather than the way the series actually turned out.

In this case the series premiered in 1965 and the novel was published in 1967 so I can only assume that the reason it differs so radically from the series is that it was a conscious decision on the part of the writers.

It is however worth observing at this point that Lost in Space was not conceived of as a silly goofy kids’ show. If you watch the pilot episode (No Place to Hide) or, even more to the point, the first few episodes of season one then it is plausible that the authors of the novel decided to make that very early version of the series the basis for their novel.

It’s obvious that the authors were attempting to write not just serious science fiction, but Big Ideas science fiction.

Some of the characters also differ markedly from their television counterparts. Especially Dr Smith. The Dr Smith of the novel is a serious scientist and he’s not the least bit lazy. He’s also not especially treacherous. He’s not even all that cowardly. He does have some megalomaniacal tendencies, which the TV version of the character doesn’t really have, at least not to anywhere near the same extent.

The authors also decided that the Robot would be groping towards acquiring independent decision-making abilities, which is certainly not the case in the TV version.

It’s also obvious that the only characters in whom the authors are interested are Dr Smith and Professor Robinson, and to a much lesser extent Don West and the Robot. Maureen Robinson becomes a very minor character. Will, Penny and Judy are even more minor characters. I suspect that the authors marginalised Will and Penny because they didn’t want to be seen as writing a science fiction novel for kids.

There is some of the familiar verbal sparing between Dr Smith and the Robot but the relationship between the two is overall quite different. In the novel the Robot’s function is not to provide comic relief. The relationship between Professor Robinson and Dr Smith is very different.

One positive thing about the novel is that it takes advantage of a huge advantage that novels have over TV series - the ability to operate on a truly epic scale. The novel takes the form of a series of three linked short stories and not one of those stories could have been attempted with a 1960s television budget.

In the first story the crew of the Jupiter II find a city that seems to have been home to an advanced civilisation but the planet is now deserted. Deserted, apart from a large number of robots and a central computer, all of which are dedicated to maintaining the city for the benefit of its non-existent inhabitants. The first mystery to be solve is obviously the lack of living inhabitants. There’s a second mystery - the central computer is hiding something very important and appears to be hopelessly conflicted over its own deceptions. It is now neurotic and guilt-ridden.

In the second story our spacefarers find a planet which is home to intelligent life, but it seems to take the form of a kind of hive mind.

The third story is even more ambitious. Our space adventurers find a vast city which turns out to be rather old. Billions of years old. And the history of this planet is somehow intertwined with Earth’s history and its destiny may be linked to Earth’s as well.


And Dr Smith believes he has finally gained what he aways wanted - the power to be a galactic emperor. Of course he’ll need an empress, and he feels that Judy Robinson would be an ideal choice. The prospect of marriage between Dr Smith and Judy is certainly something you wouldn’t have seen in the TV series,

If you’re looking for a novel that captures the feel of the TV series then you’re going to be pretty disappointed. About the only things it really has in common with the series are the names of the characters and the name of the spaceship. If that bothers you then you definitely should avoid the novel.

If you approach it merely as a science fiction novel then it’s not too bad. It grapples with big ideas with reasonable success. If you’re content with that then it’s not a bad read.

So I can’t really say whether I recommend it or not - it depends so much on what you’re looking for.

I’ve mentioned the origins of the series. I’ve reviewed the pilot episode Lost in Space - No Place to Hide and the first few episodes of the first season and they’re very much worth seeing as a glimpse of what the TV series could have been like.

The Twilight Zone - The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine

The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine was the fourth episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone and it’s always been one of my favourites. It was directed by Mitchell Leisen and written by Rod Serling and first went to air on October 23, 1959.

Barbara Jean Trenton (Ida Lupino) was, briefly, a major movie star. But that was many years ago. Her career took off quickly and crashed just as quickly. She is now a middle-aged recluse. She spends her time watching her own old movies on 16mm in a private projection room in her mansion.

While Barbara Jean Trenton, the character played by Ida Lupino, clearly has a kinship with Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard and while the initial setup resembles that of Billy Wilder’s film it is quite wrong to see The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine as merely a television rip-off of Sunset Boulevard. The story does not follow the same trajectory, and there are differences in emphasis. And while it isn’t immediately obvious at first by the end of the story it has become very definitely a Twilight Zone story.

It has the essential Twilight Zone feel - everything seems just like everyday reality until suddenly it’s not everyday reality any more.

In The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine there’s quite a bit of focus on the essential voyeurism of cinema. The twist here is that it’s self-voyeurism. Barbara Jean Trenton has no interest in other people’s lives. She has no curiosity about other people. The subject of her voyeurism is Barbara Jean Trenton. Not Barbara Jean Trenton the woman, but Barbara Jean Trenton the movie star. She watches herself obsessively on the screen. A further twist is that Barbara Jean Trenton the movie star no longer exists. This is voyeurism focused on the past.

And of course the viewer is watching Barbara Jean watching herself.

The twist at the end was later borrowed (or homaged if you prefer) by a certain very famous film director but to say any more would constitute a spoiler. It goes without saying that the film director in question was hailed as a genius for this ending, but The Twilight Zone did it first.

This is Rod Serling’s writing at its best. It packs an emotional punch but without sentimentality and without the viewer feeling manipulated. Serling could be guilty of sentimentality and manipulation but when he avoided those pitfalls he could come up with some top-notch scripts. And this is a wonderfully subtle script.

Martin Balsam is excellent as Barbara Jean’s loyal long-suffering friend and agent Danny Weiss.

But the success of this episode depends entirely on Lupino’s performance. She’s superb. She wisely avoids self-pity. Barbara Jean has isolated herself entirely from the contemporary world but we don’t despise or pity her. She has made a choice. She is happier living in the past. She knows that the modern world would destroy her. Lupino gives her a certain dignity.

While Sunset Boulevard was a rather scathing look at Hollywood and what it does to people The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine has a different tone. It certainly acknowledges that Hollywood uses people, makes them stars and then discards them but Serling’s story lacks Sunset Boulevard’s venom. Barbara Jean’s fate is sad, and yet there’s no question that for a brief moment Hollywood really did give her everything she wanted. It gave her complete happiness. Would she have been better off never having experienced her brief moment of fame and fulfilment? If happiness is fleeting would we really be better off without it? Would we really be better off living safe predictable conventional lives with no insane highs and no insane lows?

Barbara Jean would undoubtedly say that the highs are worth the price one has to pay. She knows that she was a star, and no-one can ever take that away from her.

So rather than the bleakness and venom of Sunset Boulevard we get a bitter-sweet tone here, and the combination of Serling’s writing and Lupino’s acting makes it work.

I’ve now seen The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine four times and it remains one of my favourite Twilight Zone moments. Very highly recommended.

three more Outer Limits season 1 episodes

Three more Outer Limits season 1 episodes from 1964. They’re not among the best episodes but even lesser episodes of this series are pretty good and pretty interesting.

Second Chance

Second Chance was written by Sonya Roberts and Lou Morheim and directed by Paul Stanley. It went to air in Match 1964.

A group of people are drawn to a carnival spaceship ride. They don’t know why. It’s just a silly fake spaceship. They get quite a surprise when the fake spacecraft actually lifts off and they find themselves in deep space. The carnival ride has been transformed into a real spaceship by an alien from a distant planet.

The people on the ride are a motley assortment and it’s difficult to understand why the alien wanted them aboard. That will however gradually become clear.

This is yet another example of The Outer Limits giving the alien invasion idea a major twist. And it’s another example of the series treating aliens as beings who might not necessarily be hostile. The idea of a carnival ride turning into a nightmare ride through outer space is very cool.

And, as so often in this series, there’s more emphasis on character than you’ll find in most TV sci-fi. The plot is mostly a device to allow the characters to learn something about themselves.

The Children of Spider County

Written by Anthony Lawrence, directed by Leonard J. Horn, screened February 1964.

In The Children of Spider County the Space Security agency gets involved when four young men disappear. There are extraordinary links between these four men that suggest a possibility that seems insane, but the links just can’t be explained by coincidence and Space Security takes the matter seriously. There’s also a fifth young man, Ethan Wechsler, and he’s facing a murder charge.

This episode illustrates some of the weaknesses of this series - cheesy makeup and iffy special effects. But The Outer Limits never worried about stuff like that. If they felt that the monsters needed to be shown, they’d show them, and if they looked cheesy the producers felt that the scripts would be good enough to compensate. And usually they were.

This episode works because it takes the alien invasion idea and gives it lots of interesting twists, and lots of ambiguity. Cleverly, the ambiguities are never fully resolved. There’s some slightly cringe-inducing speechifying about accepting differences but there are some genuine moral and emotional dilemmas.

There’s some action, with Ethan and his girlfriend on the run from the cops, and maybe from the aliens, and maybe from Space Security. And again there’s ambiguity - maybe it would be better if the alien caught them, and maybe it wouldn’t.

Not one of the great Outer Limits episodes but even the less-great episodes of this series tended to be very good and very thoughtful.

Moonstone

Written by Stephen Lord, directed by Gerd Oswald, screened February 1964.

Moonstone begins, naturally enough, on the Moon. American astronauts discover an artifact which is clearly not natural. At first they assume the Russians must be behind it but it soon becomes apparent that this small white sphere contains a number of alien intelligences. Are these aliens friendly or hostile? They seem benevolent. The aliens have a problem, and it’s a big problem. And it becomes a problem for the crew of the lunar mission as well. The commander of the lunar mission, General Stocker, will have to make a tough decision. He had to do that once before and it had consequences for which his second-in-command, Major Anderson, has never forgiven him.

It’s that decision made by General Stocker in the past that provides the main thematic interest of this episode. It’s all about decisions and decisions that have to be made by both the human and alien characters. The aliens simply function as a catalyst for major personal upheavals involving General Stocker and Major Anderson and the mission’s chief scientist, Professor Diana Brice (Ruth Roman). There’s a romantic drama between the general and Diana Brice but Major Anderson seems to be mixed up in it as well.

It’s not very profound but it is a bit more than just a space adventure yarn.

The special effects are very cheap-looking but the aliens are rather cool. These are aliens who really look profoundly alien, rather than being guys in rubber suits or cheesy makeup.

The acting is good enough to make the characters at least a bit more than cardboard cutouts.

Not a great episode but it’s solid enough.

Final Thoughts

I've described these as lesser episodes but I think they're all worth watching.

I’ve reviewed a number of other episodes of The Outer Limits, including The Sixth Finger, Don't Open Till Doomsday and ZZZZZ and The Man Who Was Never Born and O.B.I.T.

The Bionic Woman season one (1976)

The Six Million Dollar Man had been a big success so when writer Kenneth Johnson came up with a story idea for an episode featuring a bionic woman the producers were enthusiastic. After all if a bionic man was super-cool then a bionic woman would be totally awesome. And so the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, was launched on the small screen with a two-part Six Million Dollar Man episode. The original intention was that this would be a one-off appearance but it didn’t take long to figure out that featuring her in a spin-off series would be an even better idea.

Now there’s one thing I have to say upfront. It’s impossible to discuss The Bionic Woman without discussing the episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man which introduced the character and which preceded The Bionic Woman series. And it’s impossible to say anything about those episodes without revealing some spoilers for those episodes. It probably doesn’t really matter because anyone interested in either series is almost certainly already aware of certain events that happen during those episodes. The very existence of The Bionic Woman series is in some ways a spoiler for those episodes.

But if you’ve never seen those two early two-part episodes and you’re really spoiler-phobic you might want to skip the next section and jump ahead to the episode guide for The Bionic Woman.

The early crossover episodes

Jaime made her first appearance in a two-part episode called The Bionic Woman (written by Kenneth Johnson) which went to air during the second season, in March 1975.

The Bionic Woman

Steve decides he wants to buy a ranch in his home town as a way of getting back to his roots, and to have a refuge from the craziness of his life as a secret agent. It just so happens that this small town has produced two celebrities - Steve Austin the astronaut (obviously) and Jaime Sommers, a rising star on the women’s professional tennis circuit. Steve and Jaime were high school sweethearts years earlier but they both had ambitions that made marriage seem impractical. But Steve soon discovers that he’s still in love with Jaime.

Their newly rekindled romance is just starting to blossom when Jaime has a terrible sky-diving accident. She’s dying but Steve knows that there’s a way to save her - all he has to do is persuade Oscar Goldman that the government really needs a bionic woman. And all Oscar Goldman has to do is persuade the US Government to shell out another six million dollars to rebuild Jaime.

The first instalment of this two-parter takes a long time to get going. There is perhaps too much time spent on the Steve-Jaime romance, and way too much time spent on Steve’s parents doing folksy things. The extended treatment of the romance was I guess necessary in order to make it plausible that Steve would do anything, absolutely anything, to save Jaime.

The transformation of Jaime into the bionic woman is also pretty much travelling ground that was already travelled in the first of the Six Million Dollar Man TV movies. On the other hand Lindsay Wagner is cute and likeable and she and Lee Majors do have some genuine chemistry.

The producers didn’t want Jaime to be an exact clone of Steve Austin so instead of a bionic eye she has a bionic ear.

There is a spy plot mixed in here somewhere but the main focus is very much on the Steve-Jaime love story. It’s not the sort of thing that you would have expected the Six Million Dollar Man target audience to have gone for but in fact the viewers loved it.

This is a very emotion-heavy episode with an ending that was not only daring for network TV in the mid-70s but turned out to be rather rash. The ending does pack a punch.

The Return of The Bionic Woman

The Return of The Bionic Woman was screened during the third season of The Six Million Dollar Man in September 1975.

This episode also introduces the third actor to play the rôle of Dr Rudy Wells, the medical genius responsible for Steve’s bionics.

Steve is badly injured on a mission involving a gangland war. He is rushed to the hospital in which Dr Rudy Wells does his bionic surgery. Steve is only semi-conscious but he is sure he sees Jaime in an adjoining room. But that can’t be. It can’t be her. Oscar assures him that he was delirious. Then he sees her again. Oscar has a lot of explaining to do. There’s also a lot of explaining to do to the audience but writer Kenneth Johnson comes up with an explanation that doesn’t stretch credibility too far (given that this is a science fiction series).

Jaime is alive but not she’s not exactly well. She has lost all her memories. She has no idea who Steve is. Which is a bit of a blow, considering that they were engaged to be married. Steve has other blows to deal with, such as Jaime falling in love with the young genius doctor who saved her.

So, like the earlier two-parter, this is going to be another very emotion-driven episode. It has to be emphasised just how bold a move it was in the mid-70s to have two two-part episodes of an action-adventure-science fiction series devoted almost entirely to romance plots.

It was also quite an acting challenge for Lindsay Wagner. She has to play Jaime as Jaime, but as a slightly different Jaime. Without her memories she is just a little bit child-like and innocent. The whole world is new to her. She has to rediscover the world, and she has to face the most complicated human challenge imaginable - she has to start her emotional life all over again.

The Bionic Woman Episode Guide

The Bionic Woman series kicks off with Welcome Home, Jaime and it’s another daring move - beginning an action/adventure series with a two-part episode focused almost entirely on emotional drama. This was just not done on network TV in 1976. In fact the whole “how Jaime Sommers became the bionic woman and it affected her emotionally” tale is a six-episode story arc (beginning with four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man) and that was most certainly not done at that time. Kenneth Johnson (who wrote all six episodes and created The Bionic Woman) was years ahead of his time. Whether you think multi-episode story arcs are a good thing or a bad thing is another matter (I think that on the whole they’re a bad idea).

Jaime has had yet another operation, the hope being to regenerate some of her brain cells so that she can get her memory back. It works, up to a point. She now remembers a lot more. But she still doesn’t remember being engaged to marry Steve Austin. She is however about to find out.

In the second part we finally start to see Jaime doing some serious secret agent stuff, and showing off her bionic abilities. The big difference between Steve Austin and Jaime is that she has a bionic ear instead of a bionic eye and his story makes plenty of use of that bionic ear. It’s what keeps her one step ahead of the bad guys.

This two-parter is still basically part of the introductory story arc, giving us Jaime’s backstory and establishing her character and also establishing the vital fact that much of her past has been lost to her. She’s not just going to be battling bad guys but presumably also trying to re-establish her own identity.

So in some ways you could argue that the first season proper started with episode three by which time the format of the show had been more or less finalised.

There’s a definite Clark Kent vibe to the series - on the surface Jaime is a mild-mannered bubbly pretty young schoolteacher but she has a hidden identity as a secret agent with super-powers. This gives the series an interestingly different vibe to The Six Million Dollar Man. There never was anything ordinary about Steve Austin. Before he became the bionic man he was already a hero - a test pilot and world-famous astronaut. Being a hero comes naturally to him. Becoming the bionic man hasn’t changed his life all that much. He was already doing extraordinary things that no ordinary person could ever hope to do. But before becoming the bionic woman Jaime Sommers really was just an ordinary girl. Being a super-heroine does not come naturally to her.

Also interesting is that Steve Austin had to be coerced into becoming a secret agent and he was initially very resentful. Even though he’s a born hero there’s a part of him that would like to return to the small town in which he was born and become ordinary. Jaime on the other hand is not only a volunteer - she was the one who pressured Oscar Goldman into letting her become a secret agent. She’s the complete opposite of Steve Austin - she’s an ordinary girl who yearns to be extraordinary.

The series itself has a slightly different feel compared to The Six Million Dollar Man. In a lot of the stories Jaime isn’t doing the secret agent thing, she just gets involved in situations in which her bionic power happen to come in handy. The Bionic Woman at times feels more like a family-oriented adventure series while The Six Million Dollar Man was more overtly a sci-fi/spy series.

While The Six Million Dollar Man has Steve dealing with missions involving national security a lot of the stories in The Bionic Woman involve Jaime personally, or involve people she knows personally.

There was an intention to continue doing crossover episodes and in fact Steve Austin makes his reappearance as early as the fourth episode.

Angel of Mercy takes Jaime to the South American republic of Costa Bravo where the American ambassador is trapped in the middle of a civil war. Jaime has to get him out, with the help of hardbitten helicopter pilot Jack Starkey (played surprisingly by Andy Griffith). Her cover is that she’s a nurse. Maybe that wasn’t one of Oscar’s brightest ideas - she knows nothing about nursing and can’t stand the sight of blood (which adds some amusing moments). This one is rather similar to one of the first season episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, Little Orphan Airplane, with this time Jaime using her bionic powers to rebuild a broken-down aircraft. Jaime gets to use her bionic powers a lot in this episode.This episode works, largely because Lindsay Wagner is so charming and amusing. She really was starting to settle into the role.

A Thing of the Past takes Jaime back to her day-to-day life as a schoolteacher. The only excitement is that the school bus crashes but no-one is hurt thanks to the quick-thinking bus driver. And then the world of gangsters starts to intrude into Jaime’s small-town everyday life. That bus driver had a past and it’s caught up to him and Jaime is caught in the middle. It’s an OK episode. Lee Majors makes a totally unnecessary brief appearance but given that The Bionic Woman hadn’t yet established itself it made sense from a promotional point of view. It is however Jaime who does all the heroic stuff.

In Claws Jaime has to mind a wild animal farm for her friend Susan Victor (played by Tippi Hedren who in real-life was involved in caring for big cats). One of Susan’s animals is a ridiculously tame pet lion but the local ranchers are convinced that the lion has been killing their steers. If Jaime can’t discover what’s really going on then the future looks grim for the lion. This is an episode that veers dangerously close to heart-warming territory.

In The Deadly Missiles a ballistic missile with a de-activated warhead lands in a reservoir near Los Angeles. It appears to have been fired from the ranch of wealthy industrialist J.T. Connors (Forrest Tucker), an old friend of Jaime’s. Jaime refuses to believe that J.T. could actually be involved. But her job is to find out. And she has to find out before somebody fires another missile with a live warhead. Jaime is torn between her duty and her loyalty to a friend. A pretty decent episode.

In Bionic Beauty Oscar orders Jaime to enter a beauty pageant. The pageant is a threat to national security but he doesn’t know why. Jaime has to find that out. This episode is mostly filler with the beauty pageant stuff distracting from the actual plot. But since the plot isn’t particularly good maybe it was a good idea after all to focus on the beautiful girls. Not a very impressive episode.

In Jaime's Mother Jaime thinks she’s seen her mother. Which is disturbing, since her mother died in 1966. Jaime fears she’s going mad. Oscar isn’t happy. But Jaime still thinks her mother may be alive. This is another episode more focused on Jaime personally and on her emotional state than on secret agent missions although there’s more to the reappearance of Jaime’s mother than one might think. It’s all a bit contrived and with a bit too much emotional angst.

In Winning Is Everything Jaime has to enter a desert car race in a south-west Asian country. Oscar has hired failed Grand Prix driver Tim Sanders to drive with Jaime as navigator. Her real mission is to pick up a tape hidden by an American spy. Almost the entire episode is taken up with the car race (which I guess is exciting) and the very feeble plot gets largely forgotten. Not much of an episode really.

Canyon of Death is another episode in which Jaime gets personally involved. One of her pupils, John Little Bear, wanders off into a restricted area in the desert and discovers something very dangerous. It relates to the testing of a top-secret atomic-powered jetpack flying suit. This is definitely an episode aimed squarely at a very young audience. The idea of an atomic-powered flying suit is amusingly retro for 1976. Not a very good episode.

Fly Jaime is basically a rehash of the Six Million Dollar Man episode Survival of the Fittest. Rudy Wells has to fly to South America, on a charter flight, to pick up a secret formula. Jaime goes along as his bodyguard (masquerading as stewardess Miss Winters). The plane crashes and the survivors are stranded on a deserted island and among the passengers are killers after that secret formula. It’s OK but if you’ve seen the Six Million Dollar Man episode referred to then you’ve seen this one.

The Jailing of Jaime starts out with Jaime getting a straightforward assignment - to deliver a top-secret code-breaking device to a military base. It turns out no to be so straightforward and Jaime winds up in jail, suspected of treason. Of course no prison can hold the bionic woman for very long. She breaks out, determined to clear her name. Her ability to break out of impossible places will come in handy again later. A routine but entertaining episode and we do get to see just how strong she really is.

It was an ironclad rule in the 60s and 70s that every action-adventure series had to have at least one episode in which an evil double of the hero or heroine was running around causing mayhem. And so we get Mirror Image. Yes, the bad guys have surgically altered a woman to make her look exactly like Jaime and her mission is to kill Oscar Goldman. The idea is hackneyed but it’s executed reasonably well with Lindsay Wagner varying her performance subtly when she’s playing the double. A good episode.

The Bionic Woman goes spooky in The Ghosthunter, with Jaime up against witches, ghosts and things that go bump in the night. A top government scientist and his daughter have been troubled by what appear to be ghostly visitations. The scientist’s wife, now deceased, had been the descendant of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1692. Jaime soon discovers that weird things really are going on. The episode does a good job of keeping us uncertain as to whether these are genuinely supernatural happenings. There’s a possibility it maybe be an elaborate espionage conspiracy, or it could be something paranormal or overtly supernatural. We’re also kept in doubt not just about the nature of these happenings but also the source. A pretty good way to end the first season.

Final Thoughts

The scripts are sometimes a little on the weak side but the coolness of the concept and Lindsay Wagner’s performances carry the show through a few less than brilliant episodes. On the whole it’s a fun series and it’s worth a look.