“IMWAN for all seasons.”



Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 29 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  ( Next )
Author Message
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 2:18 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
I've been watching the fifth and final season of the pioneering 1970s superhero classic. Here we go with some reviews:


Sharks
A rogue undersea researcher and his trained sharks capture a nuclear submarine with Steve aboard.

The season starts out with a two-part episode that puts things squarely into superhero territory. Undersea pirates! A nuclear submarine held for ransom! An unfortunate searcher (Steve's friend Dr. Rudy Wells) trapped on the ocean floor! And cybernetic mind-controlled sharks! That last touch was especially inspired--though sharks were still very much in the public eye only a few years after "Jaws," they hadn't yet become as badly overexposed and parodied to a fare-thee-well as they are now.

Like many "Six Million Dollar Man" stories this one ends up looking a bit overambitious for a 1970s TV budget. The underwater sequences are, when you think about it, pretty impressive. They were really down in the water shooting these scenes, and there were some real sharks involved. But the special effects and pacing make it look dated now. The bad guys come across as underwhelming. Yes, they have mind-controlled sharks working for them, but there are only a handful of bad guys and they aren't exactly Dr. Doom material.

Still--a villain with cybernetic sharks! That's the sort of thing you don't get to see every day, even now.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 3:09 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Deadly Countdown
Steve and another astronaut are scheduled to go into orbit to repair a vital satellite--but somebody on the ground doesn't want the mission to succeed.

Once again Steve and those around him are plagued by those pesky unfortunate "accidents." This time they are the work of a couple of American crooks hired by a foreign power to make sure the American space program suffers a couple of setbacks. In the first episode of this two-parter the villains actually succeed in destroying the Saturn 1-B rocket on the launch pad. Steve and his colleague (Who is female, by the way--and used for fanservice in the course of the story :roll: ) barely escape. The OSI takes it in stride and simply orders up another Saturn 1-B to try again. So the bad guys capture the child of somebody who's highly placed in the program and holds her hostage. The ostensibly space-themed adventure thus turns into an earthbound kidnapping story. You'll never guess who rescues the kidnapping victim....

Disappointingly enough the actual spaceflight all takes place off-screen. It's really too bad. Space adventures weren't exactly a dime-a-dozen on TV in those days. Though that was on the verge of changing, thanks to a movie called "Star Wars" that become a gigantic hit only months before "Deadly Countdown" aired. The good thing about this sadly mundane story is that it has lots of great location footage shot at real-life NASA facilities. We get to see the Vertical Assembly Building, the fantastic crawler (Which looks pretty "Star Wars"-ish in its own right), and lots of stock footage of actual Saturn 1-B rockets. Evidently NASA was quite happy to help out with making this episode. And why not? Nobody gets killed in the launch pad "accident," and the viewer is given the impression that cleaning up and re-trying after a major launch failure only takes them a few days.

Note that when the Saturn 1-B blows up the stock footage is clearly NOT of a Saturn 1-B explosion. It appears to be a Mercury-era Atlas launch vehicle instead. They didn't use Saturn 1-B launch failure footage because--there isn't any! The Saturn 1-B never had a spectacular launch-pad blow-up in real life. It really was quite a fine rocket. A shame that the remaining examples were turned into giant lawn ornaments, instead of being used for further Skylab missions or some other actual space flight.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 6:34 pm 
User avatar
Pure Evil Gold!!

Joined: 26 Jul 2006
Posts: 37645
Location: Witness Protection Program
Bannings: Ask Linda
Was this the season where Steve Austin had a mustache?

Because that look did not cut it for me!

Nuh-uhhh!

_________________
Image


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 11:30 am 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
He looks like he needs a shave in some scenes, but I wouldn't call that a proper mustache. Whatever it is, he's better off without it.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 12:01 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Bigfoot V
Bigfoot awakens from hibernation and goes on a rampage.

The aliens who turned Bigfoot/Sasquatch into a cyborg watch...something have finished their observation mission and left Earth. No doubt they had some serious explaining to do to their superiors back home after that ill-advised world takeover bid that some of them tried to pull during a previous season. At any rate, they've left poor Bigfoot behind in suspended animation. The idea seems to have been to give him a chance to readjust to being a simple Earth creature before releasing him. However that was supposed to have worked, it fails when somebody wanders into Bigfoot's cave and fools around and releases him prematurely.

You really do have to feel sorry for the poor fellow. Fortunately his "rampage" doesn't get to amount to very much before Steve, who remembers that Bigfoot is not a bad guy, manages to straighten things out. Ted Cassidy once again makes an impressive-looking Bigfoot. But this was really one trip to the well too many for the Bigfoot idea. At least we get some nice shots of the great outdoors.


Killer Wind
Steve must contend with fleeing bank robbers, a stranded cable car, and a forced landing during a severe wind storm.

The forced landing is his own; that's how he and Rudy Wells happen upon the scene of all the other events. Rudy, whom I've noticed tends to have a lot of bad luck in episodes where he appears, spends most of his time sidelined with an injured ankle. These more mundane stories, where there's nothing science fictional going on, tend not to hold together well. Partly it's because Steve seems wasted in situations where he's the only fantastic element. Even in weaker sci-fi episodes, like the Bigfoot appearance above, there's at least some real imagination at work. This one is just very run-of-the-mill 1970s TV adventure fare.

It's also not done with very much conviction. The episode's almost a catalog of everything that could go wrong with 1970s-style TV production. Neither the bad guys, nor the girl at the diner that Steve runs into, nor the stranded group of kid hikers seem at all convincing. The kids are actually kind of embarrassing to watch, their scenes are so poorly written and acted. And then there's the fake wind storm. They have off-screen fans whipping up a stiff breeze, but it's pretty obvious from the amount of daylight that there's no actual threatening weather at work. IMWANers old enough to remember this series from its original run will likely also recall seeing contemporary live-action Saturday morning series by the likes of Filmation and Sid and Marty Krofft. "Killer Wind" looks like it could have been made by them, on the kind of budget they had to work with. Yes, it's really that bad.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 12:13 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
I've noticed a name appearing in the credits of some of this season's episodes: Fred Freiberger. That's an ominous sight for those who recall that he presided over what proved to be the final seasons of both the original "Star Trek" and "Space: 1999." And, sure enough, this would prove the final season of "Six Million Dollar Man" as well. Given his established record at that point, one can only imagine the sinking feeling the cast had when they learned that he was to be the new producer on some of their episodes.

From what I've read of the production of "Space: 1999's" second and final season there's little question that the "Serial Killer" of sci-fi shows made a mess of things there. Whether he also hurt "Star Trek" has been a matter of debate. I don't know whether he hurt "Six Million Dollar Man." It seems unlikely that his presence helped anything. I know this much--were I a new goldfish or house plant in the Freiberger household, I'd make out my will just as quickly as possible.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 8:04 pm 
User avatar
Pure Evil Gold!!

Joined: 26 Jul 2006
Posts: 37645
Location: Witness Protection Program
Bannings: Ask Linda
Always loved the Bigfoot episodes.

_________________
Image


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:38 am 
User avatar
...

Joined: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 59406
I'll admit that I can never see too much Bigfoot, and I haven't watched these since I was a kid, but I'd defer to Meddlin's opinions on these episodes and their quality (or lack of it). I'm sure the show isn't as great as I remember it being...but I'm too afraid to look at it again. I'd prefer to keep the memories as they are and doubt I'd enjoy seeing it as an adult.

_________________
"They'll bite your finger off given a chance" - Junkie Luv (regarding Zebras)


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:54 am 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Dr. Chris Evil wrote:
Always loved the Bigfoot episodes.


Something about Bigfoot's appearances creeped me out when I was a child. Almost as much as the robots that kept losing their faces. Maybe it was because I lived in a place where there had actually been reported Bigfoot sightings and footprints in the 1970s. Seriously, outside the Pacific Northwest region Arkansas probably led the nation in Bigfoot sightings for a while. For that matter people near my home town still claim to see him now and then. I didn't believe in ghosts as a child, but we lived out in the woods and I wondered sometimes whether Bigfoot might show up on our doorstep one evening.

A generation later Bigfoot had come to be so domesticated in the public mind that my little niece made him into one of her favorite imaginary friends. Along with Wile E. Coyote and velociraptors. Had she been born a couple decades earlier she'd have been a great "Six Million Dollar Man" fan.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:57 am 
User avatar
...

Joined: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 59406
(I still honestly believe there are non-human bipedal apes roaming around in the wilderness right across the world...true fact!) :thumbsup:

_________________
"They'll bite your finger off given a chance" - Junkie Luv (regarding Zebras)


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 1:54 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Simon wrote:
(I still honestly believe there are non-human bipedal apes roaming around in the wilderness right across the world...true fact!) :thumbsup:


Did you ever read Dennis Pilichis' Night Siege? I posted a link to it on the Yowie thread a while back, but I didn't know whether you ever saw it.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 2:18 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Rollback
Steve infiltrates a gang planning to steal secrets from the OSI.

The gang consists of...a renegade roller derby team? Roller derby went through one of its occasional spikes in popularity during the 1970s, so naturally it was referenced quite a bit in popular culture around that time (I vaguely recall there having been a short-lived series about a women's roller derby team). This whole episode is an excuse to work roller derby into the show. The way they show the rogue skaters using their special skating skills to break into a government agency headquarters has a certain ingenuity about it. It seems that the building can be approached through an unguarded D.C. utility tunnel that has gaps just wide enough for a good skater to leap. When they reach the building itself, they find that the security system consists largely of motion-sensor floors, which again can be leaped by good skate jumpers. Talk about a plot tailored to the characters' abilities!

It's all thoroughly silly, in an inspired sort of way. Great fun, especially if you have a soft spot for "caper" stories.


Target: Steve Austin
Steve and another OSI agent pose as a married couple to transport a sensitive nuclear device across the country.

Steve and partner Joan naturally have to endure some labored attempts at romantic comedy. Joan, as played by Lynette Mettey, doesn't get much of a chance to impress. Like virtually every woman who appears on the show (apart from the rare villainesses), she turns into a damsel in distress, via the stale device of replacement by evil duplicate. Really, this show and its companion, "The Bionic Woman," represent the point in popular culture where that trope completely outstayed its welcome (Though the absolute worst example was the little-remembered series "Gemini Man," in which virtually the first regular-broadcast episode after the pilot was a retread of "Bionic Woman's" evil twin story with the names changed. Bad enough that "Gemini Man" started out with such a stale story; even worse was the fact that "Bionic Woman" went into reruns at that time and ran its evil-twin episode the same week. The sci-fi fans who might have liked "Gemini Man" felt that their intelligence had been insulted and dropped the show, causing it to quickly fail).

Joan's only impressive moment takes place offscreen. We see her being approached by a couple of menacing bikers while Steve is away. When Steve returns, we see the bikers lying sprawled on the ground. That and the old couple who appear at one of the team's stops are pretty much this episode's highlights. Don't trust the old couple, BTW. Those foreign agents aren't always who you expect!

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:05 am 
User avatar
...

Joined: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 59406
That meddlin kid wrote:
Simon wrote:
(I still honestly believe there are non-human bipedal apes roaming around in the wilderness right across the world...true fact!) :thumbsup:


Did you ever read Dennis Pilichis' Night Siege? I posted a link to it on the Yowie thread a while back, but I didn't know whether you ever saw it.


I haven't - I shall check! Thank you. :thumbsup:

_________________
"They'll bite your finger off given a chance" - Junkie Luv (regarding Zebras)


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:28 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Dark Side of the Moon
A renegade geologist's unsanctioned lunar mining causes havoc on Earth.

Evidently there has been a sudden leap in American manned space capability since the last space-themed adventure. This one begins with Steve and a thoroughly disagreeable space geologist on an unnamed asteroid--in other words, far beyond lunar orbit--prospecting for "dilanthium," a miracle element that promises to solve Earth's energy crisis (In the 1970s there was a LOT of concern that the world was running out of fossil fuel sources. Who'd have imagined then that 40 years later we'd have plenty of them--but that actually using them was destroying our whole environment?). They find only inadequate traces of it. Steve (Who, as a veteran lunar astronaut has no doubt been trained in geology) urges continued asteroid prospecting. The pro geologist insists, despite having previously tried and failed to find dilanthium on the Moon, that lunar exploration is the way to go.

Soon the geologist is leading another asteroid prospecting mission. Steve stays behind when the guy pointedly disinvites him from the mission. When the new asteroid mission fails to yield quick results, our geologist has the team fly to the dark side of the Moon--without anybody back home knowing about it--and begins secretly mining for dilanthium there. This time he has brought along an abundant supply of nuclear (!) explosives to work with. The repeated lunar booms cause the Moon to shake in its orbit. This in turn affects weather patterns on Earth. Soon D.C. (where most Earth-side scenes take place) is being hit by continual thunderstorms. Coastlines all over the world are hit by hurricanes. It is implied that the storms are causing hundreds of deaths and untold damage. And it's getting worse with every lunar detonation!

Steve is sent on a solo mission to the dark side of the Moon to see what's happening there. He discovers what the increasingly mad scientist is doing, and the fight is on. The bad guys are equipped with ray guns, nuclear bombs, and the ability to figure out some of Steve's bionic vulnerabilities. Steve has the help of a Plucky Girl Astronaut. It's a fair fight.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:57 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
"Dark Side of the Moon" is one of the most spectacular "Six Million Dollar Man" two-parters of them all. We have elaborate sets of both the lunar surface and an asteroid (The latter has red skies like Mars--it must have been a recycled Mars set of some kind), spacecraft interiors, ray guns, that always-interesting stock footage of real-life space launches, and more space suits than you can shake a stick at. And a rogue geologist (How many of those do you see in fiction?) whose activities threaten the whole world. When I first saw this at the age of ten I was highly impressed.

Unfortunately, if you're much older than that, and know at least a little bit about space travel and weather, it gets very hard to suspend disbelief on this one. For starters, the villain manages to fly a spacecraft from an asteroid to the Moon without anybody noticing. NASA has a little something called "telemetry" that should make that completely impossible with anything remotely like current technology. Much worse is the idea that a few nuclear blasts a few meters below the lunar surface could affect the Moon's orbit enough to alter Earth's weather patterns. As horrifyingly powerful as they are when used as weapons, and polluting when used for ANYTHING, nuclear bombs are very small in comparison to either the Earth or the Moon. The biggest H-bomb ever built--and they got a lot bigger than the one-megaton device that threatens to go off in the story's climax--released less energy than a mundane thunderstorm, let alone a hurricane. At least "Space: 1999's" writers took the trouble to make it clear that the Moon was affected by a really, really, unprecedentedly-big blast.

This is not to say that the episode is not entertaining. But its assorted howlers must drive serious space buffs who watch it nuts! At least they don't have sound effects (apart from the obligatory "bionic" sounds) in the airless void of space. The geek in me wonders whether perhaps it might be best to think of this story as a sort of "Elseworlds" set in a different continuity from the rest of the series. It would explain the sudden jump in space capability compared to what we find in other space episodes, and why there appears to be no aftermath despite the world experiencing an even worse hurricane season than the recent one that many places are still trying to recover from in real life. It would also help to explain that "dilanthium" business. By the 23rd century it will be known as "dilithium," and will power interstellar space exploration vessels. In this alternate continuity "Six Million Dollar Man" is a predecessor of "Star Trek!"

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Last edited by That meddlin kid on Fri Dec 08, 2017 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:01 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Return of Death Probe
A stolen Soviet Venus probe is used in an international extortion plot.

Technically they stole the PLANS for the new, improved Venus probe, plus the formula for the invulnerable super alloy it's made from. To make the alloy they spend the first half of this two-parter's first episode with a bizarre plot to invade a mill making advance test alloys at gunpoint, stick a secret ingredient into the mix, wait for the good guys to make the alloy for them, and then come back for it later. It's hard to see how anybody could expect a hole-filled scheme like that to work. But of course it does. Soon the bad guys have turned the illicitly-produced super metal into a new Death Probe. They operate it under remote control on behalf of a Middle Eastern ruler who plans to use it to blackmail the U.S. into giving him nuclear weapons. Evidently the Probe is supposed to be such a terrible threat that handing over a couple of nukes to a rogue state is a reasonable price to pay to get shut of it.

That's kind of hard to believe when Death Probe II actually shows up. Like its predecessor, it resembles a cross between an oversized Dalek and a dune buggy. It has one or two little retractable mechanical arms, a pair of absurd-looking whirling blades, a grappling hook, and a powerful laser weapon. Despite all this weaponry, the initial confrontation with the Probe consists mostly of Steve, Oscar, and the Probe warily eyeing each other. Though the Probe's initial lack of aggression makes sense when one considers that the bad guys are extortionists who are trying to use it for a bluff, it makes for a less than exciting sequence.

Things pick up when Steve has to rescue a kid with a fishing pole who wanders into the Probe's path (He's going fishing in the desert? And you'd think that the military observers whom we've been told earlier have the Probe under surveillance would have thought to try to keep passerby out of harm's way). Then he, Oscar, and the handful of troops who've been tasked with dealing with the epic menace spend the rest of the running time trying out various ways to get rid of it. One thing they don't even attempt is to use conventional military bombs or artillery. They just take Rudy's word for it when he tells them that his tests on a sample of the super alloy show the Probe to be invulnerable to ordinary weapons (A powerful test drill can't even make a scratch--which begs the question of how the bad guys managed to shape and fasten the stuff as needed to build the Probe. As somebody once said of Marvel Comics' "adamantium," if it's really impossible to cut or melt, then how would you ever make anything out of it except free-form paperweights?).

Most of the action in the second part features our heroes' improvised attacks on the Probe. Highlights include Steve trying to use a pole to flip it over like a turtle; the duel between the Probe and the flame-throwing bulldozer; the Probe using its laser to tunnel its way out of a pit they lure it into (Now that's a powerful ray gun! Too bad the bad guys running the Probe apparently keep forgetting about it in other situations where it might have come in handy); and Steve spraying it with glue to blind its sensors. That begs another question--why didn't they at least try firing rockets or something into the sensors? Obviously they can't be invulnerably armored like the rest of it, and they aren't that hard to spot.

Anyway, the Probe is finally destroyed. It's a shame that its encore performance can't measure up to the fan-favorite original. This go-around lacks most of the first outing's suspense, drama, and occasional comedy relief. The not inconsiderable amount of unintentional comedy still isn't enough to compensate. The best you can say for it is that the latter half is entertaining to watch. And Death Probe II still makes that cool Venus probe noise. You just can't get enough of that.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:16 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
By the way, Oscar is front-and-center in this story. He has been conspicuously absent from some of the recent episodes. Was something going on behind the scenes with Richard Anderson at the time that kept him from playing his part for a while?

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 5:46 am 
User avatar
...

Joined: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 59406
That meddlin kid wrote:
By the way, Oscar is front-and-center in this story. He has been conspicuously absent from some of the recent episodes. Was something going on behind the scenes with Richard Anderson at the time that kept him from playing his part for a while?


He was involved in an accident, was a man barely alive...but they rebuilt him...they had the technology... ;)

_________________
"They'll bite your finger off given a chance" - Junkie Luv (regarding Zebras)


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:24 am 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Simon wrote:
That meddlin kid wrote:
By the way, Oscar is front-and-center in this story. He has been conspicuously absent from some of the recent episodes. Was something going on behind the scenes with Richard Anderson at the time that kept him from playing his part for a while?


He was involved in an accident, was a man barely alive...but they rebuilt him...they had the technology... ;)


Life imitating art, huh? Stranger things have happened....

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:47 am 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
The Cheshire Project
An aircraft containing an experimental stealth device vanishes during a test.

Well, isn't that what stealth technology is supposed to make an aircraft do? Obviously somebody is trying to steal the the radar-evading device and sell it to Unfriendly Powers (Or to somebody planning to mass produce it to sell to speeding motorists). Steve has a personal interest in the case because the Lady Pilot flying the test aircraft is yet another of his numerous ex-girlfriends. She's played by Suzanne Summers, who in a few years would briefly taste Farrah Fawcett-levels of celebrity. Very briefly--within a few more years she was appearing in first-run syndicated sitcoms. For many years since then she has made a name for herself peddling quack nutritional supplements and anti-aging remedies. It can't be easy for a performer who got to be the Next Big Thing for a time to have to spend the remaining decades of his or her life coming down that far.

Getting back to the episode, it's essentially a remake of "Nightmare in the Sky" from an earlier season. Which means that Suzanne Summers even gets to play a rehash of one of Farrah's roles! Unlike "Nightmare in the Sky" we don't get to see cool shots of a ghostly Japanese Zero fighter. A very unmemorable episode.


Walk a Deadly Wing
Steve goes undercover as a wing-walker to protect a threatened Soviet defector.

The defector has been making a living as a stunt pilot in an air show, hence Steve's disguise. As part of it he puts on a southern--or maybe it's supposed to be a Texas--accent. It doesn't sound that convincing to me; accents weren't Lee Majors' forte. It may not have mattered that much, since he was doing it for the benefit of a foreigner who might not have been too well-acquainted with differences in American regional speech. Anyway, Steve's knack for getting along with folks soon ingratiates him with the prickly guy he's trying to protect. A timely rescue from attack also helps to win the man's trust.

The real highlight of the episode is the extensive flying sequences. We see some actual wing-walking, and lots of aerobatics. Some might find the episode lame for its run-of-the-mill plot and lack of sci-fi elements and special effects. Me, I find the flying sequences quite impressive. Remember, this isn't CGI, or even old-fashioned "practical" effects done with models and rear projection. Those are real people making real planes pull those incredible maneuvers and hammerhead stalls. It's the next best thing to actually being able to attend an air show.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2017 1:48 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
Just a Matter of Time
Steve splashes down from a space mission at an isolated island, and learns that six years have passed.

How did he lose six years? Well, he was testing a new kind of super rocket fuel, and apparently he made it up to relativistic velocities or something and leaped ahead in time. Or anyway, that's the best he can figure. The new director of OSI (Oscar is now dead) doesn't buy that and arrests him on suspicion that he defected to the Soviets. While Steve is trying to figure all this out, he spots the planet Venus in the night sky. Knowing something about astronomy--he is an astronaut, after all--he realizes that in 1984 Venus shouldn't even be visible from that latitude. He never left 1978! Turns out it was all a plot to gaslight him in hopes of stealing that super fuel formula.

This is one of the few episodes from the final season that I remember very well from the original broadcast. I recall thinking about how very far away the year 1984 seemed. When you're only 10, six years seems like a very long time in the future.

One of the bogus OSI operatives is played by John DeLancie, still some years before he played Q on "Next Generation." He had already appeared the previous season as a minor OSI flunky in the original "Death Probe." Were we meant to understand that this was an actual low-level man who had turned traitor as part of the plot? Or did they just not think about it when they cast him?


Lost Island
Steve must locate an island colonized by aliens in a place where no island should be.

These didn't air back-to-back, but something tells me they were probably made that way on the same trip to whatever tropical location where they were both filmed. Once again we learn that aliens--apparently a different batch from the ones with the pet Sasquatch--have settled Earth. They're survivors of a long-ago spaceship crash who have hidden their island behind a force field. Non-powered craft can still happen upon it, though, and at least one missing scientist has found the place and produced offspring--a lovely young lady who offers to brave the outside world looking for help when power-hungry dissidents try to turn the island into a dictatorship.

The bad guys can't really help it. They've been turned bad by a radioactive mutagen from a crashed satellite. It makes them very (and rather comically) ugly, and boosts their strength. Their leader also gains a grotesquely deep voice and a speech pattern that manages to sound even more stilted than that of most aliens. It's enough to make one feel embarrassed for actor Jared Martin. Then there's his brilliant plan for invading the good guys' fortified compound with his gang--build a catapult from bamboo and such and launch themselves into it. They end up not needing to go through with it when the good guys' defenses crumble.

The aliens are very pre-"Star Wars" types. They look just like Caucasian human beings, and have varied names that range from vaguely Hungarian-sounding (Zandor), to Caveman (Torg, the bad guy leader). Apparently they're peaceful utopian types before coming into contact with that leaking radiation. At the two-hour episode's end their shield goes down, their hidden island becomes visible, and the aliens face the prospect of becoming integrated with our world. Wonder how that went?

I don't know, but I have my suspicions regarding what happened to their cloaking technology. My guess is that somehow it got stolen from the OSI by a bunch of curious fellows called the Hanso Foundation, who made the island disappear again and started moving it around in time or something. In other words, the Lost Island--or one like it--ended up becoming the "Lost" island. Of course the OSI never let anybody know about their failure to keep the alien technology under careful guard. I guess you can't blame Oscar for being embarrassed about the whole thing.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
 Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--Fifth Season
PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2017 2:03 pm 
User avatar
Biker Librarian

Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 25152
Location: On the highway, looking for adventure
The Madonna Caper
An OSI espionage operation inadvertently facilitates an art theft.

This series does love its caper stories! The painting, a priceless Madonna, is on loan from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. A friendly art expert has concealed upon it a microdot with valuable spy data (Couldn't she have picked some less conspicuous hiding place?). Steve "borrows" the painting to retrieve the microdot...and the next thing you know it has been stolen. Now Steve has to get it back before its theft is discovered and creates an international incident. As always Steve's bionic abilities come in handy. But there are otherwise no sci-fi elements to be seen.

If something about the episode seems familiar, it's because the story is largely a retread of Season 3's "Golden Pharaoh" episode. This is the second time this season that they've more or less remade an earlier story featuring Farrah Fawcett. Funny they kept picking her episodes to remake, even though she was no longer available to guest star. Between these two episode remakes, Death Probe II, yet another Bigfoot encounter, and the repeated caper stories--recall the "Rollback" episode above--it would appear that "Six Million Dollar Man's" writers were running short on ideas. It may be just as well that we did not see a sixth season....


Dead Ringer
Steve is haunted by the ghost of...himself?

He keeps seeing this weird figure that looks just like himself, usually in conjunction with a mysterious, potentially fatal "accident." A parapsychologist who learns that he was "clinically dead" (i.e. his heart stopped temporarily) for fifty-odd seconds after his big crash theorizes that his "spirit" separated from him at that time and now wants to kill him. She cites a couple of cases of people who had something similar happen to them. The idea begs all kinds of questions. How can a living person lose his spirit and not be left comatose or zombified? Did Steve lose part of his soul? And why does it want to kill him? Does it miss the rest of him that badly? Is it mad at him for not dying when he should have?

Steve remains skeptical. With good reason, as it turns out that...

Spoiler: show
...the "ghost" is just a series of holographic projections being used to gaslight him. The eerie sightings and accidents are supposed to make it easier to discover Steve's bionic secrets. As in "Nightmare in the Sky" (Hey, come to think of it, that was one of Farrah's old episodes!) the bad guys are using fantastic holographic technology that you'd think they could have more profitably used doing something else.


This is one of the final-season episodes that I recall best from the first time around. Something about the idea of a living person's spirit getting loose really caught my ten-year-old attention. I can recall being interested in out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences like that for quite a while afterward. Nowadays I find them somewhat hackneyed ideas in storytelling. As for real-life accounts of them, I'm inclined to be skeptical. I'm a firm believer in a future Heaven and Hell, but not in the notion that we have a disembodied soul that can float away by itself under some circumstances and walk among the living.

Too bad they didn't make this one early in the season. Then they could have run it around Halloween--as opposed to "Rollback," which first aired on October 30 with nary a Halloween element in sight. A missed opportunity to put quite an eerie story in a seasonally-appropriate time slot.

_________________
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


Top
  Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Go to page 1, 2  ( Next )
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 29 posts ]   



Who is WANline

Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot], Google [Bot] and 0 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  


Powdered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Limited

IMWAN is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide
a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk.