The Six Million Dollar Man 4.12 – The Ultimate Imposter

Flush with the success of their two bionic shows, the producers made two attempts in the fourth season of Six to expand the OSI’s roster with another spinoff. First up was “The Bionic Boy,” in which Vincent Van Patten became a teen bionic hero, and in January, they tried a backdoor pilot, with Steve Austin taking a two scene back seat to Joe Patten, a schoolteacher played by Stephen Macht, whose brain can be programmed for secret missions.

Using superspeed computer-learning that’s quite a lot like Gerry Anderson’s Joe 90, Patten can be primed with all the background, languages, chemistry, or blueprints necessary to complete any mission. When his girlfriend, an OSI agent played by Pamela Hensley (later Ardala on Buck Rogers), is captured on an undercover assignment, Joe gets to learn all about the world of counterfeiting to rescue her.

My son was a little disappointed with this one, because Joe’s chemistry wizardry is no match for bionic thrills. It’s not bad for what it is, and probably a shame that Joe was never seen again. Even without his own show, he could have been an interesting recurring character to provide some in-the-field help for Steve and Jaime. But another bionic action show certainly wasn’t in ABC’s plans, as I’ll mention in a couple of weeks.

The writers, Lionel E. Siegel and William Zacha, kept their programmed agent concept alive for one more try. After the bionic shows had ended, they wrote a movie-of-the-week for Universal, also called The Ultimate Imposter, in 1979, starring Joseph Hacker as the agent.

The Bionic Woman 2.6 – Kill Oscar (part three)

Happily, our son came around for the memorable conclusion of this story. He thought Steve and Jaime fighting the Fembots amid the forces of a hurricane was incredibly exciting, and he’s right. Taken as a whole, this three-parter is a master class in plotting, moving through the creepy, conspiratorial Body Snatchers business of people you can’t trust, to some good action sequences, to a tremendously busy hour with our heroes storming the island in the middle of a… well, a storm.

And since the Fembots have remained hugely troubling for him, he got to punch the air when lightning fells three of them. He was also really taken with Jaime finally getting practical with her power and doing something deadly against an implacable enemy. She uses a rock as a weapon and throws it at 60 mph into one Fembot’s back, instantly smashing it.

I was a little worried, as this episode does have a fair amount of old men – generals and admirals – sitting around a big table grumbling while the weather forces stock footage of jets and aircraft carriers to turn back. Fortunately, one of the admirals is played by Sam Jaffe with a twinkle in his eye, which more than excuses the story regularly returning to the war room.

This story marked the end of an era. This was the last time the two bionic series crossed over, and in fact they apparently barely mentioned each other going forward. In part that’s because ABC canceled The Bionic Woman at the end of this season, and NBC picked it up with the understanding that there wouldn’t be any more crossovers. I may have given my son a somewhat flawed presentation of the programs, since we’ve watched all of the crossover stories, even the ones with very small appearances, but only a few of the many “counterfeiters in turtlenecks” that really dominated the actual schedule. But in our memories, Steve and Jaime were always teaming up anyway. That’s maybe the way it should have been.

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.6 – Kill Oscar (part two)

I swear, my kid must be the only one in history who prefers the episodes of the Bionic shows that don’t have Bigfoot or the Fembots in them. This is so strange, because he enjoyed Steve Austin’s fights with Dr. Dolenz’s robots in seasons one and two, and against the second bionic man, played by Monte Markham. But the Fembots somehow have a more sinister edge, and it’s made worse by Jaime telling Steve that the Fembots are stronger than they are. He has never liked seeing his heroes in serious trouble, and says that he really doesn’t like not being able to tell who has been replaced by a duplicate.

Never mind him, this is a great story. The pacing is a little “off,” perhaps, which also led him to become restless. Steve’s rescue of Oscar and Lynda is staged like the big end-of-show action finale, but it happens halfway through the episode. Since, like every six year-old, ours has no concept of time, I think he was satisfied that the show was over, but it kept going, and going, building up to the real end-of-show action finale, in which Steve battles an Oscar robot for the second time in the show. This is probably why Oscar issued standing orders that he’s to be killed if ever captured. You wouldn’t think that getting replaced by look-alike robots was part of the job, but there you go.

I also love the design of the Fembots. There was something in the air in the mid-seventies, with female robots losing their face-plates to reveal fake eyeballs and circuitry. About a year before, there were very similar creations in a Doctor Who serial called “The Android Invasion,” leading to a classic cliffhanger where it’s revealed that Sarah Jane has been replaced by a robot. About a year later, there was a villain in the Japanese sci-fi series JAKQ Attack Squad who also looked a little like this. She was called either “Atomic Mary” or “Atomic Witch,” I understand.

The Bionic Woman 2.5 – Kill Oscar (part one)

I know exactly where I was just after Halloween in 1976. I was in a hospital having my tonsils out and insanely worried that I would miss part three of this story. Well, I don’t know which hospital, so maybe I don’t know exactly where, but that’s not important. I was assured I’d get ice cream and that I’d get to see the story. They gave me a fudgesicle, which everybody knows isn’t ice cream. Worry accelerated.

“Kill Oscar,” which introduced a new recurring foe for our heroes called the Fembots, didn’t have quite the same impact on our son. He didn’t get quite as upset by Jaime injuring herself escaping from two of the evil robots as he did when Bigfoot thrashed the daylights out of Steve the other night, but he was still really bothered and hid his eyes while holding back tears with a pouting lower lip. The situation is much the same as we saw in that story: one of our heroes gets injured and it’s up to the other to save the day, but, as we’ll see, there will be a little more to it than that.

The Fembots have been invented by yet another disgruntled ex-OSI scientist, Dr. Franklin. He’s played by John Houseman. Financing his work is a guy played by Jack Colvin, a Universal contract player who later became famous when this show’s producer, Kenneth Johnson, remembered him when he was casting The Incredible Hulk and needed somebody to be warned about making Bill Bixby angry. This story is one of eight that features Jennifer Darling as the recurring character of Peggy Callahan, Oscar’s secretary. She’d been introduced a couple of years previously, but it looks like I didn’t pick many of her appearances for this rewatch.

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.2 – Nightmare in the Sky

I enjoy seeing how television in the seventies was more modern than we might think. Look how they started the ’76 season of the Bionic shows. They opened with the crossover story with Bigfoot, and then in week two, they brought back arguably the most popular actress in America, Farrah Fawcett, for another appearance as Major Kelly Wood. Fawcett was starring in a new series on the same network that year. Charlie’s Angels had premiered six months previously as a movie-of-the-week. The first regular episode had actually just been shown four days prior to this. I bet ABC’s marketing team enjoyed that. I wonder why they didn’t get Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson for guest star parts while the iron was hot, though!

But it wasn’t just Fawcett that got viewers tuning in to the new season. This one’s about an experimental jet that can be disassembled in just ten minutes – that’s actually a plot point – and I bet the TV commercials were full of footage of the aerial dogfight between the jet and a “holograph” of a Japanese Zero over the southern California desert. Any under-tens in the house would be in heaven watching the airplanes roaring around each other, just like ours was. (And here’s another note about the evolution of the language we use; I bet any modern TV show would use the word “hologram” instead.)

The villains this week are played by Dana Elcar and Donald Moffat, who were probably a little familiar from all the one-off guest roles they’d played until that point. The following season, Moffat would appear as Rem in Logan’s Run, and Elcar would later land the role of MacGyver‘s boss.

RIP Richard Anderson, 1926-2017

We’re sorry to read that actor Richard Anderson has died at the age of 91. He had a great career, with all sorts of entertaining roles in the seventies and eighties. He was the villain in the second Kolchak: The Night Stalker movie, a victim whose murder Columbo solved early in his career, and had small parts in the classic films Forbidden Planet and Paths of Glory. But he’ll always be remembered best as Oscar Goldman in the two bionic shows and the reunion TV movies. Between them, he appeared in more than 150 episodes. He retired about twenty years ago. Our condolences to his family and friends.

Photo credit: https://johnkennethmuir.wordpress.com/

The Bionic Woman 2.1 – The Return of Bigfoot (part two)

Happily, our son wasn’t horrified by tonight’s conclusion to this epic two-parter. How could he be? Jaime plays defense against Bigfoot in her two fights much more effectively than Steve does, and doesn’t get thrown like a rag doll against any power converters with exploding sparks everywhere. From the evidence provided by this show, the main strategy one should employ when fighting cyborg sasquatches is to fight them outside. Indoors, you get clobbered.

I tease, but this silly story is a downright masterpiece in writing for under-tens. It has Bigfoot and it has an erupting volcano. Our son was a little leery when we got started, and was really worried about Jaime at first, but then he realized that the villains had moved their headquarters underneath an inactive volcano. He’s savvy enough to realize that in adventure fiction, volcanoes rarely remain inactive for long.

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.1 – The Return of Bigfoot (part one)

The pre-credits scene revealed that Bigfoot was back, and things looked good. Our son glowed. “He caused so much destruction last time! Don’t you remember all that destruction that he caused?!” But before the hour was up, things would fall apart.

So, famously, the 1976-77 season of the Bionic series opened with a very celebrated crossover, the seventies ABC equivalent of the annual Arrowverse get-together on the CW. The aliens who control Bigfoot have had an uprising, and a gang of them have stolen both the Sasquatch and their wonder drug, and are now pilfering top secret facilities to get the parts they need to build a force field. One of the aliens restores Steve’s memory, he tries to stop Bigfoot alone, fails, finally tells his co-stars, including Jaime, what’s going on, nobody believes him, and he makes another attempt as they go for the last isotope they need.

And Steve Austin gets his ass handed to him. It is a beatdown to remember.

But first, let’s look at just how forward-looking Kenneth Johnson’s story is. This episode is more than just simply crossing over the two shows with the extremely popular Bigfoot. It’s done with some really impressive guest casting. Severn Darden and Stefanie Powers are back from the first Bigfoot story, and they’ve brought Sandy Duncan along as a newly-introduced alien, and the leader of the villains is that omnipresent baddie of seventies teevee, John Saxon. That’s a great cast, and everybody is working hard to sell this silliness. I love the way that the plot of the story is simplicity itself, but explaining all this stuff about hidden aliens and time-dilation devices and Bigfoot is so convoluted and ridiculous that Steve looks completely crazy telling his friends about it. I really like Lindsay Wagner’s acting in this scene; her life is already unbelievable, but this tall tale is pushing it.

Our son was enjoying it even more than I was until that second fight. Again, you have to consider the time and the audience. Television superheroes suffer a lot worse these days with all sorts of blood and bruising, but for a seventies show, in the eyes of a six year old, this is horrifying. Bigfoot’s been amped up by John Saxon, and Steve doesn’t have a prayer. Andre the Giant did not return to the role; Ted Cassidy plays Bigfoot this time out, and he just makes mincemeat of our hero. It finally ends with Steve’s bionic legs being crushed underneath some huge thing or other, which made even me gasp, and that’s with me knowing the grievous injury that we’re going to see Jaime suffer in a few days’ time.

Our son couldn’t bear to watch. He left the room completely with his security blanket, and came back shaking. He was a mess. He curled up on the couch as Dr. Wells gave Steve less than 24 hours to live, and Steve whispered instructions to Jaime, to get help from the aliens. We did our best to assure him that Jaime will save the day. Man, I hope so…

The Six Million Dollar Man 3.19 – Love Song for Tanya

I must have picked this episode because Lindsay Wagner is in it for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opening scene as Jaime Sommers, and also because hero-of-the-blog Walker Edmiston plays one of the Russian baddies. Had I known what a bore this story about a Russian gymnast, caught between two rival factions of Soviets, would be, I’d probably have skipped it. Honestly, this was like watching paint dry, except for one delightful insert:

I love it when the people who make props like this inject a little comedy. There’s a great one in an episode of Lois & Clark which includes the line “And if you can read this, we definitely held this shot too long.” I think I like this one even better.

The Bionic Woman 1.6 – The Deadly Missiles

There’s quite a fun guest star in this episode of The Bionic Woman. Our son recognized Forrest Tucker’s voice, but couldn’t quite place him. I told him he was Kong on The Ghost Busters, and he has watched every episode of that show at least four times. Here, he plays General Jack D. Ripper – er, I mean, J.T. Connors – a very old friend of Jaime’s, a wealthy industrialist who doesn’t like Washington softies and longhairs, and is concerned with fluoridation. His character is so obviously set up to be the villain that he can’t possibly be the villain, sort of like the way they presented Snape in the first Harry Potter film.

The actual villain is the only other suspect, Connors’ second-in-command, who’s played by Ben Piazza. He was really typecast as playing frustrated dweebs in the seventies and eighties, like the hapless father tormented by Joliet Jake in that nice restaurant in The Blues Brothers. So, not a lot of actual mystery in this story, but a heck of a lot of class. It’s a great episode, with real tension, since Jaime injures one of her legs quite badly and is operating at rather less than full power. It builds up really well, and our son was completely thrilled by it.

This is one of the episodes where Steve Austin plays a fairly major role. It’s set up to look like he will have to come save the day after Jaime’s injury, but there’s a very clever reversal of expectations here. It’s also one of the episodes with Christian Juttner as the sassy boy in Jaime’s class. Looks like we either get Juttner or we get Robbie Rist, never both!

The Six Million Dollar Man 3.17 – The Secret of Bigfoot (part two)

Ha! Well, I wouldn’t have mentioned the neat rotating ice wall from the Universal Studios tour in the previous entry had I remembered this amazing shot, just beautifully photographed, of Andre the Giant carrying Lee Majors through it like a little toy. If you want to make a collage of iconic seventies images, you’d probably want to have this one.

Steve agrees to have his memories of the aliens wiped and Bigfoot returns him home after a somewhat less exciting second part to the story. It’s much more about the strange culture of the aliens than the weird mystery of Bigfoot, who spends the first half of this installment dormant and deactivated. Stefanie Powers has the “show me more of this Earth thing you call kissing” role, and Severn Darden is the leader of the colony, and there’s another alien with allergies, and the rest of them don’t really matter.

I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t actually our son’s favorite Six Million Dollar Man adventure. He clarified that he really, really liked this story, but he says his absolute favorite was “that movie about his first mission, with the missile silo.” Color me surprised, not just because I thought this was much more fun than “Wine, Women and War,” but because he enjoyed the first episode with Jaime so much and was sure he’d go for that one.

Speaking of Jaime, we’ll check in on her again this weekend.