The Bionic Woman 3.7 – Motorcycle Boogie

Bigfoot wasn’t the only major seventies icon to appear on the bionic shows. Evel Knievel, the idol of every under-twelve in that decade who ever aspired to pop a wheelie on their bike, got to play himself and brought along some 16mm stunt footage of him jumping thirty-odd junk cars. He gets to dodge bullets and rockets, although the great big super-jump in the end is done with edits and trick photography, sadly. For those of you who like other familiar faces and places from the seventies, Spencer Milligan plays an East German agent and the Rose Bowl pretends to be a stadium in West Berlin.

Our son tried to be all cool and say that this was only kind of exciting and kind of weird, but we know better. He was in seventh heaven, of course, incredibly thrilled and happy with the story. There were motorcycles and explosions and a very straightforward, simple, and easy-to-follow story by James D. Parriott and Kenneth Johnson. It’s a light and silly adventure, along the comedic lines of the previous year’s “Black Magic.”

The Bionic Woman 2.11 – Jaime’s Shield (part two)

There’s a bit in part two of this story where Jaime punches a hole in the trunk of a runaway car in order to hold on. Our son loved that. He also really liked it when George Maharis’s character rides a motorcycle through a door. I didn’t like much of anything about this. At least part one had an interesting mystery about which cadet was the foreign agent. This is just another seventies cop show. There were dozens of cop shows on the air in 1976. The Bionic Woman should have been doing something with lions or Fembots in it, and not what every other series of the time was doing.

The Bionic Woman 2.10 – Jaime’s Shield (part one)

We’ve deliberately skipped a lot of episodes in which Jaime goes undercover in some unlikely profession. Steve got to go undercover in various blue collar jobs, never anything exciting, but Jaime got to do the inevitable beauty contest, and she was a wrestler, and a nun, and, in this two-part story, she gets sent to the nation’s quickest police academy for a week or possibly two as a cadet before getting assigned to the town of Santa Regina’s Fifth Precinct. I wanted to see this one because George Maharis plays a beat cop. His Route 66 co-star Martin Milner had played a beat cop for years on Adam-12. James McEachin plays the academy’s captain. This is one of what looks like seventy-two police roles in McEachin’s career. He must have played every single rank at one time or another.

As befits a basic counterfeiters-in-turtlenecks story, there’s really not a lot to this one, and certainly not enough to warrant a two-part story. It’s written by James D. Parriott, and his then-wife Diane Cary plays one of the other cadets. The most interesting part, honestly, was the strange decision to take the cadets to a “Tinseltown studio” for their final exam, in which they drive around the backlot on a fake chase. I enjoyed the chance for our son to see what a backlot looks like when they’re not pretending it’s a real street.

The Six Million Dollar Man 3.6 – The Deadly Test

I must have picked this episode because Tim O’Connor’s in it. He’s the top-billed guest star, but he’s not actually in it much. It’s set at a USAF test pilot school with airmen from all around the country. Erik Estrada plays a major from the nation of Kutan, who doesn’t get along with a pilot from Israel. One of them is being targeted by a criminal scientist with a device that makes planes crash. Our son enjoyed all the footage of jets more than the grown-ups enjoyed anything.

Proving that you can start with something small and dull and turn it into a very impressive career, this appears to be the first screen credit for James D. Parriott, who would go on to write some more Bionic-universe episodes at the start of a very long career. He would later create Forever Knight and join the production staff of Grey’s Anatomy for a while. He’s currently one of the producers of Amazon’s spy comedy Patriot.