Buck Rogers 1.7 – The Plot to Kill a City (part two)

I’m impressed. That was a very solid story. I might quibble and grumble about the show playing it safe and not making the future seem very different from 1979, but that was every bit as entertaining as any other science fiction show could have managed in the seventies, and our son loved it. He was much more focused and still tonight than he was with the first episode.

Obviously it’s early hours, and for all I know the rest of this program is as dopey, dated, and disco as its godawful pilot was, but I didn’t dislike any of that. I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but I’ve always agreed with the generally bad reputation that Buck Rogers has, which is probably thanks to that godawful pilot. Even though nothing happens in this story that will be very unpredictable to grownup viewers, it’s done with style and talent and a lot of charm. I hope other episodes are half this good.

Actually, there is just one watched-from-the-future disappointment. Of the three main villains, two of them are killed off quite unceremoniously, and one escapes. I believe she is never seen or heard from again. That’s no way to start a rogues gallery! I like recurring enemies.

Joining the cast this week, it’s James McEachin as an engineer blackmailed into helping the villains. We’ve seen McEachin a couple of times before in this blog – in Universal shows, in fact – but I want to pause this time and note what a good actor he is, with such an expressive voice. McEachin was the star of Tenafly, one of the forgotten NBC Mystery Movies of the seventies. I’ve been aggravated for decades that only about half of those movie series, led, of course, by Columbo, ever got a second life in syndication or home video. I’d love for someone to release Tenafly, McCoy, Cool Million, Faraday & Company and the others.

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 1.2 – Survival of the Fittest

I don’t want to watch all of the Bionic shows – we’d be here for years! – but I wanted to show my son some of the classic episodes, and that meant picking up some low-priced sets of the series, and so we might as well look at a few other installments, principally the ones with interesting casts. So about eighteen months ago, I had a careful look over an episode guide – yes, eighteen months ago, I enjoy planning ahead – and picked five of the first thirteen episodes.

But as it was so long ago, I didn’t remember who was in these episodes that made me want to pick them! So in this story, written by Mann Rubin, in which our heroes and some other survivors of a plane crash are being stalked on a Pacific island by villains who want to kill Oscar Goldman, we got to see Laurette Spang, who we’ve seen in a later episode of Isis, along with Christine Belford, who would play Baroness Von Gunther in the first episode of Wonder Woman, as a nurse.

Our son didn’t remember either of them, but what he did recall pleasantly surprised us. Among the cosmetic changes that the show’s new executive producer, Harve Bennett, initiated when he took the show from movie-of-the-month to a weekly series, there’s the iconic “running in slow motion” to indicate super speed. Steve shows off this power when one of the villains coshes Oscar and leaves him unconscious with a huge snake bearing down on him. Steve slow-motion-rushes to save the day, and our son said “Hey! He runs slow like they did in that Bigfoot show!” I’m glad that he remembered that. It bodes well.

The other cast reasons I probably picked this episode out for a watch: James McEachin, whose Universal series Tenafly had just been axed by NBC, plays one of the villains, and Jo Anne Worley, who was spending her post-Laugh-In days appearing as a guest star on everything, is the comic relief character. It’s not a bad story. Our son enjoyed it and was able to follow along, and it has a few pretty good action scenes.