Tag: steven e. de souza

The Hardy Boys 3.9 – Game Plan

I used to really, really enjoy playing Monopoly in college – the sort of all-night, stamina-demanding Monopoly with enough wheeling and dealing to basically aggravate my opponents into submission – and so I spotted where this one was going immediately. Steven E. de Souza’s story uses a dice game at an Atlantic City casino as a code for drop spots on a criminal’s route. Unfortunately, I also spotted where this story was cheating with the rolls and also reorganizing the drops from the order we see them when characters revisit the tale afterward.

Continuity errors are usually small and perfectly forgivable, but every stinking time the plot came back to the game, this episode made a brand new foul. Go directly to jail, Hardy Boys!

The Hardy Boys 3.4 – Search for Atlantis

The last time that we looked at a Hardy Boys episode, I noticed that guest stars Anne Lockhart and Patrick Macnee were making semi-regular appearances in Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica, which aired right after this show on ABC Sunday nights. Tonight, we add John Colicos, who played the villain Baltar in Galactica to the cross-pollination. I hope there are more; spotting folks from Galactica‘s gigantic cast is very amusing. Also this week, Shaun Cassidy gets to smooch guest star Pamela Jean Bryant, which quite a lot of us wouldn’t have minded doing.

So anyway, tonight’s episode is set in Greece and it was written by Steven E. De Souza. At one point, Joe goes looking for clues and finds out that a guy he needs to speak with is in Athens, Georgia. I figure since it was 1978, the dude wanted to check out one of those house parties that the B-52’s were playing back then. If I had a time machine, that’d be on my list. Go down to Allen’s for a twenty-five cent beer while I was there.

The Bionic Woman 3.22 – On the Run

As I mentioned the other day, the series finale as we know it wasn’t the sort of thing that producers did back in the sixties or seventies. It was seen as an impediment to successful syndication, back when that was the main way that studios and production companies got their money back. Strangely, there was some reason to think this was true: two shows that did have celebrated final episodes, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and The Fugitive, were not as successful in 1960s-70s syndication as their fame might suggest.

But the producers of The Bionic Woman wanted to give Jaime a proper sendoff, while also leaving the door open for future missions. So “On the Run,” written by Steven E. DeSouza, isn’t the end-all that it might be if it were made today. It seems to take its inspiration from The Prisoner, with Jaime ready to resign and just be a normal person again, and government agents, led by Andrew Duggan, wanting to send her to a resort that sounds an awful lot like “The Village” to keep other countries from abducting or dissecting her. Duggan was in all sorts of movies and TV shows in the seventies, usually playing some high-ranking government jerk.

Both Richard Anderson and Lindsay Wagner get some real meat to chew on in this story, with both actors putting in some of their very best work. Oscar is outraged on Jaime’s behalf and rails against his superiors, and Jaime is just about to crack and needs to see the light at the end of the tunnel for once. She has some additional support from a third season supporting character we’d missed in our viewing, a boyfriend called Chris Williams played by Christopher Stone. This character appeared in four episodes, but gets unceremoniously killed off sometime after this story so that Jaime and Steve could be together again in the reunion movies!

After The Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner became one of the networks’ most in-demand actresses for TV movies-of-the-week. She made dozens over the next twenty years, perhaps most famously Stranger in My Bed and She Woke Up. Her TV series weren’t as successful, but I think 1989’s family drama A Peaceable Kingdom was unfairly wasted by CBS, thrown away against established hits on the other networks without any support.

Richard Anderson, who passed away earlier this year, also stayed very much in demand, mainly in guest star roles, until he retired in the late 1990s. Both Anderson and Wagner appeared as guests in Lee Majors’ hit series The Fall Guy, although sadly not in the same episode! Anderson got to play another female secret agent’s boss in the 1984-85 series Cover Up, which starred Jennifer O’Neill. (It’s sadly better known as the show where her co-star, Jon Erik-Hexum, was tragically and accidentally killed after a couple of months filming than as one of the rare eighties action shows with a female lead.) In another notable appearance, Anderson played Lyndon Johnson in the syndicated miniseries Hoover vs. The Kennedys, which I think was the last big production from that old “Operation Prime Time” quasi-network.

This wraps up our look at the bionic action shows. I’d like to thank all the people who maintain and update The Bionic Wiki for helping me pick which episodes to watch with our son and providing all sorts of background information.

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.13 – Death Probe (part one)

There’s a lovely bit toward the beginning of this adventure where a farmer in a lonely corner of northern Wyoming, his horse and dog freaking out over some strange noise or other, is suddenly confronted with a Russian-made space probe that thinks it has landed on the planet Venus. The silent machine, looking like the bastard offspring of a Dalek and the tank-thing from Damnation Alley, sends the farmer scurrying to his pickup truck to get away, and the old codger takes a moment to roll up his truck’s window before starting the engine.

So the Death Probe is the last great recurring nemesis for the bionic heroes. The big machine kind of takes a back seat to the story of all the Soviet sleeper agents that are trying to track it down. The group is led by Major Popov, played by Nehemiah Persoff, and it was designed by a scientist named Irina, played by Jane Merrow. Irina had actually been introduced in a season one episode that we skipped, “Doomsday and Counting.” Merrow did quite a lot of American television in the seventies. Earlier in her career, she had been frequently cast as a guest star in many of the ITC adventure shows, and had been considered for the role of Tara King in The Avengers. And there in a single scene and not credited, you can’t miss John de Lancie as an army medic.

This two-parter was written by Steven E. de Souza. It was one of his earliest credits; he’d later find fame and fortune writing hugely successful films like 48 Hours, Die Hard, and, err… that crappy Judge Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider. Honestly, I was pretty underwhelmed by this one. There isn’t nearly enough mayhem with the Death Probe smashing its way through farms and cars and houses, and far too much of Soviet sleeper agents running rings around hick sheriffs. On the other hand, our son was positively freaked out by the machine and was so excited – slash – worried by Steve looking like he wouldn’t be able to stop it that he missed the cliffhanger entirely from behind the sofa!