I saw this one when it was rerun in spring of '65, and for years remembered nothing of it except the shower scene. (I was eleven, and it convinced me, weirdly, to start showering instead of taking baths.)I don't remember the little orientation intro when the shows were new, since my first episode was "Finny Foot." I've never liked it much. Imagine if we'd had a similar intro to "Star Trek":
(Narrator) "This is the United Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission is to find new life in our galaxy. We've entered via the hangar deck, and are now rising through the turbolift elevator to the bridge." "Hello, I'm James T. Kirk. I'm the captain of this vessel, current complement 430 men and women." "I am Spock, Science Officer. . . ." (You get the idea.)
For the first (but not the last) time, Solo takes on a cover identity. We're not shown the special conditioning process (see "Neptune" and "King of Knaves") here, though I doubt he'd have needed it.
Jill is charming, and Slim Pickens is very disarming as the farm boy who's made good.
The scene with the three no-goodniks in scuba gear on the hill has always disturbed me. It's daylight, right? Shouldn't they have worried about being seen?
The jet takeoffs and landings, and close shots of the pilot's hand, imply that Solo is flying himself. We see several times later that he can pilot a helicopter, so I suppose this is consistent.
The little infrared Polaroid-style camera Solo uses to photograph Carmen Miranda (or Lola Montez or whatever her name is) in the darkness -- that must have been ultra-science fiction for those days, as much as Solo's plug-in communicator was.
The scenes as the nylon-masked baddies hunt Solo and Jill were filmed in the daytime with a filter to simulate night. It's a shame they couldn't have actually been shot at night, as the opening scene with Solo and the saboteur appears to be. However, the scene in the silo, when Solo tells Jill his real name as he field-assembles the Mark I Special, makes up for it. (I do think they'd have a hard time breathing under that grain, though. And I suspect that when the MPs pour into the tunnel at the climax, they'd arrest everybody, Solo and Jill included, and sort things out afterward.)
Verdict: An effective little story. Norman Felton, the show's executive producer, and Sam Rolfe (creator and line producer) probably had several scripts, such as "Brain Killer," "Neptune," and "Shark," ready to go once production started. What led them to pick this one, I wonder? And to schedule it second in broadcast order? Or did the network guys decide that?Great Line:
Solo (levelly, to Jill, about her late boyfriend): "His name was Edward Friedlander . . . and he was one of the most expert saboteurs in the world."
