DVD REVIEW: The Harsh Light of Day (2012)

This review contains spoilers.

This recent independent British supernatural revenge thriller adapts the exploitation themes of the home invasion flick to suit the current post-Let the Right One In art house boom conditions enjoyed presently by a culturally renewed vampire genre, wherein contemporary urban locations are often requisitioned to provide a mundane (and in this case chav-inhabited) backdrop for some deliciously warped occult horror happenings. The result here is a conceptually intriguing potpourri of genre elements, not always entirely satisfactorily realised on the film’s ultra-low budget, but suggestive enough to imply the notion that some degree of thought has gone into the presentation of the motivations and actions of the characters whose lives it follows, and even, to some degree, providing a philosophical basis for them. Young, British first-time writer-director Oliver S. Milburn and producer Emma Biggins -- both graduates of Bournemouth University film and production courses, who embarked upon this project soon after obtaining MAs in their respective disciplines – have been as savvy in their marketing campaign for the film since its limited theatrical release in June 2012, as  they have with their genre-splicing choice of material; a fascinating internet blog focusing on the production processes involved in low budget independent film-making (including their travails and pitfalls), being just one of many online tools they’ve since utilised to conjure up visibility in an overcrowded marketplace.

The film itself reveals Milburn’s implicit feel for genre and makes the most of its picturesque Dorset coastal cliff-top locations and the contrast such idyllic surroundings makes with the grim-looking Bournemouth and Poole housing estates, shown by sodium-drenched night at the top of the film -- their looming concrete tower-blocks saturated in a pall of sickly neon luminosity amid environs inhabited by the vaguely feral-looking hooded figures who roam their dimly lit underpasses and flyovers. It’s from these dank, benighted urban locations that the violence which sets the main events of the film in motion is eventually seen to emerge, marking this initially as another entry in the distinctly British but much reviled ‘hoodie horror’ sub-genre category. The tensions invoked by the ambiance and character of these two very diverse settings as they're juxtaposed during a chronologically fractured opening sequence which inter-cuts between two very different social worlds (the film benefits greatly from some intelligent editing by David Spragg), and the image this creates of the contrasting lives and values of their respective inhabitants, provides an unspoken reminder throughout of the other conflicts and dichotomies being dramatised by the dialectically driven narrative -- the main one being the moral relativity which is implied by the positing of a world that’s uncomfortably split between two irreconcilable realms – the supernatural and the material.

The airy, comfortable, middle-class safeness of the lifestyle enjoyed by occult researcher and writer Daniel Shergold (Dan Richardson) and his loving wife Maria (Niki Felstead), stands in marked contrast to the dreary, rootless transience of the hoodie wearing, semi-criminal thirty-something yobs who are about to smash the comforting certainties of the couple’s existence apart. While Jeremy Howard’s sombre piano score implies a dark fatalism to the violence and brutality which is about to envelop the couple’s quaint, countryside cottage locale, the editing scheme used here sets up a thematic collection of parallel pairings which act as an illustration of the opposition between, say, the secular and the occult, lightness and darkness and the rural and the urban -- suggesting Daniel as a figure who is about to find himself precariously balanced between all of them.

At its core this is a traditional Faustian pact narrative, which begins when Daniel and his wife Maria arrive home from the publishers’ launch party celebrating the publication of the author’s new book about the occult, entitled Dark Corners, and are subjected to a harrowing Clockwork Orange-style invasion of their home by silent black-clad masked figures wielding iron bars, who proceed to film the murder of Maria on camcorder while Daniel is forced to watch her demise, powerless to intervene, his spine having been shattered during an attack which subsequently leaves him both bereaved and wheelchair-bound -- craving a vengeance he is never likely to obtain in his newly embittered state. The killers leave no clues behind them, and the police investigation soon peters out (‘no CSI magic,’ Daniel bitterly intones). One of the contributors to his recently published book, a mysterious unseen voice on the telephone called McMahon (Lockhart O’Gilvie) whom Daniel seems implicitly to trust, arranges a home visit from an enigmatic stranger by the name of Infurnari (Giles Alderson), who in turn claims to be able to offer Daniel the chance to find and then take his revenge upon those who have wronged him – but only for a special price, which unfortunately doesn’t involve the transference of money …

Infurnari looks at first glance like a sales assistant more likely to be found behind the counter of an electrical goods store, dressed in his short -sleeved shirt and jumper combo. The demonic red eyes soon give the game away though. The word vampire is never used at any point in the film (and fangs are conspicuous by their rarity), but the gory, torturous, glimpsed-only-in-flash-frame transformation process (which has a sadomasochistic element to it, highly reminiscent of some of Clive Barker’s work) that Daniel eventually agrees to undergo at Infurnari’s hand, leaves him with an inability to tolerate sunlight while nursing a deep craving for human blood that has to be sated at all costs. On the other hand, crucifixes are easily endured and Infurnari seems little detained by the vagaries of Catholicism, or any  religion for that matter, assuring Daniel that they're all just human constructions used as a device for framing a human-centric morality that means nothing to his kind, and which will soon have to be abandoned by Daniel as well.

The transformation (and this is the crucial part) also restores the use of Daniel's legs, and endows him with the handy ability of being able to pick up psychic traces and sense impressions which will help to track down the perpetrators responsible for Maria’s murder just by his being able to sniff out their sweat or traces of their blood, and to pick out other olfactory clues that the killers may have unwittingly left in their wake, but which are invisible to ordinary mortals. There’s an effective scene at this point which acts as a powerful allegory for the state of mind endured by those who are cursed by the need for vengeance: when Daniel examines the bedroom in which Maria’s death occurred, looking for a lead using his newly acute powers of perception, he is forced to relive the moment over and over again, as though he were being physically transported back to the time of the event; the deductive investigation process consequently becomes a painful and emotionally harrowing one, which keeps the wounds raw and fresh and stokes the fires of vengeance with even more fuel.

 

The supernatural world which Infurnari occupies is a gateway existence that represents the replacement of one set of moral values and standards with that of another, separate but apparently equally valid one; values which are visually represented by the vampiric abandonment of the daylight world, and its replacement with an existence exclusively conducted under the cloak of night. Infurnari claims that his race have never warred and never individually fight with each other, and that their occult, secret society of the supernatural is the realisation of a Utopian dream that’s far removed from and infinitely superior to anything in the human world, which is defined by the ugly horrors its peoples are capable of inflicting upon each-other almost as a matter of routine. To emphasise such a claim, the film also follows the progress of the three housebreaking masked intruders responsible for Maria’s murder, and reveals them not to be the imposing, diabolical satanic creatures of the night they appeared when they were kitted out in their all-black hooded uniforms and expressionless white masks, but instead merely a bunch of opportunistic, moronic small-time villains -- out to make a quick buck by peddling homemade snuff videos to a fat, greasy-haired gangster called Roy (Tim J. Henley).

In many ways, these three unkempt villains, played by Paul Jacques, Wesley McCarthy and Matthew Thorn, are the best thing in the film: a brutal, emotionally stunted trio of louts who even get ridiculed and chastised by their equally unbecoming ‘business partner’ for still dressing like chavs even though they’re all now well into their thirties! The fact that one of them (the nominal leader of the troupe) looks disconcertingly like Carl Pilkington is just the icing on the cake that spells out ‘losers’ in large sugar-coated lettering. These unlikable yobs have their own distinct code of conduct which sets them in opposition to anyone outside their enclosed estate of cramped tower block apartments and late-night dockside meeting places. At one stage the group ponder who they should make the subjects of their next ‘snuff’ project after having filmed a series of street muggings in their local vicinity at night, and end up deciding that they won’t prey on ‘their own kind’ anymore -- meaning those others who dwell amongst the twilight maze of underpasses and flyovers which surround the blocks of flats on the housing estates in which they themselves live.

People such as Daniel and Maria on the other hand, lead a life so far removed from their own that the gang have next to no empathy with them as human beings, and think nothing of carrying out the kinds of atrocities we’ve already seen result in Maria’s death and which later become voyeuristic material for Roy’s clientele. They’re the ‘underclass’ of tabloid mythology rendered here larger than life: out to 'happy-slap' you for delinquent kicks; lurking on darkened street corners waiting to follow you home. Except that their latest little money-making venture takes them right into the heart of the well-heeled existence of their middle class prey.

The street gang’s inability to empathise with people from other social strata can be parallelled with Infurnari’s lack of moral feeling for the human beings whose lives he needs to extinguish in order to perpetuate his own existence. In this version of vampire lore, humans can’t be turned by being bitten (that requires the special occult processes of bodily reconstruction which were seen being performed on Daniel earlier) – instead they are merely a source of nourishment and food. Infurnari compares his attitude to humanity to that of most people towards animals: we might entertain a certain fondness for our furry friends, but in most people that fondness exists perfectly comfortably alongside the idea of killing other creatures for their meat, without causing any moral disquiet whatsoever. But this, of course, is not true for everyone; and Daniel finds himself attempting to balance on a precarious moral seesaw thanks to the conversion process which has allowed him this opportunity to exact a bloody revenge upon his wife’s unrepentant tormentors, but which also obliges him to feed on sometimes perfectly innocent human beings in order to continue to exist at all.

Daniel’s attempt to reconcile his disgust with the moral vacuity of the killers he seeks out during the final act of the film with his own lust for the blood of the young care assistant, Fiona (Sophie Linfield) (who has so assiduously looked after him previously, during his anguished convalescence), and Infurnari’s insistence that he should give up any thought of possessing a moral obligation to humans now that he has been made anew, is the dilemma which lies at the heart of the film: for if Daniel were to truly extinguish all human sentiment, as Infurnari demands of him, then he would no longer have any compulsion to make the killers pay for the crimes they committed against his wife – and that is still what drives him onward, even despite an ugly scene, staged in his own kitchen, in which he is forced to gut and drain an unfortunate innocent of their life-blood.

This low budget offering addresses some interesting concerns, but doesn’t in the end entirely quite follow them through satisfactorily and settles for merely enacting clichés several times too often. I would also have liked more background on the Fiona character; she is perfectly sympathetic as far as she goes thanks to Sophie Linfield’s performance, yet the character is always overshadowed a bit too heavily by Daniel and Infurnari’s vaguely homoerotic relationship; we never get to know anything of her life outside her apparently boundless concern for Daniel’s welfare, which as a trait becomes just enough to allow her to play the role assigned to her in the script as a possible victim who is quite plainly entirely undeserving of the potential fate Infurnari would mark out for her; yet she is never allowed to become fully rounded enough to make the dilemma as acute and as impossible for Daniel as it should be. I found Giles Alderson’s Infurnari a bit too clean-cut and wholesome for someone who is supposedly a representative of a Nietzschean super-race of occult beings and the inexperienced cast also occasionally struggle to sell some of the gauche dialogue which has a tendency to clatter out of Milburn’s typewriter.

Other irritations revolve around the use of wholly unrealistic CGI blood splashes (the film would have been infinitely better off with no blood at all rather than the unconvincing animated variety seen here) and some missed opportunities to expand the narrative with regard to the Sean McMahon character, who is described at the start of the film as having been Daniel’s most forthcoming contributor of occult materials during the author’s researching of his book, and who even gets a thank you at the launch party. He is also the one who fixes up Daniel’s meeting with Infurnari  over the phone after the death of his wife, yet there is never any more of an explanation than that regarding the nature of his involvement in proceedings. Right up till the final moments I was expecting a last minute twist of some kind in relation to this character, but it never comes!

Nevertheless, the film comes over as a professional production despite its evident low budget giving it the air of a TV drama episode from about ten years ago. Jeremy Howard’s score is effective and the film even gets a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and a sound design that helps considerably to sell its low-rent effects. On the commentary track, which is included on the DVD from Monster Pictures, Milburn and Biggins talk about the difficulties they encountered  on this, their debut effort and offer advice to other first-time filmmakers on script writing, casting and location scouting. The picturesque stone cottage which provides the location for Daniel and Maria’s countryside home was only found a week before the start of filming, which resulted in any storyboarding already worked out by Milburn and director of photography Samuel Stewart having to be thrown out. To be fair, most of their problems seem to have been the result of a very low budget forcing them to dispense with the services of casting directors and location managers etc., so their anecdotes can only serve to relay a summary of the kinds of problems anyone attempting to make a film with very little money will inevitably also have to expect to encounter.

The DVD also comes with trailers, goof reels, deleted scenes and an interview with the director accompanied by some behind-the-scenes footage, again designed to act as a mini demonstration reel for the budding director just out of film school, in which Milburn expounds on his own experiences of the casting process, his attitude on set during the shoot, the post production process (including editing and sound designing) and the kinds of problems one can expect to encounter on a day-to-day basis when shooting any low budget film.  The disc also includes Milburn’s comedy short Speechless which was long-listed for a BAFTA in 2012 and has won numerous awards since its release on the international festival circuit last year. It demonstrates the director’s talents are developing fast and is in fact a much more confident production than the main feature. If Milburn continues to work in the horror genre we could be seeing great things from him in the near future.

RELEASE DATE: 2012/FORMAT: DVD/RELEASING COMPANY: Monster Pictures/GENRE: Home Invasion and Vampire/REGION: 2 PAL/ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1 OAR/DIRECTOR: Oliver S. Milburn/COUNTRY: UK/LANGUAGE: English/SUBTITLES: None

 

Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack! (2012)

A quick glance at the cover art and title of this seventy minute Japanese OVA (which finds a welcome UK DVD release courtesy of the Terracotta label’s TERROR COTTA imprint) might lead one to expect this film to be the anime equivalent of all those silly Asylum flicks such as Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus: a big dumb action/monster movie in manga form, with little of substance about it to hold the attention for long.

How wrong could one be? The only difficulty with attempting to dispel such an impression is that it might involve giving away too much of the deranged insanity that finds its way to the screen during the course of this increasingly bewildering tour of outlandish horrors from the mad mind of horror manga-meister Junji Ito.

 

That name will already be familiar to some, and if I mention a few of his other peculiar creations, such as Tomie or Uzumaki for instance, even non-manga fans will probably be starting to form a picture of the kind of thing they might expect from this straight-to-video anime spectacular, even if their previous knowledge comes only from familiarity with the live action film adaptations of these works which, although weird, were as nothing compared to the surrealistic but dense allegorical nature of the tales of mutation and bodily transformation which continue to be Ito’s stock in trade.

This adaptation of Ito’s ten-year-old manga “Gyo” has been directed and written (with Akihiro Yoshida) by Takayuki Hirao, himself no stranger to the weird side, having previously been entrusted to direct the first episode of Satashi Kon’s magnificently offbeat anime series Paranoia Agent after first learning his craft under the Paprika director’s assured guidance. Naturally, condensing a two-volume manga down to a seventy minute film results in a great deal of the substance and subtext from Ito’s original tale being simplified or lost, and Hirao’s version does indeed play more like a fast-moving action movie in some respects, with those in-depth and more perverse beats common to Ito’s manga characterisations finding themselves muted or abandoned altogether here. In actuality though, this oddball spectacle of nightmarish freakery still does some interesting things with the original protagonists: switching the gender of the principle lead and making the lead character of the manga merely a subsidiary presence here, who, in this alternate rendering, actually meets one of the most grotesque fates out of anyone in the film (although it’s a tough call, admittedly)! This subversion of the original manga’s focus might be lost on those of us coming new to the tale, but Hirao’s adaptation doesn’t lose the core essentials from the frankly bizarre set of ideas that motivate another feverish outpouring of insanity from Junji Ito’s brain.

The film takes the approach of starting quietly and then building up the intensity and the weirdness until the narrative reaches a surreal apocalyptic crescendo of madness at the end. It begins with three young female grad students taking a vacation in a summer house on the island of Okinawa when they notice a peculiar smell, like that of human corpses (the death stench) which seems to be permeating their surroundings like a foggy miasma. Then they discover a bizarre walking fish, scuttling about inside the house on what appears to be a metallic supporting ‘spider body’ framework. Hirao and Yoshida spend some time establishing this trio of anime female stereotypes as their lead characters (Kaori, the nice girl-next-door; Erika, the boy-hungry ‘slut’; Aki the chubby depressive) and then parallel the compete (and I mean complete) breakdown of their friendship with the coming of the end of the world, when the entire fishy contents of the pacific ocean suddenly emerges onto dry land in a biological tidal wave of devastation -- first on the Okinawa island chain, then the rest of Japan, and finally the entire world.

Seeing on television the disaster which appears to be consuming Tokyo, where her boyfriend Tadushi is still trapped, Kaori leaves her friends and embarks on a desperate journey in order to be with him, which involves her and a young photojournalist called Shirahawa (who she meets on the flight back), in first, an emergency aeroplane crash-landing, and then a monorail derailment during the course of their efforts to reach the capital.

This slightly offbeat iteration of a disaster movie scenario constitutes only the beginning of events though: back on Okinawa, Erika -- having indulged herself in a threesome with two local ‘horn dogs’ (there are times when the sexual content pushes this towards Hentai territory, although in the end the sex is used merely as a first act taster for the general atmosphere of derangement that’s soon to come) -- discovers she is breaking out in spots and emitting a horrid stench, much like the walking fish themselves, after an earlier run-in with a giant shark resulted in a foot injury (and the loss of most of her clothes). It turns out that these creatures of the sea are carrying a virus which turns their victims into bloated bags of death stench gas.

Even this is only the starter for the true madness to come, though, of which I should really say no more. All I will mention is that Ito’s main concept involves an utterly delirious cocktail of biological mutation, biomechanical invention & experimentation, and supernatural agency, which results in imagery that is grotesque, outrageous and utterly original. In the short text-based interview which appears on the TERROR COTTA disc, Ito says he’s a fan of the Beatles and writes his horror mangas while listening to their music. There’s something of the psychedelic fantasy landscape of the group’s 1968 animated film “Yellow Submarine” discernible in the colourful circus imagery which appears towards the end of this film, but the scatologically inclined direction things take here probably wouldn’t have appealed to the fab four’s sensibilities!

Hirao pushes the macabre levels to the max in imagery which embodies the original manga’s concern with sexual disgust and fear of bodily contact. The quality of the animation itself is often slightly cruder than is technically possible these days. But when it comes to realising the monstrosities and bizarre concepts that lie at the root of Junji Ito’s vision, this OVA adaption is second to none.    

 Company: Terra Cotta/Format: DVD/Region: 2 PAL/
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1/Original Release Date: 2012/Genre: Anime
Director: Takayuki Horao



 

The Six Million Dollar Diary Part Five: SERIES FOUR

The Return of Bigfoot also sees the debut of Steve Austin's
hideous moustache

Season four of The Six Million Dollar Man is a curious beast. Over the course of three previous series, the show had pretty successfully managed to negotiate all of the safer ground -- from action drama and adventure, through to science fiction -- for which its versatile format was best suited, with relative comfort. But now, having apparently exhausted the relevant spectrum of story types available to it, the series seems to shift gears as it starts to strain at the boundaries that normally determine the rules governing the genres across which it had been ranging widely for quite some time. On a few occasions, this leads to a sort of self-aware kitsch quality invading a handful of these episodes; while at other times the militaristic, macho/action side of the equation (which was inevitably always a strong factor in the style of the show) is excessively ramped up, and Lee Majors’ sex appeal as a hairy-chested air force hunk who likes sport gets highlighted much more prominently than it was before. All this was part of an understandable effort to maintain the show’s audience share in a fiercely competitive arena, but at around this time it also appears to have been starting to get difficult to find new angles on an increasingly familiar format; the drama -- whether sci-fi or action-orientated -- was being pushed to extremes and entering a region of more pronounced fantasy as a result. The process had really started with “the Bigfoot episodes” in season three, but it reaches its zenith here in the three-part extravaganza of camp that is Kill Oscar. At the end of this particular run of episodes, though, the series' spin-off, The Bionic Woman, was to be cancelled by the ABC network, despite several high profile cross-over stories (such as the latter), that make a big impact during the first half of season 4 of The Six Million Dollar Man, and which had been designed with a view to maintaining an interest in the franchise as a whole. The Bionic Woman would go on to find a new home at rival channel NBC for one more season, but this development also prohibited a close association between the two productions continuing, something which had previously served the duel functions of allowing Lindsay Wagner and Lee Majors to maintain a mutual presence in each other’s respective shows, while also reminding viewers of their characters’ shared history. From hereon, both shows would be forced to fend for themselves ... 

There is one new development in season four, though, which makes its presence immediately apparent and certainly caused some degree of consternation when, as a Steve Austin obsessed eight-year-old, I first sat down to watch the opening episode, The Return of Bigfoot (a two-part story where the second instalment also acted as season opener for the second series of The Bionic Woman): the imperturbably cool bionic hero was now seen proudly sporting, without anyone ever commenting upon it's incongruous presence, a distracting piece of facial ornamentation on his upper lip! I remember being horrified by Steve Austin’s moustache at the time, although it seems a trivial matter to get so worked up over now. It's just that Majors’ new look somehow didn’t feel right for the character of Steve Austin as far as my former eight-year-old self was concerned; and there does seem a vaguely defined sense in which this small detail of recalcitrance in the facial grooming department  also becomes a symbol for how Majors was possibly starting to act bigger than the show and throwing his 'star' weight around behind the scenes. It always feels to me, even now, as though it is Lee Majors to whom this on-screen moustache truly belongs, and not Steve Austin! The actor apparently grew the offending article without first okaying it with the show’s producers, who were none too pleased when they found out about it (after belatedly reviewing the dailies for the first episodes of that coming season) because  it meant that episodes from across different season batches could no longer now be as seamlessly mixed & matched when it came to the running of repeats.

The only person with more hair than either Steve Austin or
John Saxon in The Return of Bigfoot: Ted Cassidy is the new,
even more powerful Sasquatch.

You’d have thought Jaime Sommers might have had a gentle word in his ear about it before the facial fungus got out of hand, but The Return of Bigfoot sees both the Bionic Woman and Steve Austin faced with more immediately perplexing problems … such as a renegade gang of criminal aliens led by a hirsute John Saxon, who’ve stolen the Bigfoot cyborg and have started using him to commit a series of daring raids on sensitive institutions, including banks that've been holding vital reserves of gold bullion and secret nuclear power centres. This is Saxon’s second appearance on the show following his memorable stint as a remote-controlled robot in season one. This time he’s hiding behind a bushy beard and playing Nedlick -- formerly one of the group of peaceful alien scientists that set up its hidden research base under the California Mountains and which were encountered by Steve in the season three story The Secret of Bigfoot. Nedlick and his cohorts have gone bad, and want to take control of the Earth away from ‘inferior’ humans. They’ve already damaged the power generator sustaining their original outpost in order to stop their former comrades from pursuing them, and they’ve also taken control of the mighty Sasquatch by making the simple creature believe that the life of his mistress Shalon (Stephanie Powers) depends on him following their orders. Sasquatch has been carrying out the raids for Nedlick’s group, who are planning on using the components they’ve managed to obtain in order to devise a shield to protect their New Mexican base while they drill farther into a geothermal vent with the intent to tap its great power as part of their bid for world domination. Unfortunately, as viewers of The Secret of Bigfoot will doubtless remember, Steve had all memory of his adventures with the Sasquatch, Shalon and her people completely wiped from his mind by the aliens at the end of that story - so they could preserve their anonymity while continuing with their remote surveillance and research programme. As far as the intelligence services are concerned, the only possible explanation which can fully account for the level of damage perpetrated during this series of raids is that the assailant must have bionic capability. Steve becomes the number one suspect, even in the eyes of a disbelieving Oscar and Rudy! Only Jaime continues to trust in Steve’s integrity, despite his inability to remember or explain what’s really going on, even after being reminded of the Sasquatch foot cast which was previously recovered in the California Mountains. So Steve is forced to go in the run to clear his name and find the real culprit, because the authorities order Oscar to have Austin's bionics tuned down to normal strength!

Pixieish alien Gillian (Sandy Duncan) arrives to seek Steve's
help in the battle against Nedlick.

Perhaps because it was devised as another of the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman crossover adventures, The Return of Bigfoot tends more towards a playful approach in its plotting, inclusive of broad character motivation and plenty of colourful, cartoony incident that serves to bring out writer-producer Kenneth Johnson’s deep love of old 1950s sci-fi serials: evil alien villains in colourful jumpsuits plot to take over the world; an unstoppable rampaging hairy monster steals gold from a bank vault; and a volcanic disaster threatens to wreak havoc on millions. These are all typical ingredients of the Saturday morning matinee adventure narratives so indicative of Johnson's beloved Republic Studios.  The story proceeds in a bright, bold and brash fashion after the appearance of actress Sandy Duncan in the role of Gillian. She's one of the good aliens from the crippled Californian base, who zaps her way into a perplexed but curiously deadpan Steve Austin’s house (one of the few times when we get to see inside his home) to reinstate his memories and appeal for his help in stopping Nedlick’s diabolical plan. The slight, waifish and small-of-stature Duncan was quite familiar to American audiences at the time, and in particular had become famous for having taken the role of Peter Pan during a run of the eponymous stage play. Her role here is made similarly conspicuous in its fantastical and genie-like appeal: using the time-line converter (TLC) device showcased in the previous Bigfoot episodes, Gillian pops up whenever a bit of fanciful exposition is called for, or to transport Steve to wherever convenience of plot demands he should be taken -- something he appears to accept with remarkable equanimity seeing as how he had no memory at all of his previous adventures with the aliens at the time of her first arrival. Saxon can be relied on to deliver a joyous pantomime villain performance as Nedlick behind the fake beard and purple jumpsuit, and the role of Sasquatch is successfully handed on to the-slightly-smaller-but-still-ruddy-massive Ted Cassidy. Previously better known as the sepulchral manservant Lurch in the 1960s series The Addams Family, Cassidy took on the role of the towering ape-man cyborg after André the Giant’s previous success with the part in the last series led to him becoming so sought-after for his particular skills that he was unavailable to resume the role for the shooting of this second story. Cassidy would retain the part in season 5’s final outing for the Bigfoot character, Bigfoot Five.

John Saxon plots world domination in The Return of
Bigfoot.

Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) pleads with aliens Shalon
(Stephanie Powers) and Gillian (Sandy Duncan) for help in
saving the dying Steve Austin in The Return of Bigfoot.

If this first series crossover story of the season has a classic adventure sci-fi appeal and a certain element of campiness in its approach, well that's as nothing in comparison to the other story to get split across both shows later during season four: the three-part epic Kill Oscar -- which starts on The Bionic Woman, continues on The Six Million Dollar Man and concludes as another Bionic Woman episode. We’ll look in more detail at this all-time classic in a moment, but first, although it seems fair to emphasise how distinct these crossover stories are from most of the rest of what appears on the series -- thanks to their comic book plots and offbeat humour -- they weren’t in fact the only episodes to to follow their own rather peculiarly crooked paths. One that particularly stands out is a mid-season attempt to do a Christmas tale, which originally aired in the US in December of 1976.

A Bionic Christmas Carol is essentially just what its title suggests it is: a spoof re-telling of the Charles Dickens Christmas classic, but acted with tongue firmly in cheek. It starts with a deadpan scene set in Oscar’s office, during which you can almost see Lee Majors and Richard Anderson struggling to keep straight faces as Steve hands his boss a Christmas gift and is crestfallen when Oscar sheepishly reveals he’s forgotten to get his pal anything in return (Steve then grumpily bends the table lamp that Oscar has just unwrapped as a present from him, and claims its a piece of modern art!). Even worse, Steve’s planned Christmas holiday with his parents at home in Ojai has now had to be cancelled; instead, he’s given a last-minute assignment: to get to the bottom of some production problems concerning the work being done at the factory of one of the OSI's major suppliers, after it was commissioned to develop components for a life support system that's to be used on an important mission to Mars. At first surprised that the factory would even still be in operation over the Christmas period, Steve soon discovers why in fact it is: penny pinching boss Horton Budge (Ray Walston) is making his dispirited workforce graft right the way through most of the Christmas period, and as well as indulging in classic Scrooge-like behaviour such as forcing Christmas carollers  to be removed from the site for interrupting his workers, he’s also been cutting costs by making sure the components the factory is making for the OSI mission only comply with the barest minimum legal standards of workmanship!

Capitalist miser Horton Budge (Ray Walston) is shown the
error of his ways by a heavily disguised bionic man, in A Bionic
Christmas Carol.

Because Horton isn’t technically doing anything illegal, The OSI can’t break his contract, and after Steve discovers the miserly boss’s nephew and poorly paid Chauffeur Bob Crandall (Dick Sargent) can’t even afford to give his family a decent Christmas, Steve takes a tip from Dickens’ tale and sets out to reform Horton by dressing up and pretending to be Santa Clause then using his amazing bionic speed and jumping capacity to show the old skinflint (who’s in a semi-delirious state after a bad fall in his mansion) the error of his ways while giving him a guided tour of the results his actions have had upon the lives of those around him. He even pretends to show the old codger a glimpse of his future, a la the Ghost of Christmas Future, after using his bionics to quickly knock up a granite gravestone with Horton’s name carved on it! This rather unlikely tale is given a further air of unreality when one realises that Horton happens to live in the Bates Mansion from Psycho (the ever-accommodating Universal backlot becomes the show’s very own way of making Horton-like cost efficiencies, here) and, during a visit to a toy shop in the town, when Steve decides to buy Crandall’s kids some presents in return for the Chauffeur’s insistence that he spend Christmas with the Crandall family rather than all alone in an anonymous hotel room, one can clearly see a Steve Austin action figure on one of the shelves in the background at one point in the ensuing scene! The sight of Lee Majors in a Santa suit is not something to forget easily: this episode’s lack of any real danger or threat, let alone a true bad guy, makes it one of the most whimsical and good-natured of Six Million Dollar Man stories, doffing its cap to Dickens’ characters and situations with a hearty wink throughout.

Steve tries to make carnival worker Kim (Cheryl Miller)
believe the crazy plot of Carnival of Spies - but with little
success!

Similarly off-the-wall plot revelations are showcased during Carnival of Spies. The episode follows an intriguing espionage formula for most of its run-time involving doubles being ingeniously switched, covert cross-country chases in the dead of night and clandestine rendezvous’ using secret passwords. Steve is assigned to keep an eye on suspect visiting East German scientist Ulrich Rau while the subject is attending a high profile scientific conference in the states. Rau has the expertise to design the specs for a surface-to-air missile system that might be attractive to a great many of the US's enemies, but Steve is at first at a complete loss to explain why the scientist slips away from the conference only to meet up with a fortune-teller working a fairly ordinary-looking carnival/fairground site. All becomes clear near the conclusion, though, when Steve realises that the entire carnival, and the fairground rides inside it, are really the individual elements of a disguised ground-to-air missile site set up by Ulrich’s contacts with the intent of shooting down a new B-1 Bomber that's about to be tested in the region by the US. The system's control room is hidden in the ghost train, and the Tilt-a-Whirl ride is really a nuclear missile aimed at the Bomber's flight path, its launch facilitated by twisting a gorilla's arm (not a real one, obviously!); while the Merry-go-round is actually the site's radar tracking system!

A typical, not-in-the-least-stereotypical representation of a
teenager who is interested in science. Lanny Horn as Danny
Lasswell in Danny's Inferno.

Some of the other episodes which also make use of off-the-wall ideas such as the one above include the entertaining episode Danny’s Inferno, in which Steve befriends a bespectacled, frizzy-haired teenage science geek (Lanny Horn) who has accidentally stumbled upon a new form of thermonuclear energy in his mom's garage, that could alleviate the world’s dependency on oil. Unfortunately, young Danny Lasswell doesn’t really know how he’s created this marvellous wonder fuel from simply messing around with random ingredients. The OSI’s sensors detect the massive explosion his  amateur experiments cause above the skies of a built-up suburban region of the city, and Oscar sends Steve out to investigate. But others have got there first -- in particular a corrupt official who befriends the young lad and persuades him to hand over the rest of the valuable solution he’s still got stored back at his mother’s house. The mixture inevitably gets sold on to a shady conglomerate whose corrupt boss wants to know the formula at any cost, and who sets out to kidnap the boy genius -- unaware that Danny has no idea how he’s managed to come up with this amazing discovery in the first place! This story has a pronounced comic feel to it. The villains are largely bunglers and Steve’s relationship with Danny is what drives most of the episode's events. Of course, Danny’s interest in science means that he has to be kitted out in oversized Woody Allen-style black specs and made as socially awkward and geeky as anyone interested in science always is on TV, particularly in 1970s TV. But there’s some amusing interaction here with, for example, the OSI’s top fuel scientist, who is brought in to work out the formula for the kid's invention but becomes increasingly exasperated at Danny’s inclusion of some rather unorthodox ingredients, and the boy's less-than-precise means of recording his experiments. There’s also an amusing scene in which Steve, now acting in his capacity as bodyguard to the imperilled teen, comes to sleep over on the spare bed in Danny’s bedroom and reveals -- rather unconvincingly, it has to be said -- that he was once also a teenage nerd who couldn’t get any attention from pretty girls ... Yeah, right!   

"Have you heard the one about how my act, thirty-five years
from now, will come to symbolise everything that's unacceptable,
 outdated and reactionary about 1970s comic mores?" Flip Wilson
as Billy Parker in the episode Double Trouble. 

One attempt at a similar sort of humour in the episode Double Trouble, comes off rather less successfully though. An old-school nightclub entertainer called Billy Parker (played by Flip Wilson: an African American TV comedian, famous at the time, but unknown outside the US either then or now) just happens to look exactly like a visiting African head of state, recently elected after proposing to end his country’s long association with the Eastern Bloc and forge friendly relations with the United States instead. A scientist working for ‘the other side’ has come up with a conveniently clever space-age device that can change and control the behaviour of any person after its implanted in the base of their brain. The plotters have already implanted their gizmo in the unsuspecting lookalike comedian’s head and are planning on kidnapping the African prime minister he resembles before he can deliver his alliance-changing speech at the African Embassy. The remote controlled double under the direction of the kidnappers, will then deliver the speech the Soviet Bloc wants to hear instead. There’s a scene in which the gang behind this plot test the implant in Billy’s brain by forcing the hapless performer to carry out all sorts of embarrassing actions -- such as clucking like a chicken or removing his shoe and attempting to eat it Charlie Chaplin style -- while he’s on stage attempting to deliver his act to an all-white club audience. This means we have to listen to a large chunk of the comedian’s material beforehand; most of it, it has to be said, is based around an excruciating tale about a racist parrot! The audience is clearly finding it a bit painful as well, but tellingly, Billy gets his biggest reaction when he extorts his audience to ‘laugh or I’ll come and rob your house!’ By this point, it’s a relief when the dastardly plotters start wreaking his act by forcing Billy to perform their outlandish test actions! Any thing's better than listening to this weak 1970s racism.  

Still, the one story this season that combines off-beat humour, a certain knowing campiness and the series' taste for bizarre sci-fi tinged storylines to best effect, is the three-part crossover adventure that actually starts off as an episode on The Bionic Woman: Kill Oscar. A number of elements come together to produce a much broader style of action adventure here, laced with a certain comic-book appeal. Each episode has its own unique focus. The first one has a certain satirical feminist take, and looks as though it may have been inspired by the 1972 film of Ira Levin’s novel “The Stepford Wives”, although the unconventional path it takes also went on to influence the Austin Powers movies. The set-up instantly announces this particular story’s heightened sense of unreality: ex OSI employee Dr Franklin (John Houseman) has been employed by Russian agents to steal a brand new top secret weather controlling device that’s been under development at OSI headquarters for some time, and which Franklin himself actually initially developed before being sacked for seeking to use the device as a weapon rather than for humanitarian purposes. Concerned about the amount of extra funding Franklin is now requesting for his plot to steal back the device he once created, the Soviets send the flamboyantly white suited money man Baron Constantine (Jack Colvin) over to check on his progress. Colvin plays this Soviet paymaster with an exaggerated accent and a menacing swagger -- a typical comic book villain. Houseman’s performance as the disgruntled ex OSI scientist is equally over-the-top and produces perhaps the most memorable (and curiously likable) villains in the shows entire history. The British-born actor and theatre producer (he co-founded the Mercury Theatre company with Orson Welles, which later staged that infamous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”) who played a key role in Citizen Kane, is perfect as the rotund, fey and Hitchcock-like mastermind of a most fiendish plot to destroy the OSI from within by replacing all its female secretaries with robot replicas obedient only to him!

Dr Franklin (John Houseman) demonstates what makes the
perfect woman tick, in a scene from Kill Oscar.

Constantine is not terribly convinced that such an outlandish plan could ever work because these robotic mannequins can’t demonstrate self-will and could never think for themselves; but a perplexed Dr Franklin merely responds: ‘Since when is thinking for herself an asset… in a woman?’ In fact, Franklin’s deliciously casual sexism here, leads him to the logical conclusion that his Fembots are actually superior to flesh and blood women … because they are so unerringly obedient! This is a rare trip into satire for the series (although remember, this first episode is a Bionic Woman episode and not The Six Million Dollar Man -- which often seemed quite comfortable with its own casual sexism, if not quite this blatantly) -- for Franklin’s plan actually comes very close to succeeding precisely because the attitudes he so glibly expounds to Constantine are also endemic (if unspoken) to the office culture at the OSI -- where Oscar’s loyal secretary Peggy Callahan (Jennifer Darling) has previously confided in Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) that she feels unappreciated and overworked. When Both Callahan and Rudy Wells’ secretary Lynda Wilson (Corinne Michaels) are both replaced by Franklin’s physically perfect Fembot replicas, no-one notices apart from Jaime who, having spent time with the women, knows enough minor detail about their lives to be able to catch the Callahan Fembot in a lie after having been first alerted to something not being quite right with her when her bionic ear picks up the high-pitched radio control frequency Franklin uses to control his creations.  

The team assembles: from left to right Lynda Wilson (Corinne
Michaels), Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), Callahan (Jennifer
Darling), Dr Rudy Wells (Martin E Brooks) and Jack Hanson
(Jack L Gling)

The second stage of Dr Franklin’s plan is to kidnap Oscar and replace him with a replica that will then be in an ideally placed position to steal the weather control device. But after Oscar’s abduction, the OSI head’s own contingency plan, in the event of his capture by the other side, automatically kicks in: so sensitive is Oscar’s position within the agency, regarding the amount of top secret information he is privy to, that the country’s enemies must be prevented from coming into possession of any of it through torture or brainwashing; because of that risk, Oscar has left a videotaped set of instructions insisting that the OSI must dedicate itself, from this moment on, to the objective of bringing about his elimination! The National Security Bureau (NSB) is brought in to organise the man hunt, led by Chief Supervisor Jack Hanson (Jack L. Ging) -- and he’s not about to waste time listening to Jaime’s stories of robot infiltration. But after she is attacked and nearly killed at Callahan’s apartment by both Fembot replacements (which also have bionic levels of strength), it’s left up to Steve to take up the baton of investigation in part two of the story -- attempting to pin-point the location of Franklin’s hideout by triangulating the control frequency Jaime had previously identified using her bionic ear, with the position of the Lynda Fembot now deactivated in Rudy’s lab. The subsequent action plays out very much like a typical episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, yet we learn at the end of it that everything that happens in the first half – Steve’s daring one man mission to rescue Oscar and the real Lynda Wilson from Franklin’s heavily fortified desert compound and the base's subsequent destruction, as well as the shocking news that the real Callahan has been killed – has all been part of the avuncular plotter’s original plan. Callahan is actually still alive, and a prisoner of Franklin and his Fembots; the destroyed compound was a fake and the Oscar Steve has rescued is in fact the Fembot (or Manbot?) version of the OSI head, who is now perfectly placed to have the weather device transported to a location of Franklin’s choice! This middle episode is notable for Steve’s iconic extended battle with a duo of faceless female robots, one of whom is the robot version of Callahan. For the second time Steve also gets to battle a robot Oscar, but it is too late to thwart Franklin’s plot, and the episode ends with the mastermind surreally speaking through the Lynda Fembot to confirm his victory and hold the world to ransom, threatening worldwide  climactic catastrophe  if his future demands are not met.

A perfect replica yes, but Dr Franklin still hasn't mastered the
art of making robots whose faces don't come off when they fall
over!

A soggy Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) about to show
sexist criminal mastermind Dr Franklin (John Houseman)
whose really the boss.

After one episode of garish comic satirical fantasy and another that re-stages the more popular action elements of previous bionic/robot fighting face-offs, staged between Steve and the various robot replicas of Chester Dolenz in past seasons, the three-part story ends with a team mission for Steve and a revived Jaime Sommers that has a distinct James Bond flavouring to it. Franklin takes on the air of a stereotypical Bond villain – reconvening with his Fembots, and a loyal technical expert, to a remote tropical island from which he starts unleashing random weather related chaos on the world. The Air Force can’t get close enough to bomb his island base and because Franklin is still holding Oscar and Callahan as his prisoners, Steve and Jaime manage to persuade an eccentric elder Air Force general to let them have a go at sneaking onto the island by being fired out of a submarine hidden in torpedo casings (the same idea was previously used in one of the pre-series TV movies) to stage a rescue mission before the army does anything  too drastic. Franklin’s hubris and his crazed determination to prove that his Fembots are better than Rudy Wells’ bionics eventually leads the embittered rogue scientist to a reckless act of self-destruction and the tropical storms he unleashes on the island to try and tame Steve and Jaime also cause the collapse of a dam that is protecting his high-tech base from being flooded and washed away. Franklin survives at the end of this epic tale though – suggesting that he might well have made a comeback in the future if circumstances had been right. The interesting thing about Franklin as a villain is that once he has successfully pulled off his plot of stealing the weather control device from the OSI and taking revenge on Rudy and Oscar for his past treatment, he really has no idea what to do next. He plays the role of a mastermind who wants to dominate the world with a sort of ironic flourish rather than any real burning desire. This gives him a sort of likability, and even Steve and Jaime appear not to bear too much of a grudge at the end of it all -- despite the near destruction of the OSI and  the worldwide chaos brought about at his hands. When Jaime threatens to pick him up and carry him out of his underground control room if he doesn’t leave the base as he’s been told to, Franklin’s outrage and puzzlement at being defeated and then talked down to by a woman is played with a baffled air, as though his world has just been turned upside down, by the amusingly fruity-toned Houseman. ‘Leave me my dignity, please!’ he splutters. ‘Miss Sommers, you're a very determined young woman, with a mind of her own. I've always said that was a defect in a woman.’

Steve's about to cop it, and only Jaime can save him in The
Return of Bigfoot.

These cross-over stories need to be able to find reasons for each of their bionic protagonists to, at some point, drop out of the story in order to make room for the other. In The Return of Bigfoot for instance, Steve gets severely beaten up by an extra-strong Sasquatch and ends up at the finish of the first episode languishing at death’s door after his bionic legs are crushed, a lethal dose of radiation from their power packs having poisoned his system. The Bionic Woman then continues the story with Jaime Sommers charged with tracking down a supply of the alien wonder drug Neotraxin – the only thing that can save him. In Kill Oscar it is Jaime’s turn to find herself (once again) faced with the possibility of her system rejecting her bionics, after she’s forced to make a jump from the top floor of a tenement building while escaping from Franklin’s Fembot replica of Callahan. Her legs are critically damaged by the jump, and Steve has to take over the ensuing attempt to rescue Oscar, before both are teamed up again for the final episode of the three-part adventure. Both of these stories are forced, out of necessity, to introduce this baton-relaying plot construction, but the possibility of certain kinds of damage interfering with a bionic protagonist's ability to complete their mission  actually results in a whole new source of suspense which this series of The Six Million Dollar Man goes on to exploit on several other occasions during its run as well.



Rudy Wells fixes up Steve's damaged arm in Vulture of the
Andes. One of several bionic injuries sustained during the
course of the season.

On at least one of those occasions, the same idea was used for similar reasons: simply as a means of writing Lee Majors out of the episode for a brief time. In Vulture of the Andes Steve takes up gliding in an effort to thwart the plans of wealthy and wonderfully named playboy Byron Falco (Henry Darrow), who’s been dropping concealed homing devices near a US military installation and is preparing to blackmail the OSI into providing him with the military means to stage a coup in his home Latin American country, or face hijacked missiles under Falco’s control being unleashed on American military targets. It’s not one of the most riveting episodes in the series’ history, but there is a curious interlude half-way through when Steve injures his bionic arm saving a young child who’s managed to get himself tangled up in a rope attached to one of the gliders, and is just about to be dragged into the skies above the California desert until Steve’s timely intervention. His rope-yanked bionic arm has to have its circuitry repaired by Rudy, but instead of calling on Jaime Sommers, Oscar sends in another of his non-bionic special agents as a replacement, posing as a camp photographer and played by Bernie Kopell. It feels weird to have the episode inexplicably handed over to someone we’ve never heard of before, but apparently this odd interlude was required because Lee Majors had been scheduled to make a personal promotional appearance at the behest of the Network, slap in the middle of the shoot!

Elke Sommer is the glamorous guest star of H＋2＋O = Death

While posing undercover as a defecting scientist dung the episode H＋2＋O = Death, in order to break up a spy ring, led by the mysterious criminal known only as Omega, which has been responsible for stealing specialised components from under the OSI’s nose, Steve has to fake the invention of a desktop nuclear powered device – a feat which is achieved by using his bionic arm as its true power source. When his arm is damaged during Omega’s (Linden Chiles) attempt to steal the mock up, he’s forced to let double agent Dr Ilse Martin (euro starlet Elke Sommer) in on his bionic secret in order to gain the opportunity to organise a spot of clandestine self-repair with the help of a smuggled soldering iron!

Mad Rudy, infected by a chimp bite, leaves his bionic friend
hanging around in The Most Dangerous Enemy. 

In the episode The Most Dangerous Enemy, Steve is incapacitated while he and Rudy are visiting a remote island on which a young female scientist by the name of Cheryl Osborne (Ina Balin) has been working on an intelligence boosting serum which she’s been testing on captive chimpanzees. Her animal experiments go disastrously awry though, and her best chimp test subject not only gains extra intelligence but increased strength as well, then proceeds to escape and run amok on the island. Steve’s bionic-related troubles in this instance derive from an unexpected source: Rudy gets bitten by the super-chimp escapee and himself becomes a crazed superman who, now deranged by the serum-infected bite, is intent on hanging on to his new-gained powers at any price. After Dr Osborne informs him that the serum will kill Rudy if its antidote isn’t administered quickly enough, Steve attempts to persuade his scientist pal to allow himself to be injected with the normalising agent, but ends up falling into a disabling trap super-Rudy sets up to immobilise him and which gums up the servomotors in his legs, leaving him hanging helpless by his feet from a tree.  ‘I made you … and only I know how to stop you!’ the OSI genius reminds his bionic colleague.



It may look more like a garbage disposal unit but this is actually
an unstoppable Soviet-made killing machine!

In the two-part story The Deadly Probe (another of the season’s most fondly remembered adventures), a deadly Soviet Venus exploration probe crash-lands in Wyoming, and a group of Soviet sleeper spies are activated to try and reach it before Steve and Austin can also track it down and discover its secrets. Unfortunately, this autonomous, semi-intelligent tank-like device has been designed using a newly developed super-strong alloy contrived with the aim of withstanding almost any challenging environment likely to be found on its journey in space. When the probe goes on an unstoppable rampage across the countryside after the shut-down codes fail, Steve finds even his bionic strength is no match for it, and once his bionic  arm is left useless after one particular encounter, and explosives and missiles prove equally ineffective in thwarting the probe’s relentless rampage of destruction, he’s forced to come up with an outrageous idea that involves him dangling from a helicopter and attaching a bungee rope to the top of the device so that it can be toed off into the stratosphere until internal pressure eventually causes it to explode; although no one bothers to satisfactorily explain how the device managed to get into space in the first place given such an obvious flaw in its construction.

Yet another bionic injury sustained while tackling The Deadly
Probe.

Action based episodes, usually involving the participation of the US air force and partaking of stock footage featuring military aircraft in action; McGuffins which take the form of secret weapons technologies, and the various espionage plots inevitably related to them: these are the elements that are the spur for a collection of much more straightforward adventures this season. Nightmare in the Sky features Farrah Fawcett-Majors in her final guest appearance on the show, once again playing the character from her Season One debut, the pilot Kelly Woods. After experiencing a bizarre hallucination during a test flight for a new experimental aircraft, during which a World War II fighter appears to force her down in the desert, only for the abandoned test craft to mysteriously disappear afterwards, Woods comes under suspicion from air force authorities who couldn’t see anything but her craft on their radar screens at the time of the incident. Steve believes her story and busts her out of the military hospital where she’s being held for “evaluation” and together they uncover a plot to steal expensive military prototype craft by using holograph projections, beamed from a secret desert location, to create the Bermuda Triangle-like disorientation effect that forced her to bail out.

Steve lets Kelly know how special she is to him. Farrah Fawcett-
Majors -- making her final guest appearance on the show.

 The feature-length episode The Thunderbird Connection contains more stock flight footage and has Steve joining up and flying with the US air force aerobatics display team known as The Thunderbirds, for an aerial show scheduled to take place in a Middle Eastern country that’s just been the site of a coup organised by Air Marshal Mahmud Majid (Robert Loggia), who claims power in the name of the young prince Hassard, the son of the recently assassinated King. The OSI knows that Majid plans to have the prince disposed of in just the same way as he removed the father, but Steve’s rescue plans soon fall into disarray when he discovers that the youngster is completely under Majid’s influence, and the plan to smuggle him out of the country in the specially-constructed nosecone of his Thunderbird display crafts ends up turning into a suicide mission when the prince stupidly betrays the plot to the authorities and Majid has a bomb secretly planted in Steve’s cockpit, hoping to kill two birds with one stone. Another undercover mission turns equally hairy in the episode Taskforce when, having successfully infiltrated a heist gang which is preparing to hijack a nuclear missile while it’s being transported by road via San Diego to a Nevada test site alongside an OSI escort, Steve finds himself under lockdown at the gang’s hideout, unable to communicate with Oscar to warn him that the head of the military escort employed to guard the missile is in fact in the pay of the hijackers. This particular episode also marked the final appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man of Jennifer Darling as Oscar’s secretary Peggy Callahan. Meanwhile, in the episode The infiltrators, Steve again goes undercover, this time as an amateur boxing champ for a team that’s been built around foreign defectors secretly trained as a hit squad. The OSI has to uncover the gang’s target; and to get Steve on the boxing team he and Rudy contrive an amusing way of removing one of the legitimate competitors so that Steve can take his place: the athlete is persuaded to believe that his strength has failed him and that he needs to pull out of the match and take extensive bed rest, after being given deliberately mislabelled weights to lift during a fitness assessment in Rudy’s lab. The dumbbells actually require a good deal of strength just to even be able to pick them up, but Steve (posing as Rudy’s lab assistant) is able to handle them with ease, using his bionics to facilitate the illusion that they’re really just trivial weights, which the athlete should be able to lift without even thinking about them.

Steve gets involved in Middle Eastern politics in the episode
The Thunderbird Connection.

Peggy Callahan (Jennifer Darling) joins Steve undercover in the
episode Taskforce.

Out for the count. Steve is drugged during a boxing bout in
The Infiltrators.

Routine adventures such as those mentioned above are beginning to predominate towards the middle half of the season, and although they all have their moments, we don’t see anything quite as weird, wild and imaginative as the Bigfoot or Fembot stories again this year. The other two episodes which stand out in this particular run though, do so perhaps because they were originally intended as trial runs for yet more potential spin-off shows, although ABC's cancellation of The Bionic Woman made the prospect of either of them being picked up a remote one.

Steve gets sporty ... in a cow field? A scene from The Bionic
Boy, starring Vincent Van Patten (right) and football star Frank
Gifford (centre).

The Bionic Boy even got the full feature length treatment and revolved around Rudy Wells developing a new power pack implant that might help paraplegics walk again. The OSI computer scans every case in the country for the most suitable -- both physically and psychologically -- recipient on whom to test the device (no doubt hoping to avoid another case like that of Barney Hiller) and comes up with the name Andy Sheffield (Vincent Van Patten). Steve takes a trip to the boy’s home town in Utah to break the news and discovers that things aren’t quite as straightforward as the OSI computer painted them: Andy is a previously highly active college football player who became paralysed after an accident in which his father died in a rock slide trying to prove his beliefs about an ancient Indian burial ground in nearby mountains. The episode represents a definite change in pace to those which had defined the majority of the rest of the series; it takes its time to develop Andy’s backstory and examine his ambivalent feelings about the prospect of going through with Rudy’s new procedure, given the many failures and disappointments he’s had to endure before. When he does agree to the operation, Steve becomes a sort of mentor and guide through the emotional pitfalls the bionic implant technology sometimes brings with it. One can see from the tone and sedate pace of this episode how any spin-off series would have refocused attention on the sorts of adolescent problems which define growing up, but with an added bionic twist; but sadly it was not to be, and the episode became just one more interesting addition to The Six Million Dollar Man archives.

Stephen Macht takes the lead role as re-programmable
OSI agent Joe Patton in the episode The Ultimate Impostor.

The single most unusual episode of the entire series was also yet another attempt to engineer a spin-off show -- and once again the effort came to nought. The writers William T. Zacha and Six Million Dollar Man producer Lionel E. Siegel even had another crack at it a few years later when they produced a pilot movie of the same name and with a similar storyline, but with all previous references to the show removed. In this first trial-run version of The Ultimate Impostor though, Oscar and Rudy are seen testing yet another of Dr Wells’ innovations: this time it’s a device which can swiftly wipe and re-programme the human brain, enabling it to learn any skill or assume any identity in a matter of seconds. Steve Austin plays no part in the main bulk of the story and Lee Majors is confined to bookending guest appearances (although a pretext is found for Steve to display a feat of bionic strength during the opening segment). Instead, Steve’s pal Joe Patton (Stephen Macht) takes over as the leading man, presumably to henceforth be sent on missions by Oscar and to have his brain programmed for them every week by Rudy, should the show have gone to syndication. Here, Joe is sent undercover programmed with the knowledge and skills of a dishonest industrial chemist called Lyle Montrose, in order to rescue his imprisoned girlfriend Jenny (Pamela Hensley) -- another OSI agent -- from a counterfeiter gang led by someone called Stenger (David Sheiner). The implausible concept at the heart of the proposed series clearly had potential to offer a diverse collection of episodes which would’ve allowed Joe to take on pretty much any new guise each and every week. Yet Stephen Macht seems rather uncharismatic as a leading man, and the problem remains of how to create interest in a character whose identity and personality changes every time you see him. It’s a problem also encountered by the ill-fated Josh Whedon series Dollhouse, which clearly shares fundamental conceptual DNA with this 1970s spi-fy idea.

And so The Six Million Dollar Man headed towards its fifth and final full series: the moustache was by now gone (thank goodness) and the last run of episodes was to rely mainly on some generic military adventure subject matter for most of its story material, although there are still some interesting variants scattered amongst quite a few otherwise average stories. It is probably true to say that the show was finally beginning to run its course and many more stories are stretched across two episodes in that fifth series than had ever been the case before – sometimes with rather mixed results. But we shall be taking a more detailed look at Steve Austin’s final collection of missions in the next blog entry.

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

IS OUT NOW FROM FABULOUS FILMS