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50th Anniversary Viewing (Part 2)
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Mission: Impossible
"Boomerang"
Originally aired January 12, 1973
Wiki said:
After a mobster's wife kills him and takes his vital criminal records into her possession, the IMF induces a false belief in her that he survived and is trying to kill her so that the records can be located and turned over to the authorities.
John Vayle (Charlie Guardino) lands his twin-prop private plane on a remote airstrip for a rendezvous with his wife, Eve (Laraine Stephens), who relays instructions from a man named Luchek for John to hand over the documents he's carrying to her. John refuses to comply, and while Eve pretends to go along and be wifely, a man sneaks out of her car and whacks John with a wrench. The man drags John's body onto the plane, takes off, and parachutes out, following which the plane blows up. (He couldn't just let it crash?)
The reel-to-reel tape in a groundskeeper's truck at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers said:
Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Two days ago a private plane exploded while en route to Los Angeles, killing John Vayle, a member of an underworld family headed by Stanley Luchek. We have reason to believe Vayle's death was arranged by Vayle's wife, Eve, enabling her to obtain records he carried vital to the Luchek organization. In the proper hands, those records would put an end to the mob's operation and place Luchek himself [Ronald Feinberg] behind bars for life. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to locate those records and turn them over to the authorities. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!
Having to drive to Frisco and back for the tape must eat into Jim's mission planning time.
Outside John's funeral, Lieutenant Barney gets noticed by Eve and the heavy she inherited from her husband, Homer Chill (Walter Barnes), while taking down the plate numbers of cars. Eve arranges a rendezvous with Luchek, where she negotiates a hefty ongoing payment to keep her husband's documents in safekeeping.
Outside her stately home, Eve is shot at by Jim but trips on a concealed wire. Jim is nabbed by Barney, who questions him and Eve inside. Eve refuses to cooperate with the fuzz, but makes a note of Jim's room key, via which she has him tracked down. While she and Homer are out, Willy gets to work replacing Eve's sleeping pills, getting a sample of John's aftershave, rifling through money in her safe, leaving a fake fingerprint on its dial, and then coming back to the front door to drop off John's dry-cleaning. Eve questions Jim, who tells her that he bribed Barney to be set loose, and arranges to discuss who hired him over dinner. She wants Jim to take out his employer, but he says he was hired via a female third party. Eve takes Jim home and pays him, but the packet of bills is short a couple thousand, to Eve's surprise. Jim raises a fresh fingerprint from the dial, which matches one on John's driver's license. Chill eavesdrops on all of this activity and reports to Luchek.
Eve woos Jim a little and goes to talk to her accomplice in John's murder, Garth, but Desk Clerk Willy informs her that he never checked into the shady hotel that she set him up in. Back at home, Casey calls Eve about how John's suit, which is an exact duplicate of the one John was wearing when he was killed, was delivered to the wrong address. Eve and Jim break into the apartment that leads them to, which belongs to a woman with a nursing degree who has a picture of John and a drawer full of (duplicates of) his personal effects. The woman in question turns out to be Casey, who's also the third party who hired Jim and identifies Johnny as her boyfriend. Later, an agent named Burt who wasn't at the briefing dons his Johnny mask and burglars into the Vayle home, giving Eve a shot in bed and spraying Johnny's cologne around. She wakes up to find him leaving, and he indicates that he has all he wants from her.
Lt. Barney comes to pick Eve up. Homer tries to follow, but Willy has tampered with his car. Barney takes Eve to a morgue where he shows her what she's led to believe is Johnny's freshly killed body. Barney shares Johnny's scheme to kill her so the police would get the records and Johnny could take Luchek's place. Barney also indicates that Johnny learned where the records were by questioning Eve with truth serum, showing her the needle mark on her arm; and that he now has the records, producing (a duplicate of) the case they're in and negotiating a hefty percentage of Luchek's payments to her. Eve tries to recruit Jim to take out Barney, offering to take him to a spot in the desert that she and Johnny used to go to; Homer tips off Luchek, who thinks he knows where she's going. At the spot, Eve retrieves the real briefcase, right where she left it, and Luchek shows up with a henchman who wings Eve. Jim struggles with both men until Barney and Willy pop up to take the case.
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Love, American Style
"Love and the Face Bow / Love and the Impossible Gift / Love and the Love Kit"
Originally aired January 12, 1973
"Love and the Face Bow" opens with Leo Brubaker (Wendell Burton) carrying his bride, Naomi (Cindy Williams), over the threshold of their snowy honeymoon cottage. Naomi is embarrassed when the item at the top of her suitcase turns out to be an orthodontic accessory that she has to wear at night, but Leo pulls out one of his own, and they decide to put them on to see what each of them looks like. Naomi accidentally puts on Leo's, however, and the metal part gets stuck on her teeth, protruding from her mouth like metal tusks. After awkwardly trying to make the most of their wedding night. Leo ends up calling for a dentist on a ham radio in the cabin that belongs to an uncle, using Naomi's tusks as an antenna. She has to stand a certain way to get a good signal, lest they receive the Super Bowl instead. Eventually a Dr. Edwin Muller (Sterling Holloway) arrives and gets the accessory out easily enough. The couple sends the doctor on his way, only to find that Naomi can't feel Leo kissing her because her mouth is numbed by Novocain.
In "Love and the Love Kit," country girl Annabelle (Donna Douglas) tries to get her farmer suitor Fenton (Stuart Margolin) in the mood while they've got her parents' place to themselves, but he blows the opportunity with his awkward nervousness. Later he gets a visit from a citified cosmetics salesgirl (Lori Saunders) who, when she learns that Fenton's having trouble with his girlfriend, pitches the titular item, guaranteed to make him irresistible to the opposite sex--a shoebox that includes aphrodisiac spray (dispensed from a plastic foot pump), wine, a small Lawrence Welk record, and a small guidebook of romantic things to say. She pretends to be swayed by his charms while he samples it in order to get his money, but Fenton's older shackmate (possibly his old man, but that's not made clear), Grover (Dub Taylor), thinks Fenton's been had.
Grover: Ain't no woman in the world worth eight bucks!
Before Fenton can use the kit on Annabelle, however, he has to practice, so he gets Grover to don a bonnet and mop wig.
When Fenton goes back to Annabelle, she doesn't want to let him in the door, but the phrases he reads from the book do the trick. She's ready to go at that point, but he gets her to leave the room so he can deploy the other items, dispensing the spray, putting on the record, and treating her to some of the wine when she comes back. Fenton returns home boasting to Grover that the love kit worked, and of how he plans to go all the way to the end of the book next time. But while Fenton's taking a cold shower, the skeptical Grover sabotages the items in the kit.
On the next date, in addition to Fenton taking a swig of mouthwash, it turns out that Grover's put weed killer in the dispenser, switched the record with horse race music, and replaced the verses in the book with less romantic ones. Annabelle learns that she's been wooed by a "box full of junk," but Fenton finds the right words, describing it as a box full of loneliness that's filled with dreams of her...which does the trick.
In the coda, it appears that Grover's been using the actual items himself, locking himself in the shack to get away from either an unseen woman or a goat talking in a woman's voice.
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Emergency!
"School Days"
Originally aired January 13, 1973
The first sentence on Wiki said:
John and Roy are breaking in a new trainee who lacks self-confidence in tight situations, including assisting an elderly man who was injured by a falling bookcase, an ambulance broadsided by a car at the entrance of a golf course, a boy injured in a chemistry lab accident at his home, a sleeping man with a "snake" on his chest, and a man injured and trapped in a junkyard.
Now that's more like an episode summary! Too bad this guy doesn't quit while he's ahead.
Squad 51 has another trainee, Billy Hanks (Kip Niven)--and this one, by contrast, is set up as being underconfident, afraid of screwing up...despite having received multiple citations for valor as a firefighter. The station is called to the home of elderly Dr. Andrew Temple (Ian Wolfe), who's had a bookcase fall on him from a gas explosion. When the doctor starts to go into pulmonary edema, Billy momentarily freezes up, and kicks himself for it afterward.
At Rampart, Brackett and Morton are seeing to Skyle Tyler, a third baseman who was beaned and got a skull fracture. After bringing Temple in, the station rushes to the scene of an accident involving an ambulance having been broadsided, sheering off a fire hydrant. Left on his own to see to the attendant in the back of the vehicle, Billy unhesitantly gets down to business. A couple of upright ambulances arrive on the scene to carry away their fallen comrades...and maybe to rub it in just a little. The relatively uninjured patient who was in the back of the ambulance with Billy compliments his skill.
The station is called to an explosion in a garage. Feeling that they need to put some pressure on Billy to boost his confidence, on the way Roy informs the trainee that he'll be in charge of this one. The paramedics tend to an injured twelve-year-old boy who was using a chemistry set, Brad Lewis (Michael-James Wixted). Billy acts a little edgy but focuses on the job and asks questions where needed. The boy's parents (Lew Brown and Sandy deBruin) are concerned that his eyes have been injured.
At Rampart, Tyler's estranged wife, Kathy (Terrence O'Connor), has been brought in. She's quick to blame herself for potentially having been a distraction, but Dixie encourages her to potentially mend their marriage by seeing to his recovery. Dr. Temple is up in bed and back to his books on ancient Middle Eastern civilizations, while his proud housekeeper, Emma Perigrew (Ann Doran), fusses over him.
In the aftermath of the last call, it comes out that Billy has a respiratory condition from a prior work incident that has taken away his sense of smell and causes him to be more susceptible to smoke inhalation, which has him coughing for days afterward. The squad comes to the aid of a man lying on a campus green with a snake coiled up on his stomach. Johnny takes the lead, having Roy lift up the man's shirt so he can knock the snake off with a broom and Billy can zap it with a fire extinguisher. The split-second rescue works, but the snake turns out to be rubber--apparently a gag having been pulled on him by some of the laughing bystanders. (You'd think he could tell that it wasn't alive.)
After hours at the station, Roy has an encouraging talk with Billy. At Rampart while they're picking up some supplies, Dix recruits Roy and Billy to loosen the recovering Brad's lips about what he was mixing with his set. Grateful that his eyes were saved, the boy reluctantly agrees, but the station gets a call before he can divulge the nature of his experiment. The station arrives at an auto wrecking yard where a scavenger is trapped under a fallen and unstable stack of cars. Billy crawls in and takes charge of seeing to the patient while Chet has the yard attendant take him to the crane. Marco climbs on top of the stack to hook the top car so the crane can keep it steady while the patient is removed and wheeled to an ambulance. Once they're done, the stack and one next to it both collapse. Afterward, Billy shares that he feels like he's graduated, but Roy cautiously offers that every day on the job will be a titular one.
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The Mary Tyler Moore Show
"My Brother's Keeper"
Originally aired January 13, 1973
Wiki said:
Phyllis schemes to have her brother fall in love with Mary, but her plans go awry when her brother and Rhoda click.
Phyllis drops by the station to try to arrange for Mary to meet her visiting brother, Ben, in her pretentiously overbearing way. When Phyllis mentions that Mary and Ben have both have been saved for marriage, Mary again hints at a more active lifestyle than the show was initially leading us to believe...
Mary: Well, Phyl...I'm not all that saved.
Phyllis brings Ben (Robert Moore) by Mary's place that night, wanting the two of them to "spontaneously" join her and Lars for dinner and the symphony, but Ben doesn't feel like such a big night out after having just flown in, so he ends up having a casual, friendly dinner at Mary's. Rhoda drops by and Mary soon finds herself cut out of the conversation, though it's her suggestion that Ben could take Rhoda to the symphony. Later, Phyllis returns to Mary's, in shock after the gauche spectacle of Rhoda at a Mozart concert.
Rhoda later makes dinner for Ben in Mary's kitchen, rubbing it in to Phyllis how they're hitting it off. On another evening, Mary's throwing a party in her place when Phyllis comes by, distraught that Rhoda and Ben are out together. Mary actually tries to get rid of Phyllis to avoid killing her party, but Phyllis lingers around long enough for Rhoda and Ben to come by. When Rhoda tries to explain that there's nothing serious going on between her and Ben, Phyllis won't believe it, so Rhoda tells her what she wants to hear--that she and Ben are getting married the next day. Phyllis actually buys this, and when Ted (who's accompanied by Georgette, establishing her as a recurring character) tries to liven up the party with a game of Twenty Questions, Phyllis loudly breaks out crying, clearing the party. Once they're alone, Phyllis takes exception when Rhoda tries to explain that Ben isn't her type...and we get the famously promo-featured exchange that I wasn't expecting to pop up in this episode...
Phyllis: What do you mean he's not your type? He's witty...he's attractive...he's successful...he's single...
Rhoda: He's gay!
Phyllis initially drops her jaw at this revelation, but promptly finds herself relieved that Rhoda won't be her sister-in-law.
In the coda, as Ben's playing a piano that Phyllis rented for his visit, she mistakes a dog food commercial that he wrote for Mozart.
Well...MTM just earned its cultural cache keep with this little bombshell. And my compliments to a Wiki contributor who knows how to briefly summarize an episode premise without loading in beat-by-beat details.
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The Bob Newhart Show
"The Crash of Twenty-Nine Years Old"
Originally aired January 13, 1973
Wiki said:
Depressed at turning twenty-nine, Carol decides to quit her job and do something new with her life.
As the episode opens, Carol is already 29 with no mention of a recent or impending birthday (though it would have been close to Marcia Wallace's 30th when the episode was being shot). She has an impromptu session with Bob about her dissatisfaction with her life, at the end of which Bob learns that Emily encouraged her to quit her job at lunch. Bob tries to get to the bottom of this at home, learning that Emily was nodding along as Carol talked about quitting, but Emily emphasizes that lots of women are coming to question their roles these days. When Howard drops by between flights with a stewardess date (Jill Jaress), Emily asks Mary Ellen about her satisfaction with her career, causing an argument between Mary Ellen and Howard.
Carol attends a group session with recurring patients such as Victor Gianelli, Lillian Bakerman, Elliot Carlin, and Michelle Nardo--as well as a one-shotter, Mr. Keeney (Don Barrows)--at which career satisfaction becomes the main topic. Addressing the entire group in a general way, Bob makes an argument for Carol sticking with her job, but she stands up and declares that she's quitting.
Bob's office ends up with a new receptionist, Paul Sanders (Jack Bender). Carol drops by the office for unfinished business and runs into him.
Carol: You mean you're the new girl?
Carol seems to miss her old job, but boasts to Bob of how she's gotten a new one at the unemployment office, which she's using to shop for a long-term career. But later Carol unexpectedly drops by another group session and Bob interrupts the other patients to find out what's bothering her. It turns out that she's realized that choosing a new career may involve years of night school while she's stuck in an unsatisfying job. Bob initially tries to argue for Carol to stick to her guns, but his patients turn the tables on him, asking him how he feels about Carol. The patients get Bob and Carol to admit to how they hurt each other in their dealings over Carol's career dissatisfaction; get Carol to ask for her old job back; and get Bob to accept her request. Bob reminds Carol that somebody else is currently occupying her desk.
Carol: Oh, that's right...what're you gonna do about Paul?
Bob: Maybe I could have Emily take him out to lunch.
The climactic therapy session was a role-reversal gag that landed on the mark. This episode did confuse me about exactly who Carol's working for, though. Her services are shared by multiple offices, but here she seems to be Bob's to rehire.
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I think Lucy did it first, and then it became a trope.
I wouldn't doubt it, though I don't remember that specific instance.
Actually, I find the intro a bit long
I could've described it as "strikingly pretentious"...
I don't remember hearing this on the radio until much later, in the 80s, on BCN. The first time I heard it might have been on their greatest hits album.
I'm so stupid about music that I can't even hear any similarity.
I wasn't familiar with either song. I think that at least part of the issue with glam rock not really taking off as a phenomenon in the States is that it was more of a style of presentation than a distinct sound.
