A BIONIC LOOK BACKWARDS, PART II

Picking up from last time, my 11-year-old daughter Maddie and I continue our overview of The Six Million Dollar Man, which we watched via the superb Complete Collection DVD box set.

NOTE: This “bionic retrospective” was originally intended to run in two parts, but I’ve decided to expand it into a three-parter. This time around, we’ll look at Seasons Three and Four, and we’ll conclude next time with Season Five and the three reunion movies.   

SEASON THREE

The third season of The Six Million Dollar Man was arguably the most pivotal, as it included some truly key episodes, ones that broadened the scope of the series and expanded its universe and the cast of characters populating it. 

As I mentioned last time, the season kicked off with the two-part “The Return of the Bionic Woman,” which brought back Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers and “undid” the death that traumatized viewers across the nation. Of course, millions of jaws dropped when, during this sequel storyline, the revived Jaime sees Steve Austin for the first time since her “death” and asks plainly, “Who are you?” 

"Who who, who who…?"

Writer/producer Kenneth Johnson did an admirable job reversing the end of Jaime’s origin story, but in the name of compelling drama, he went one step further—he resurrected Jaime, but in wiping out her memory, he also killed the romance between her and Steve.

MADDIE: “I was really happy when Jaime came back, and I was excited to see her and Steve back together. But I was really upset that she couldn’t remember him. I didn’t know what would happen from there. They had carved their initials in a tree, and they were in the newspaper together for their engagement announcement, and Steve’s parents loved her as their own daughter, so it was really complicated!”

To make matters worse for Steve, Jaime has fallen for Dr. Michael Marchetti, the brilliant scientist who used cryogenics to save her life.  

MADDIE: “I hated Michael Marchetti. He was a jerk. He had no business getting involved with Jaime—he was her doctor and she was his patient. That’s not supposed to happen. And I felt really bad for Steve. It must have really hurt him to see the woman he wanted to marry falling for someone else.”

Dr. Michael Marchetti—BOOOOOOOOOOO!

I have to note that when Jaime “died” at the end of “The Bionic Woman Part II” and a heartbroken Steve mourned her, Maddie did not shed a tear. But at the end of “The Return of the Bionic Woman Part II,” when Jaime drives off with Michael to try to forge a new future for herself—with Steve downgraded to the “just good friends” category—Maddie was fairly inconsolable.  

MADDIE: “I was very unhappy when she drove off with Michael Marchetti. I felt that Steve was her soulmate and Michael was not. I didn’t like Michael to begin with. I guess Steve was doing the right thing for Jaime when he convinced her to go away from him, but I didn’t like it. They were the perfect couple and I think if she had stayed, maybe she would have fallen for him all over again.”

“The Return of the Bionic Woman” is a crowd-pleaser—that’s exactly what it was intended to be—and it’s a treat to see Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner sharing the screen again. The chemistry between them is as strong here as it was in the original two-parter, and it’s very clever how the script puts a completely different spin on their relationship so that they’re not just repeating themselves. Overall, I don’t think “Return” is quite as strong as its predecessor, but it’s still very enjoyable and creative.

Of course, “The Return of the Bionic Woman” led to the weekly Bionic Woman TV series, which launched just four months later. One of the most fondly remembered things about The Six Million Dollar Man is how it interacted with its spin-off series, and how Jaime became a recurring element for the rest of the third season and well into the fourth. (More on that shortly.) 

MADDIE: “I was glad that Jaime got her own series. It was exciting, and the best part was that Steve and Jaime appeared on each other’s shows. Those were the episodes that stood out the most and were among the best  ones.”

But Jaime wasn’t the only bionic character to return in Season Three. In “The Bionic Criminal,” the world’s second bionic man, Barney Miller—his surname now changed to Hiller in the wake of ABC’s launch of the unrelated police sitcom starring Hal  Linden—is back in action, only now he’s being blackmailed and thus forced to commit a series of crimes.  

Monte Markham is back as Barney and is clearly having a good time, but due to the nature of the story—Barney is under duress and functioning as a reluctant antagonist this time around—he’s not quite as over-the-top, and is therefore not quite as much fun, as he was in his previous appearance.

"Mmmmmm, I smell ham—oh wait, it's ME!"

MADDIE: “That was a good one, but not as good as the first episode with Barney. I was scared when they tuned his bionics back up and gave him back his super strength, because I remember what happened last time and how dangerous he was. Though I did always enjoy the moments when Barney was out to show how much better he was than Steve, and that’s what was missing in the sequel.” 

The episode is also notable for the one-shot return of Alan Oppenheimer as Dr. Rudy Wells, presumably because there are flashbacks to Season Two’s “The Seven Million Dollar Man” that feature Oppenheimer’s Rudy. After this episode, Martin E. Brooks would inhabit the role permanently.  

But probably the biggest story of the season, in terms of scope, audaciousness, and popularity, was “The Secret of Bigfoot,” written and produced by Kenneth Johnson. (Note that Johnson also created Jaime Sommers—his value to the series can’t be overemphasized.) In this two-parter, Steve Austin encounters Sasquatch, a super-strong creature that turns out to be the bionic-like protector of a hidden society of extraterrestrials living in the California mountains.

"Chewie, is that you…?"

I watched this when it originally aired, and as I recall, it absolutely blew my mind. It had everything a fan of the show could want: mystery, suspense, action, the lovely Stefanie Powers as alien scientist Shalon, a surprise (and uncredited) guest appearance by Lindsay Wagner as Jaime, and, most importantly, a truly intimidating, worthy—and even downright scary—opponent for Steve in the form of wrestling legend Andre the Giant as Sasquatch. 

"Turn around, bright eyes…"

MADDIE: “This one was very good. I loved the fight scenes between Bigfoot and Steve, because it was one of the very few times where Steve faced an enemy who could really challenge him. I liked the way the aliens could move through time with their little devices, and the whole plot was really strong. It was really different from most of the other episodes, and it was the first time in the series that we really got deep into science fiction. It was a real twist to find out that Bigfoot was a lot like Steve. He was so big, and his eyes were really creepy! I liked that they gave Jaime a little tip of the hat, it was nice to see her. Shalon was very pretty. I liked her character. It was clear she had a crush on Steve, but then again, every episode is like that!”

Stefanie Powers as Shalon. >Sigh<

Ask anyone what they remember most about The Six Million Dollar Man and chances are, Sasquatch will be one of the top three responses. The character was brought back numerous times—more on that later—and was even turned into a Kenner action figure.  

Alas, I never got to own one. >Sniff!<

For fans like myself, who fully embraced the science-fictional “otherworldly” elements introduced in “The Secret of Bigfoot,” and were hoping that the series would continue in that direction from that point on, it was a bit disappointing to see the return to down-to-earth stories focusing on Steve combatting espionage and organized crime. That said, there’s a surprisingly small number of third-season episodes that qualify as genuine clunkers. For me, the weakest of the bunch were:

“The Song and Dance Spy,” in which guest-star Sonny Bono plays Steve’s old college roommate, who has gone on to become a successful singer—and is now believed to be a courier for an espionage ring. It’s a dopey, silly episode no matter what—and the presence of Sonny Bono does not help matters. This isn’t just me looking back at 1970s culture with irreverence. Even as a little kid growing up during that era, I had come to the conclusion that a guest appearance by Sonny Bono meant a weaker-than-usual episode of The Love Boat or Fantasy Island.     

Well, at least Lee Majors seems happy to have him there.

MADDIE: “This was just a stupid episode. I didn’t care what happened in it, and the fight scene at the end was dumb, with Steve’s friend trying to act like he’s tough.”  

“The Wolf Boy,” a riff on Tarzan in which Steve searches for an orphaned boy—the son of a U.S. ambassador and his wife—who is now living amongst wolves.

But the rest of Season Three’s episodes were all compelling enough in their own ways. Among the most notable:  

“One of Our Running Backs is Missing,” the only episode of the series directed by Lee Majors, in which Steve’s old friend, football player Larry Bronco (played by real-life pro football star Larry Csonka) is kidnapped as part of a betting scam. Like “The Song and Dance Spy,” it’s dopey as hell, but I found myself enjoying it quite a bit—and I’m hardly a football fan. 

“The Winning Smile” is another episode in which Oscar Goldman’s secretary Callahan figures prominently. Callahan, played by Jennifer Darling, was one of the best additions to the series, and the episodes featuring her were among the most enjoyable. This time, she’s suspected of leaking top-secret information out of Oscar’s office.  

Lovely lady, lovely smile… awful hairdo.

MADDIE: “I liked this one. I was really scared that they were going to send Callahan to jail because everyone thought that she was guilty. If she was guilty, that meant that her seeming all innocent was just an act, and that would have made me very sad, because I liked her so much. It was very clever that it turned out that her boyfriend, who was also her dentist, was the real criminal. He planted a tiny microphone in her teeth and she had no idea. Callahan picked really bad guys to date—the same thing happened to her on The Bionic Woman!”

“Hocus-Pocus” brings back Audrey Moss, a character introduced in Season Two’s “The E.S.P. Spy.” Audrey, once again played by Robbie Lee, is brought in to use her E.S.P. abilities to act as Steve’s assistant when he goes undercover as a nightclub magician. Their mission: to recover the U.S. Navy’s top-secret code book, which has fallen into the hands of a club-owning mobster. Audrey is somewhat like Callahan—very cute and likable, with a, shall we say, unique speaking voice.  

In “The Golden Pharaoh,” Farrah Fawcett, shortly before the debut of Charlie’s Angels, makes her annual guest appearance, though she’s playing a completely new character—Trish Hollander, an old flame of Steve’s, whom he enlists to help him recover stolen Egyptian treasures. But Steve may not be able to trust her, as it turns out that Trish has her own agenda. Watching Majors work with his then-wife is always interesting. By the way, in one amusing moment, Steve tells Trish, “You’re an angel.” Talk about foreshadowing!

What a difference a year will make...

And Jaime Sommers makes a cameo appearance in both “Love Song for Tanya” and “Big Brother.” I actually remember my seven-year-old self watching “Love Song for Tanya” the night it aired, on February 15, 1976, and being quite excited about seeing Jaime show up—and also thinking guest-star Cathy Rigby, playing a Soviet gymnast wanting to defect to the U.S.—was really cute. The episode itself is not quite as good as I remember it being, but I don’t want to crush my seven-year-old self, so I continue to think of it fondly. 

MADDIE: “I liked when Steve was going to show Tanya how to play pinball and she thought you play by sticking a pin in a ball! She was very funny and cute, and she was fun to watch.” 

Obviously, she's just beaten Steve's high score.

“Big Brother” is a well-meaning episode written by Kenneth Johnson that helps promote the Big Brothers organization (now known as Big Brothers Big Sisters) and features Steve coming to the aid of a troubled ghetto youth. Watching it again, I’d say that the Jaime appearance is the best thing about it.

(Incidentally, Lee Majors returned the favor by appearing as Steve Austin in several episodes of the first season of The Bionic Woman, including “Welcome Home, Jaime, Part I,” “A Thing of the Past,” and, most significantly, “The Deadly Missiles,” which featured Steve in a more prominent role and hinted strongly that there was still a romantic spark between him and Jaime.)  

MADDIE: “I was so happy watching ‘The Deadly Missiles,’ because Steve and Jaime kiss at the end. I was like, ‘Goodbye, Michael Marchetti!’ And it was a good episode anyway!” 

"Hey, speaking of 'deadly missiles'…"

In the third season, The Six Million Dollar Man really came into its own. It is arguably the best season, overall, of the series. And while the subsequent seasons would not maintain a consistent level of quality on a week-to-week basis, there were a number of fine episodes still to come.             

SEASON FOUR

Without a doubt, the fourth season includes some of the most iconic, most fondly remembered episodes that the series ever produced. It also includes some real lame-0s, along with a somewhat desperate attempt to expand the bionic franchise even further. 

But more than anything else, Season Four is notable for being the “mustache season.” That’s the year Lee Majors decided that what Steve Austin really needed was a mustache. But not a cool, thick, bushy, masculine Tom Selleck style mustache. 

No, Steve’s mustache was meticulously groomed and thin, sort of like David Niven’s.   

My theory has always been that Majors was trying to emulate Burt Reynolds, who at the time was the biggest movie star in the world. 

Whatever the reason, I vividly remember that as those fourth-season episodes originally aired, I, and everyone I knew—including my dad, who was ALSO sporting a mustache at the time (and would retain it until the day he died in August 2013)—considered Col. Austin’s new facial hair a distraction and an impairment to his good looks. Apparently, a lot of the viewing audience felt the same way, but Majors stubbornly kept the ’stache for the majority of the season.

Watching the episodes again all these years later, I still find the mustache an unfortunate distraction. And I’m not alone.

MADDIE: “It looked like there was a pencil under his nose. You would just look at his mustache and block out everything else. It didn’t even really look like a mustache, it looked like dirt or a caterpillar under his nose.”

As for the episodes themselves—the highlights of Season Four were undoubtedly the two extended crossover storylines between TSMDM and The Bionic Woman: the two-part “The Return of Bigfoot,” which began in the season premiere of TSMDM and concluded in the first episode of TBW’s second season, and the three-part “Kill Oscar,” which began on TBW, continued in an episode of TSMDM, and concluded in TBW. This kind of storytelling has been commonplace in comic books for many decades, but was—and remains—a rarity in television.

MADDIE: “I liked the idea of the crossovers, because I got to see Steve and Jaime together. It was weird that the stories would jump from one show to the other, but I think they did that to get more people to watch both shows. The crossover episodes were among my favorites.” 

“The Return of Bigfoot,” written by Kenneth Johnson, was a totally obvious choice to kick off the fourth season, in that it took the two most popular elements from the previous year—Bigfoot and Jaime Sommers—and mixed them together into one big story. As a direct sequel to “The Secret of Bigfoot,” it brings back Stefanie Powers as Shalon and continues the story of the aliens that live secretly among us. However, Andre the Giant was apparently not available to reprise the role of Sasquatch, so Ted Cassidy—best known as Lurch from The Addams Family—took over.

"I'm a substitute for another guy…"

Cassidy performs well, but I prefer Andre, both in appearance and in overall approach to the part. 

MADDIE: “I liked the first Bigfoot better. He seemed more fierce and less human.”

The storyline acknowledges Jaime’s brief appearance in the previous Bigfoot story, which helps to bring her into this one in a way that feels organic. Part one, which ends with Steve near death after a brutal encounter with Sasquatch, and Jaime the last remaining hope to save the day, sent chills down my spine when I first watched it as a child. I still consider it very strong storytelling. In part two, Jaime forges a far less adversarial relationship with Sasquatch than Steve ever had, and, with a recovered Steve joining them, they manage to stop a rogue splinter group of aliens from carrying out their plans for world domination. 

"Interesting friends you have, Steve."

Admittedly, all the slow-motion action gets a bit tiresome after a while, and the production budget prevents the key set pieces from being truly impressive, certainly by today’s standards. But it’s exciting to watch Jaime become more immersed into Steve’s world and, of course, it’s always great to see the two of them together. However, their budding romance seems to have cooled somewhat—maybe Jaime didn’t like the mustache either.            

MADDIE: “I thought ‘The Return of Bigfoot’ wasn’t as good as the first Bigfoot story. The fight scenes lagged on a lot, and towards the end of part two, the special effects were pretty bad. But I liked Gillian (played by Sandy Duncan) because she helped Steve and Jaime—she sort of reminded me of Callahan. I liked how Jaime got involved in the Bigfoot storyline, and how she took over when Steve was injured. I liked seeing Shalon again, but I was sad that she ended up very sick at the end. I hope she survived and that her home planet sent more of the miracle drug that she donated to save Steve. She was supposed to use it to save herself.”

“Kill Oscar,” written by Arthur Rowe, introduced the “fembots” into the bionic universe. Created by Dr. Franklin, an embittered former OSI scientist played by John Houseman, the fembots are androids that look exactly like human beings and are designed to infiltrate OSI operations so that Franklin can seize control of an experimental weather control device. Oscar Goldman’s secretary Callahan is abducted and replaced by a lookalike robot, as is Dr. Rudy Wells’s assistant Lynda—and, ultimately, so is Oscar himself. In a reversal from “The Return of Bigfoot,” this time it’s Jaime who is near death at the end of part one, and Steve has to pick up where she left off to confront the threat. 

Talk about a face-off!

Parts one and two are great, thoroughly entertaining, and represent the bionic shows doing what they do best. But the storyline crashes right into a brick wall with part three, a talky, boring, and increasingly tedious exercise. Veteran actor Sam Jaffe shows up as an elderly U.S. Navy admiral, and he gets waaaay too much screen time and seems like he’s about to keel over at any moment. The scenes involving the U.S. military and government officials plotting a strategy against Dr. Franklin are deadly dull. It’s not a totally awful conclusion, but it certainly doesn’t live up to the two parts that preceded it, and is thus a big disappointment. It would also be the last time that Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers would be seen on screen together until the first reunion movie in 1987.

MADDIE: “I loved a lot of ‘Kill Oscar.’ The big twist, where we find out that Oscar has been replaced by a killer robot, was just so good. I did not see that coming. I liked the fight scene in part two, between Steve and the fembots—he throws a pole to destroy the device controlling the fembots, and then the fembots go blank and start walking around like zombies! My expectations for part three were very high, and I was disappointed. There was just a lot of long conversations, I found it hard to follow, and when Steve and Jaime make it to the island where Franklin is hiding, it feels like they’re running around for like a half hour and nothing happens. But parts one and two were really compelling.”

Maddie says she lost some interest in the series following the conclusion of “Kill Oscar,” so she doesn’t have much to say about subsequent installments. But I consider these other Season Four episodes notable:


“Nightmare in the Sky,” in which Farrah Fawcett makes her final appearance in the series by playing astronaut/test pilot Kelly Wood, the character she portrayed back in the Season One episode “The Rescue of Athena One.” Kelly comes under suspicion when her plane—a $15 million aircraft—disappears. She claims the plane had been attacked by a World War II fighter, but no other aircraft was detected in the area. Steve, convinced of Kelly’s innocence, sets out to clear her name.    

“The Most Dangerous Enemy” is a rare chance for Martin E. Brooks as Dr. Rudy Wells to take center stage. Rudy and Steve fly to a remote island to check on a scientist who has been working on a drug to boost human intelligence. Things go very wrong when Rudy is bitten by a chimpanzee that was used as a test subject for the drug—and, like the chimp, he begins to exhibit increased strength and growing mental instability. By this point, despite the fact that Brooks was the third actor to play Rudy, he had proven himself to be a key element that should be used on a regular basis, much as DeForest Kelley had done by the end of the first season of the original Star Trek. It’s interesting to see him and Steve as opponents, especially when Rudy declares, “I made you and only I know how to stop you!”

The doctor is out—of his mind.

   

The oddball “A Bionic Christmas Carol” is exactly what you think it would be, with Ray Walston as Ebenezer Scrooge—er, I mean Horton Budge, a penny-pinching businessman developing technology for America’s space program. But it seems that the project is being sabotaged, so Steve is sent to check it out—over the Christmas holiday, much to his annoyance. Dick Sargent (Bewitched’s Darren No. 2) plays Bob Cratchit—er, I mean Bob Crandall. Steve ends up functioning as the ghosts from the Dickens story, subjecting Budge to a night that will transform him from a miser to a mensch. I got a kick out of this one, don’t ask me why.

"Bah-onic humbug!"

(By the way, there’s a scene in this episode where Steve is in a department store, and over his shoulder, in the background, you can see an original Six Million Dollar Man action figure on a shelf!) 

The two-part “Death Probe” was another popular storyline, and I remember  loving it when I was a kid. A Soviet space probe accidentally lands in Wyoming, and the Soviets want to get it back before the technology falls into American hands. The probe, however, thinks it’s on Venus, which is where it had been intended to land, and poses a threat to anyone who gets in its way. Steve is sent in to stop the probe, but the machine is damn near indestructible, more than a challenge for Col. Austin. 

"You up for a game of stickball?"

Watching “Death Probe” all these years later, it’s not nearly as exciting or as epic as I thought it was back in 1977. Cool story concept, and the probe itself has an interesting design, but the action gets a little tedious—a result of the limited production budget, no doubt. I’m sure it worked a lot better on paper.   

I liked “Danny’s Inferno,” in which Steve is assigned to protect teenager Danny Lasswell, who has inadvertently created a new form of thermochemical energy—and, as a result, has been targeted for kidnapping. I thought Lanny Horn put in a good, effective performance as Danny—he’s a Hollywood depiction of a stereotypical nerd, to be sure, complete with a bad hairstyle, shlumpy clothes, and oversized geek glasses. But I found him to be a likable character and I was rooting for him. 

This kid would probably be a billionaire today, laughing at the whole lot of us.

For the most part, other episodes in Season Four range from good (“Task Force,” another fun adventure pairing Steve with Callahan) to decent (“The Infiltrators,” guest-starring Yvonne [Batgirl] Craig, in which Steve goes undercover as a boxer and wears a hilariously ridiculous “belly shirt” while training) to mediocre (“Double Trouble,” featuring Flip Wilson, “Vulture of the Andes,” and the two-hour “The Thunderbird Connection”).

I must also mention “To Catch the Eagle,” the next-to-last episode of the season, which is most notable for featuring Steve without his mustache for the first time since Season Three. Perhaps to compensate, Lee Majors then started letting his hair get much longer and bushier.   

But there are two episodes in the fourth season that I place at the very bottom of the barrel, and both are backdoor pilots for new series that deservedly never got off the ground.

“The Bionic Boy,” which originally aired as a two-hour TV movie, takes everything that made the original “Bionic Woman” episodes so great and basically throws all of it out the window. It’s an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, but that’s never something you can plan for. 

One trip to the well too many.

“The Bionic Woman” wasn’t intended as anything other than a particularly good installment of The Six Million Dollar Man—there were no future plans for Jaime, so there was a lot of freedom to do whatever it took to make the story as strong as possible. Hell, they killed her, with no intention of bringing her back. By and large, the story is about Steve, and how he’s affected by what happens throughout. Steve has a personal history with Jaime right from the start, and we watch their love grow. The chemistry between Majors and Wagner was strong and unique.         

In contrast, Steve is basically a supporting player in “The Bionic Boy,” which focuses on teenager Andy Sheffield, a character with whom Steve has no personal connection. Andy, paralyzed in an accident, is given a chance to regain the use of his legs through bionic implants, and Steve is assigned to help the boy adjust to his new situation. It’s Andy’s story, pure and simple. Steve has no real personal stake here, there are large chunks where he’s not even on screen, and Andy, played by Vincent Van Patten, is just not an interesting enough character to pick up the slack. This was clearly intended as a launchpad for a third bionic series, and in that regard, as a pilot in which Lee Majors guest stars as Steve Austin, it’s effective enough—but as an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, which is what the audience is actually tuning in to watch, it’s a ripoff.  

And “The Ultimate Imposter” is even worse. This is an even more blatant attempt to use TSMDM to launch another series, with Steve Austin appearing only at the beginning and at the end. The rest of the time, we’re following the exploits of Joe Patton, subject of an OSI experiment to transfer information from a computer directly into a human brain. Patton, played by Stephen Macht, is by and large a charisma-free zone, providing no reason for people to want to watch him on a weekly basis. Once again, people tuning in to watch their favorite bionic man are left feeling cheated.  

Uh… who are you, and why should we care?

Overall, Season Four was creatively uneven, but still, by and large, it was enjoyable. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, Season Five would not be an improvement.  

NEXT TIME: The end, a new beginning, and another end.

© All text copyright Glenn Greenberg, 2013.

A BIONIC LOOK BACKWARDS

My wife has given me some great birthday gifts over the years. But one of the very best—and one that I’ve been able to enjoy for a particularly extended period of time—is the Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection DVD box set, which I received shortly after it was released in 2010. 

To say that it is all-inclusive would be an understatement. This collection includes the three original TV movies that introduced and began to establish Colonel Steve Austin, astronaut, who, after a tragic accident (or was it?), would be remade into something better—stronger—faster; every episode of all five seasons of the weekly series, including the “crossover” episodes of The Bionic Woman; and all three reunion TV movies from the late 1980s/early 1990s that brought Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner back to their iconic roles of Austin and his female counterpart, Jaime Sommers. And there are hours of retrospective materials, including extensive interviews with Majors, Wagner, co-stars Richard Anderson (O.S.I. chief Oscar Goldman) and Martin E. Brooks (Dr. Rudy Wells), and executive producer Harve Bennett, along with wonderfully informative episode commentaries by uber-talented writer/producer Kenneth Johnson, who created the Bionic Woman and introduced Sasquatch to the series as a recurring antagonist.  

As a kid, several years before I latched on to Star Trek, I was a huge fan of both bionic series. After TSMDM and TBW went off the air, I watched the syndicated reruns, which were broadcast every evening around dinnertime on Channel 5 in New York City. As an adult, I’d catch an occasional episode of either series when they were running on the Sci Fi Channel. So I have a long history with the shows and their characters. Armed with the box set, I looked forward to revisiting that world—but I didn’t intend to do it alone.

As I did with Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Animated Series to the first six movies, and with the entire Star Wars movie saga, I decided to bring my daughter Maddie along for the ride. One Saturday night shortly after I received the box set, I cracked open the case containing the first disc, put the DVD into the player, sat Maddie down on the couch next to me, and dived into the original TV movie (which, in syndication, was retroactively titled “The Moon and the Desert”).

And from there, for the next year or so, we watched everything that followed. Maddie was seeing it all for the first time, of course. And it had been so long since I had seen most of the episodes that they were almost completely new to me, as well. So what did we think? Read on.

THE ORIGINAL TV MOVIES

The biggest differences between the first TV movie and everything that came after it are the casting and the character portrayals. Lee Majors eases into the role of Steve Austin almost immediately, but Darren McGavin is playing his supervisor instead of Richard Anderson—and McGavin isn’t even playing Oscar Goldman. Instead, he’s Oliver Spencer, and he’s so cold, so business-like, that it’s impossible to imagine him and Steve ever forming the brotherly relationship that Austin would eventually develop with Oscar.

Darren McGavin's Oliver Spencer (left) could save Steve Austin's life—but not his own job.

Dr. Rudy Wells, the brilliant scientist responsible for Steve’s rebirth as the world’s first bionic man, is played by Martin Balsam instead of Martin E. Brooks (or Brooks’s immediate predecessor in the role, Alan Oppenheimer). Balsam is fine as Wells—committed and very likable. In fact, it seems that the Balsam incarnation of Rudy may be even closer to Steve than the later versions. 

Balsam left—but the mustache stayed.

And the lovely Barbara Anderson, as Nurse Jean Manners, is clearly set up as an ongoing love interest for Steve—but alas, after this first film, we’ll never see or hear about her again. 

She wears white even when she's not in uniform.

Overall, if you accept the time period in which this TV movie was produced and the limited production values, it’s a pretty good start. 

MADDIE: “I thought it was kind of long and sometimes boring. But it was a pretty good beginning because it showed Steve Austin go from hating his bionics to realizing how much they saved him and how he could use them. At first, he yelled at the nurse who was taking care of him and he didn’t want her to touch him. But he gets over it by the end.

“I didn’t like the first Rudy because he wasn’t as funny as the main one (Brooks) and the main one seemed much younger.”

The two follow-ups, “Wine, Women and War” and “The Solid Gold Kidnapping,” produced by Glen A. Larson (who would later go on to create Battlestar Galactica), represent an uncertainty about how to handle the concept on an ongoing basis. Richard Anderson comes aboard as Oscar—though he’s not nearly as likable as he’ll later become—and Oppenheimer takes over as a less prominent Dr. Wells. But these two films portray Steve Austin pretty much as a bionic James Bond, going so far as to put Majors into a tuxedo and have him romance numerous women. They do a decent enough job of keeping things rolling, but Maddie and I agree that the most memorable thing about them—and not in a good way—is the song played over the opening credits:

That’s Dusty Springfield singing, by the way. Yeah, I was shocked too.

MADDIE: “That was not a good opening! The later opening was much better because there was no one singing and I liked the music better.”

THE WEEKLY SERIES

Shortly after the “The Solid Gold Kidnapping” aired, The Six Million Dollar Man returned as a weekly series. Harve Bennett, brought in by ABC to serve as the show’s executive producer, dispensed with the James Bond elements and emphasized Lee Majors’s down-to-earth, “aw shucks” personality, which was very much on display in the original TV movie. Bennett also conceived the iconic opening credits sequence—even voicing the “Steve Austin, a man barely alive” narration (I didn’t know that until I watched the interview with him included in the box set)—and he came up with the idea of using a slow-motion effect to show Austin using his bionics at super-speed. It’s important to note that years later, Bennett would save the Star Trek franchise by developing, producing, and co-writing the feature film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

As mentioned above, the series ran five seasons. Each one had its high points, its low points, and a lot of points in-between. Maddie and I agree that the fifth season is the weakest overall. By that point, Bennett was no longer involved and the people who took over—one of them being the notorious Fred Freiberger, who also oversaw the much-maligned final season of the original Star Trek—were less interested in exploring new territory, experimenting with the format, or even attempting to expand Steve Austin as a character, than they were in just cranking out routine episodes on time and on budget.

MADDIE: “The show had a good run. Some episodes were really good, some were really bad.”

For the most part, the series was grounded in the real world, with Steve Austin’s bionics being the only outlandish element that audiences had to accept in a given episode. Steve’s most frequent antagonists were corrupt U.S. government agents, organized crime figures, or, with the Cold War still in full swing at the time, spies from the Soviet Union. (Incidentally, Richard Anderson’s pronunciation of the word “Soviets” never failed to make me chuckle—it sounded like “sahviets.”) But every now and then, the show embraced its science-fiction aspects and featured Steve in more unusual situations. Those episodes tended to stand out, and they are some of the most fondly remembered installments. They’re certainly the ones that I remembered most over the years.

MADDIE: “I preferred the episodes where Steve was fighting enemy spies or criminals. The science-fiction episodes were okay too, but sometimes they were hard to follow.

“I think I liked the two-or-three-parters the most. They always seemed to have the best plots.  

“The only thing I didn’t like about Steve Austin was that he was constantly hooking up with the women he met. I think he should have been with fewer women, maybe just one or two per season.

“I liked Oscar—he was funny! I loved how he called everyone ‘pal’ or ‘babe.’ Sometimes he and Steve were best friends, and sometimes there was tension between them.

“Rudy Wells was a fun character. He always thought the scientific things that were really boring were really cool!”

Maddie and I are more or less in agreement about what constitutes the best and the worst of The Six Million Dollar Man. Here are our comments on each season:

SEASON ONE


The first season, which contained only 13 episodes, gets off to a good start with “Population: Zero,” about the entire population of a small town dying under mysterious circumstances. Steve’s investigation leads to a vengeful ex-government scientist demanding to be paid a fortune or he’ll kill another town. 

Interestingly, the second episode, “Survival of the Fittest,” in which Steve and Oscar survive a plane crash and are targeted by enemy agents on a deserted island, was recycled almost entirely two years later as a first-season installment of The Bionic Woman, entitled “Fly Jaime.”


MADDIE: “I enjoyed that episode the first time around, but when I saw it redone on The Bionic Woman, I was like, ‘I know everything that’s going to happen in this!’”

“The Rescue of Athena One” established the tradition of having a guest appearance each season by Lee Majors’s wife at the time, Farrah Fawcett-Majors (at least for the first four seasons).  

Farrah as astronaut Kelly Woods, paving the way for Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

MADDIE: “I thought the Farrah Fawcett episodes were ‘eh.’ I wanted to see Steve with Jaime.”

There are no real clunkers in the first season, but I’d say the true highlights are “Day of the Robot,” in which Steve battles a powerful android that looks exactly like his close friend (played by John Saxon), and “Burning Bright,” in which William Shatner plays another friend of Steve’s, a fellow astronaut, who returns to Earth from a space mission transformed after an encounter with a strange energy field. Shatner’s performance is, without a doubt, among his most over-the-top—he’s absolutely chewing the scenery, at times laughably so. But he’s never anything less than totally compelling, and Majors, who mostly plays Austin as cool-as-a-cucumber, provides a nice counterbalance.   

'Nuff said.

MADDIE: “I liked seeing William Shatner in that episode because we were just finishing up watching all of the Star Trek movies, so it was fun to see him again. He was very emotional and the way he talked made me laugh.”

SEASON TWO

This was the first full-length season—22 episodes, some of which rank among the very best of the series. There are a few real clunkers too. Let’s get those out of the way first. 

In “Lost Love,” Steve is reunited with an old girlfriend, Barbara Thatcher, whom he almost married seven years earlier. But Barbara is now mourning the death of her husband, a prominent scientist who worked for the U.S. government. Steve sees Barbara’s newly widowed status as an opportunity to rekindle their romance, and he and Barbara start seeing each other again. Trouble ensues when Barbara gets a phone call from Europe, and it’s her supposedly-dead husband on the line. This would have been a fairly mediocre episode no matter what, but it’s fatally wounded by guest star Linda Marsh as Barbara. With this episode, Barbara is positioned as the great love of Steve’s life. But there’s absolutely no spark between the two of them—they have about as much chemistry as Andy Garcia and Sofia Coppola had in The Godfather Part III. Marsh’s performance overall doesn’t help matters. She seems too mature and too elite for Steve, in looks, demeanor, the way she carries herself, the way she dresses, the way she talks. She seems more like his troubled aunt than a lover. To make matters worse, Marsh displays little-to-no personality in the role. She’s about as compelling as a brick, with her performance ranging from stiff and mannered to annoying and overwrought. 

Best left lost.

The show would introduce another woman from Steve’s past later in the season—with far more successful results.       

In “The Cross-Country Kidnap,” a young Donna Mills plays an equestrienne who hopes to make the U.S. Olympic team. But she’s also a world-class computer cryptography expert (!) who needs to be protected by Steve when she’s targeted for kidnapping by enemy operatives. This one made me groan.

And the less said about “Taneha,” the better. It’s really one of the worst episodes of the series. Steve Austin spends most of it hunting down a cougar that’s supposedly the last of its kind. Some people want to protect it. Others want to kill it. I just wanted it to be over. WEAK.  

This episode belongs in kitty litter.

MADDIE: “‘Taneha’ was SO STUPID. And then they did an episode of The Bionic Woman that was almost just like it!”  

For sheer audacity alone, I have to mention “The Pal-Mir Escort,” which is basically “Steve Austin Protects Golda Meir From Assassins.” Not a great episode, but certainly fun to watch. There are some really cute moments between Majors and guest star Anne Revere, who plays Golda—er, I mean, Prime Minister Salka Pal-Mir of the nation of Eretz—as a tough, wise, feisty old woman with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.    

With “The Deadly Replay,” the series introduces a major—and shocking—bit of retroactive continuity. Steve learns that the crash that nearly killed him and caused him to become bionic was no accident—it was an act of sabotage. Presumably the producers had second thoughts about this revelation, because it was never referred to again.      

MADDIE: “‘The Deadly Replay’ was AWESOME. It involved a mystery, and in the end, we find out why Steve crashed—that it wasn’t an accident. That adds more to the story and gives us a better understanding of what was really going on when Steve took that flight.”            

“Straight On ’Til Morning” is notable for being the first episode in which Steve encounters extraterrestrial beings. There would be a far more memorable encounter with aliens in Season Three.

“Stranger in Broken Fork” is an entertaining episode in which an amnesia-stricken Steve ends up defending a home for the mentally ill from townspeople who don’t want the facility in their community.

“Steve Austin, Fugitive,” the final episode of the season, is a personal favorite of mine. It’s compelling, funny, picks up on continuity established in the first season, and introduces Oscar’s secretary, the adorable Peggy Callahan (played by Jennifer Darling), who will become a recurring character on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. In a nutshell, Steve is framed for a murder and is pursued by the authorities. The only person he can turn to for help is Callahan, whom he must entrust with the secret of his bionic body parts.

Jennifer Darling as Callahan (right): A most welcome addition to the series. 

MADDIE: “I like Callahan a lot! I loved seeing her talking on the phone to her mother, and we see that there are, like, 25 locks on the front door of her apartment! I like the way Callahan talks, she’s very small and very funny and she gets into these crazy situations but she always finds a way to help. I was glad to see her come back in later episodes.”

There’s also a bizarre-but-amusing scene featuring a clerk at an electronics shop, played by none other than Lee Majors wearing heavy makeup and false teeth.

An old Baba Booey?

But most significantly, the second season introduced two more bionic characters—both would return, but only one would capture America’s heart.      

In “The Seven Million Dollar Man,” Steve learns of the existence of Barney Miller (later changed to “Hiller” after the series Barney Miller launched on ABC), a second, more powerful bionic man secretly created by Rudy Wells. Barney, played by Monte Markham, is corrupted by his newfound strength and abilities, and Steve has to bring him down before he gets totally out of control. Markham’s performance is nearly as over-the-top as Shatner’s in “Burning Bright”—subtlety doesn’t seem to be one of his strong suits. But again, Majors is so solid that he provides a nice contrast.

"Let go of me—there's more scenery I want to chew!"

MADDIE: “I really liked that one. I liked the guy who played Barney—he reminded me of William Shatner! I liked how he hooked up with the nurse that Steve used to date. I didn’t like the way he thought he was better than Steve just because he cost a million dollars more, and he wasn’t nice like Steve. He would always talk out of the side of his mouth. But he was fun to watch because he would always try to do more than Steve and there was chemistry between him and Steve.” 

And then there’s “The Bionic Woman,” written by Kenneth Johnson. In this pivotal two-parter, Steve is reunited with his childhood friend Jaime Sommers, played of course by the lovely Lindsay Wagner. They fall in love, but a terrible skydiving accident nearly kills her. Steve convinces Oscar to make her bionic to save her life. Following her recovery, they plan to marry, but Jaime’s body starts to reject her new parts. Despite Rudy’s best efforts, Jaime dies on the operating table, leaving Steve heartbroken and alone.

Wagner is simply phenomenal as Jaime. She has great chemistry with Majors and Anderson. And her presence brought out a whole new side of Majors and his portrayal of Steve Austin. He’s more romantic, charming, and vulnerable than we’ve ever seen before. (The scene in which Steve desperately begs Oscar to make Jaime bionic is one of the most powerful bits of acting that Majors ever did in the series. He would not get many more opportunities to show this kind of range.)          

   
When audiences across America saw these two episodes, they fell in love with Jaime almost as much as Steve did, and they were appalled by her demise. They demanded that the tragic ending somehow be reversed—and at the start of Season Three, they got their wish. 

As I recall, I didn’t get to see “The Bionic Woman” until after I saw its sequel. In fact, “The Return of the Bionic Woman,” the two-parter that kicked off the third season on September 14, 1975, may well have been the first episode of The Six Million Dollar Man that I ever watched in its original broadcast. I would have been six years old at the time, just starting first grade. Fortunately, there was enough exposition and flashbacks to the previous Jaime story that I was able to follow along. 

Jaime quickly became one of my first crushes, joining Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, Yvonne Craig as Batgirl, Jessica Lange as Dwan in the 1976 remake of King Kong, and Cheryl Ladd as Kris Munroe.    

MADDIE: “I loved Jaime. She and Steve were already friends so they already had chemistry and she was close to his parents because her parents had died when she was a kid. Steve was dumbstruck when he saw her again playing tennis. They carved their initials into a tree. It was very cute. Jaime seemed very easygoing and fun. I was really scared when she was in the telephone booth in the rain and she was screaming for Steve—I knew something bad was going to happen. I was really upset when she died and he kissed her on the forehead. It was really emotional.

“Lindsay Wagner had a great smile and she was very pretty. She and Lee Majors seemed like they were perfect for each other.  

“The only thing I didn’t like about ‘The Bionic Woman’ were the two songs, ‘Got to Get Loose’ and ‘Sweet Jaime.’ They were very silly. Lee Majors sang them, and he wasn’t that good. The episodes really didn’t need the songs, they could have just played background music. I would have liked that better.”  

Next time, we’ll pick up with Season Three and go through the rest of the series, wrapping up with the three reunion movies. See you then!

© All text copyright Glenn Greenberg, 2013.