THE INNOCENT: 13-year-old (looks younger) Kurt Russell plays Christopher Larson, a kid who takes an interest in Napoleon Solo at an airport, decides to change his travel plans to follow him, learns he's in a spy story, and is too persistent to shake off. This was intended to bring in the youth audience and coincided with merchandising plans for a range of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. gear, ranging from toy guns to trench coats. This worked out well for Russell, who was later cast in a series of toy commercials for Mattel, which had developed its own line of spy toys under the banner of "Agent Zero M". We don't really need to get too far into Kurt Russell's career, since he's a well-known superstar, but AT THIS POINT, he'd had 8 other TV/movie roles, including the boy who kicked Elvis Presley in It Happened at the World's Fair. He was just off Guns of Diablo, a fairly prominent role opposite Charles Bronson and Susan Oliver.
REVIEW: They may have wanted to draw in the kids by making them believe they could share an adventure with Solo (Illya gets sidelined and sadly disappears from the narrative not long after getting shot in the shoulder), just like their avatar Kurt Russell did, but it also feels like one of the most violent episodes yet. Solo keeps gunning people down at close range before the baddies can get at THEIR guns, a fellow agent gets stabbed, and the story opens on a village full of dead people (give or take the old guy still moving because he can't help it, yes, that one in the above picture). I'm not sure parents would be too happy for their kids to talk to strangers, witness murders, eat that many desserts, play with street dogs, and hang around a chemical powder that ages people to death (but the mom doesn't seem put off by it, UNCLE probably provided young Chris with a cover story).
Regardless, there's a strong opener introducing the UNCLE helicopter (I'm always struck by how public the org is considering it works out of secret bases), though Solo and Illya's hazmat spacesuits are rather silly. Very creepy atmosphere on the Scottish island where everyone's lying old and dead in the street, and we can forgive the lacklustre "destruction" of the village because there's no way the show could have shown that. It's just a couple of smoke grenades. They recover what turns out to be a dead seal (hi kids!) that was infected with a deadly chemical created during the War by a Japanese scientist in Norway, washed up in Scotland and killed everyone. It's not a virus so it can't have gone airborne, and we're told repeatedly that it becomes inert after it dries. Certainly, the doctor doing the autopsy on it - Waverly has to look away, because he's positively useless - doesn't die even when he's right over it without a mask. So the science - which also involves "geriatric antibodies" that slow down aging - is complete nonsense, and the finale, with the busted barrel of deadly chemical is safe no matter what your instincts tell you. And the villains can't retro-engineer it from the dry powder that's all over the place either. The science is really where the episode fails.
Fortunately, there's a lot of nice spycraft. We're jetsetting around Northern Europe, though the villains are from Asia - yes, there's a why actor playing a Japanese general, but at least his striking female assassin Tomo (Tura Satana) actually is Japanese. Solo is consistently followed, there are several assassination attempts (one of which gets Agent Henderson right in front of the kid), and a special decoder ring that leads to the weapons cache. That whole bit of business is great. Just getting it to Solo is a problem (the kid winds up with it), he uses a chewing gum trick to hide it in a restaurant (where the slapstick chase happens), and has to figure out clues that lead to a statue's ring finger, etc. After being captured once, he uses Chris's (or Chekhov's) trick box to create a distraction and escape, and then has to contend with a bug placed on the boy. He puts it on a friendly dog, but the damn thing follows them to the cave anyway, where you'd think he'd jump a bad guy, but no, it's Chris who gets in on the action and disarms one of the thugs with a stick. As a superspy story, it's pretty exciting stuff.
So your appreciation of the episode really comes down to what you think of Solo teaming up with a child. I think it mostly works. They do a good job of making it difficult for Solo to put the kid back on a plane to his mother in New York, and even the way the boy gets into the adventure plays as a well-meaning mistake. Solo tells him he's an international spy and gives him a fake little mission to get him out of the way, but he sees things he shouldn't have. The boy is clearly traumatized after that because he becomes quite standoffish, but good on Solo for spinning a yarn to defuse the problem. Chris's motivation, all this while, was finding a cool husband for his "hot mom". So we gotta see the mom at the end. By that point, Chris has decided that he can't match his mother with a spy who would never be home (never mind the danger), so we're on the edge of our seats. At first, Solo thinks the mother is a rather ordinary-looking lady and is relieved he doesn't have to meet her. It's not a great joke, so it's a bit better when he's mistaken and it's a very pretty one, though she still looks like a young suburban mom and not the kind of babe Solo is really used to (unless they've been cast as the Innocent), so being walked off by Waverly is an okay tag, but not as funny as it might have been had they cast someone particularly sexy.
HEARD ON CHANNEL D: "Under torture, I tend to yell a great deal, and reveal absolutely nothing." (Solo)
BONDED: Leonard Strong (as General Yakamura) wasn't any more Asian than Joseph Wiseman as Dr. No, but that was his Hollywood specialty. Notably, he played the Claw, a much more politically incorrect villain in several episodes of Get Smart. Dinny Powell (Henderson) did stunts on many Bond films, starting with Dr. No and ending with Tomorrow Never Dies. To get us back to the Man from UNCLE toys (and the Agent Zero M toys, as well), both lines did as well as the Bond toys that had exploded in the same era.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: Even if it hadn't featured superstar-to-be Kurt Russell, there's enough spy action here to get my recommendation. Shame about the science.
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