THE INNOCENT: Kamala Devi as Deirdre Purbhani, an employee of the airline who was supposed to be on the plane that crashed, and would have died if her uncle, a former Maharajah (and unbeknownst to her, Thuggee cultist), had not requested she be replaced on the flight. She's very likable, showing enormous empathy for the people whose fate she failed to share, and indeed, not in the episode enough. Devi is also one of the very few actually Indian actors playing Indian characters in the ep, aside from a Thuggee extra and the hotel clerk, they're all white guys in brown face. (Neile Adams, who plays side-villain Sita, is Filipino.) Devi worked in Hollywood for a decade, only getting 14 roles, largely of the ethnic variety - Native Americans, Mesopotamians, South Asians - in movies and TV. One notable film is The Brass Bottle, a genie movie in which both she and Barbara Eden were strongly featured, and nominally the inspiration for I Dream of Jeannie.
REVIEW: It's fun to see other UNCLE agents in the wild, even if Solo is THE guy (and indeed, Illya does not appear this time) because they're a variable lot. "Mac" is a Scottish agent with an enormous family ring on his finger (so not great at blending in), and he's killed for his trouble. But he gets the experimental lie detector (the episode's MacGuffin) from an older lady played by Madge Blake who played Aunt Harriet on the old Batman show! She gives all the right crossword clues as passwords, and has a fun little scene with Mac. Not who you think of when you think of superspies, but the implication is that she recovered the MacGuffin after it was stolen by THRUSH, so sometimes it pays to be innocuous!
Set in India - Solo gets there on a fighter plane, which couldn't possibly make the trip, but is sure an exciting piece of stock footage - there's a lot of exoticism in this episode. It's pleasant, but retro, with an evil Maharajah who has started up the Thuggee cult again to steal from tourists (fatally) and has a giant statue of Kali on full display with blood in its basin. Yeah, why not? 1965 isn't a good time for sensitive portrayals of foreign lands and peoples, so even though the villain is contrasted with self-proclaimed "moderns", Solo spends a lot of money bribing these to get what he wants. That said, the Innocent is a very sympathetic character, and the Inspector, while set against Solo when the latter is framed for murder, is just seriously doing his job and saves the days at the end (I'd almost call the arrival of the police a deus ex machina, but Solo did call for them through a proxy... fair enough). So I like this as pulp fiction, the same way I might like the use of the Thuggee in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom i.e., with caveats.
What's most interesting is that the Thuggee don't really know what they have. The booby-trapped case (dropping it might cause it to explode, but not swinging it like a weapon, got it) is in their treasure room with other things stolen from tourists before their plane was destroyed. THRUSH is also in this, represented by a competing agent called Simpson who, like Solo, poses as an insurance claims adjuster. So there's some productive confusion at first, when Simpson sends an assassin to kill Solo (or the man marked with a thrush - I think the logo might have been glimpsed a couple episodes ago, but this is our clearest look) and the cultists kill him after he fails. I thought they were just being harsh with one of their own - they do kill Sita, a member who exposed them by wearing Mac's ring after she's supposed to have died on that flight - but no, they were responding to a hitman on their territory. The infrared stamp is a neat idea at any rate. Solo gets out of it by setting up a scarecrow and letting it be shot instead, showing a lot of gear he's not using under that jacket, nice detail. So Simpson is a separate threat, one whose every attempt to "team up" against the Thuggee fails (cuz it's better for the cultists to have it than THRUSH, ya nitwit). He's a threat when he needs to be, but he's mostly goofy, isn't he? His cover is pretty strong - just the "bad friend" Solo made on the trip - but he reveals himself to his counterpart anyway, gets knocked out, looks squeamish when he sees blood... Not THRUSH's best. And once the Inspector is on side, he can be dealt with more permanently and gets a "tour of India's prisons". Amusingly, the police haul him out of the airport and kick his suitcase around because he dropped it (I'm guessing he wasn't supposed to).
HEARD ON CHANNEL D: "Watch out for stray birds, dear. You know a thrush hates to have anything stolen from its nest." (Aunt Harriet... I mean Woman Tourist)
"I'm with the Unified Northern Casualty and Liability Exchange." (Solo's new solution for the UNCLE anagram)
"That's two floors apart. The fates fight us." (flirty Solo)
"India is a very poor nation. Our jails reflect that poverty." (The Inspector)
BONDED: No actual link to 007, but in relation to spy shows, David Sheiner (The Inspector) is a real favorite. He will not only appear, in different roles, in 5 episodes of UNCLE, but also 2 of I Spy and 6 of Mission: Impossible!
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: A fun international adventure that feels dated, sure, but still works quite well.
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