THE INNOCENT: Bonnie Franklin as Peggy Durrance, the Patridges's maid at Porlock Hall (but describes herself as Mrs. Partridge's "companion"). Her father worked for the estate and she stayed on even though she fears the new Squire because she thinks his wife is a dear old lady. She ends up helping Solo and discovering her masters are both insane. Bonnie Franklin slummed it in television, mostly comedy, from adolescence on, finding more success on the stage, until she was cast as the single mom in Norman Lear's hit sitcom One Day at a Time (1975-1984). For a certain generation (mine), that ensured her immortality.
REVIEW: You can't trust birds in the UNCLE universe. If it's not THRUSH, it's a British supervillain called G. Emory Partridge who sends you pear trees if you left him for dead years ago. He's played by George Sanders, which was surely a big deal, a proper film actor. And when I say supervillain, I mean it. He lives in a castle with secret passages, dungeons, trap chairs, and a hedge maze full of booby traps and an honest-to-God patrol WOLF. He's bought up all the land around it and runs it like an aristocrat. His men carry umbrellas tipped with a soporific and drives around New York in a bus filled with comperes. He explains his convoluted plots, captures Illya to lure in Solo to lure in Waverly (why not just umbrella the latter? I guess he wanted revenge on all three). And while he definitely shows psychotic tendencies (his misogynistic reaction to the Innocent, for example), his wife Edith (Jeanette Nolan) is certified. She acts like a kooky old lady who's started to get confused, but she was obviously a super agent in her day - master torturer, escape artist, and psychotic killer. And Partridge always defers to her. It's as if they walked out of an Avengers episode.
While Illya gets captured early on and thrown in the dungeon (his valiant escape attempt fails), Solo is in rare form. Once he gets to Eastsnout and visits the unfriendly pub, he's throwing darts like he's Robin Hood, riding on the back of a car to get to the castle without Innocent Peggy noticing, and infiltrates the castle without Partridge initially noticing. He's captured and tied to the rack, but takes torture like Bond does in Casino Royale, acting like it tickles when it's obviously painful. To save Peggy from a hot poker, he does accede to Partridge's demands, but it seems Waverly doesn't mind flying to England to meet with the villain anyway, and it's all in service of a final joke I don't quite get, so that's the weakest part of the story for sure. But he soon escapes with his friends in tow, and the villains are hoisted on their own petards in the hedge maze. Especially like the sword tripping the wire. He impresses himself, too.
And you can tell a bad guy was in charge of the county because once he's been arrested, the pub is lively, welcoming to women, and Peggy gets a makeover. That tracks.
HEARD ON CHANNEL D: "Would you like for me to open the gate?" [GROWLING] "No, that's not necessary, thank you. I'll consider myself captured." (Jenkins and Illya, the latter facing a snarling wolf behind a gate)
BONDED: Co-written by Antony Ellis, co-scripter of CBS's 1954 television adaptation of Casino Royale, an hour-long live show that apparently took a lot of liberties with Ian Fleming’s first novel - Bond is an American and Felix Leiter (renamed Clarence Leiter) is British, for example. Illya says "Bon appetit" when the wolf gets Forrest, a quip repeated by Bond in You Only Live Twice after a thug falls into pool of man-eating fish, and again in License to Kill after leaving a thug in a container of maggots. (It's also featured in a Bond short story published in Playboy in 1997, but the circumstances are very different.) George Sanders played the Saint in the 30s and 40s, a role that would be taken on by Roger Moore in the 60s, and which would lead to him being offered the role of Bond. From Russia With Love also features a tricky hedge maze. While the phrase "Home, James" spoken to the bus driver compere has nothing to do with Bond, in a spy show, one must accept it as a conscious nod to 007.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: Fun villains built on a theme can be silly, but are at least sure to enliven any episode.
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