THE INNOCENT: Yvonne Craig as Cecille Bergstrom, a down-on-her-luck mannequin restoration artist (interesting job) who takes care of her brother, an early victim of Dr. Dabree's brain-draining experiments. She helps UNCLE for the money and Solo keeps throwing it at her the more risks she has to take. She's not happy about it, but is in need, until she scores big and is suddenly planning for luxuries. She's a terrific screamer, and a terrible speller. Yvonne Craig was a dancer before she became an actor, and dated Elvis Presley in the early 60s, and Bill Bixby later. She's, of course, BEST known for playing Batgirl in the Batman '66 TV show (Batgirl Loves the Hulk?!), and has a memorable turn as an Orion in Star Trek. As her career tapered off, she went into real estate and activism, but still turned up for voice work as the grandmother in the children's animated show Olivia from 2009 to 2011. She died from cancer in 2015.
REVIEW: The Brain-Killer Affair was filmed early in the production schedule and there are tell-tale signs - the agents don't use the custom UNCLE gun, the full acronym is always spelled out, and there's a surplus of premise reminders like Solo walking into the HQ front, etc. Solo feels a little more ruthless, too, and they haven't relegated Illya to the less sexually active role yet. He first shows up lying down out of sight at Channel D (jumping back into his shoes when the alarm comes in) - what was he doing with the dispatcher? - and it's later implied he's had relations with a contact who is all legs. His presumptive liaisons are all sexier and more believable than Solo's with Cecille, as Craig plays her a little too young to date the suave agent. And, well, if you want to slip the episode earlier into the timeline, it could even be used to justify Waverly's slow speech, as if the brain drain really did have an effect, but I'm being facetious.
Director James Goldstone (who would go on to do the second Star Trek pilot - indeed, there are a lot of future Trek guest-stars in this, not that we can lay that at Goldstone's feet) does an admirable job, keeping the pace up, but also highlighting the script's thematic richness. I DO wish the chess games were more indicative of moves and countermoves by UNCLE and THRUSH in the main plot, but they're not NOT that. There are plenty of reversals on each side, and agents thinking ahead and trying to counter strategies in advance (it also ties into Waverly giving them false information under interrogation). Indeed, having a female villain means you can go after a player's "queen", just as in the first move we see on screen. I also greatly appreciate Cecille's weird job working with mannequins, which seems to tie into Dr. Dabree's hypnosis gun, which turns her enemies into stiff dummies. Goldstone's only real misstep is in the stairway fight, which I find a little limp (the music should be helping more), but these are always hard to stage on a TV budget. But transitions like the Innocent's brother smashing a mannequin's head with a hammer, which both foreshadows the same thing happening to Solo and visually remarks on the brain damage being done by the doctors, make me forgive the format's limitations.
The "black queen" of the piece of very pleasantly played by Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, here getting to play the mad scientist role. She even wears a wig that evokes the Bride's gray streaks. She's perfected a machine that can short-circuit a patient's brain so that they have a loss of active intelligence, and now plans to use it on Waverly to secretly addle one of UNCLE's top people. This would be more useful than killing him outright, as he would just normally be replaced without UNCLE missing a beat (in fact, he IS temporarily replaced by his Indian counterpart here, I wish they'd done more with this). It's unfortunate that Dr. Dabree's technique needs so much prep, because she has Waverly under her "care" for a long time before the agents track her and her second banana down. The latter ends up getting Dagger of the Minded, but she escapes even after falling down an elevator shaft (one of Solo and Illya's well thought-out tricks). She swears revenge on Solo, and sadly, never appears again.
HEARD ON CHANNEL D: "Instead of the mess and furor of assassinating an enemy physically, we destroy only that part of him which can do us harm. And before we are finished, we shall have ground U.N.C.L.E., along with Mr. Waverly, into the mud beneath our heels." (Dr. Dabree)
"I'd swear someone just stepped on my grave. Come on. I prefer dancing on my grave." (Solo)
BONDED: A "brain drain" device wouldn't be shown in Bond until 2015's SPECTRE, where Blofeld places Bond in a restraint chair and uses a robotic medical drill targeting specific regions of his brain to erase his memories. In 1967, Yvonne Craig would feature in In Like Flint, a Bond spoof starring James Coburn. Elsa Lanchester was married to Charles Laughton, who was a close real-life friend of Ian Fleming's. Indeed, Fleming once said Laughton was his visual inspiration for Auric Goldfinger. But neither he, nor Lanchester, were ever in any Bond media.
REWATCHABILITY - High: It's not the wittiest script in the season, by any margin - like, what's that big conversation about poverty doing there? - but in terms of pushing the SF superspy adventure, it really does the job. Fun guest stars, cool direction, plenty of gadgets and action, and the main cast is very well used.
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