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| Production 43006 Original Airdate: November 16, 1975 | |||
 Episode-at-a-glance.
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| Teleplay by Sheridan Gibney Sydney Field | |||
| Directed by Cliff Bole | |||
| Guest Cast | |||
| Guest Star(s) Janet MacLachlan as Mrs. Cook Michael Conrad as Jimbo | |||
| Co-starring Rodney Allen Rippy as Ernest Cook Eddie Fontaine as Tony Anderson Jason Wingreen as Logan Barry Cahill as Det. Olmstead | |||
| With Benny Nickleberry as Charlie Virgil Charles Frye as Fred | |||
| Uncredited Carl | |||
| Broadcast Order | |||
| Season 3 | |||
| ← Previous | Next → | ||
| "The Bionic Criminal" | "The White Lightning War" | ||
Summary
Steve takes on the identity of a longshoreman when an agent, who is about to expose the ring smuggling super sensitive detecting devices, disappears. His bionic arm has been modified to send a blue flash to his bionic eye when his hand passes near the devices. Steve takes lodging at Mrs. Cook's boarding house, where the agent was last seen. Mrs. Cook's young son, Ernest, turns to Steve for help when his mother also disappears. In the interim, Ernest's smashed bike is repaired by the bionic man--which results in a rash of broken toys arriving on the boarding house steps.
Deconstructed
Quotes
Oscar: Going through my files again, eh?
Steve: (slightly ashamed) Well, I had nothing to do yesterday afternoon...
Steve: Its incredible Oscar. A microprocessing unit assembled on a single silicon chip, no bigger than a grain of rice, containing 5400 transistors. Its capable of performing 100,000 operations a second.
Logan: Clumsy, clumsy. You don't dump bodies in the ocean unless you want them to be found.
Ernest: The frame is all twisted. The wheels are all bent. If that got fixed it would be a miracle.
Steve: Sometimes miracles happen.
Ernest: I never saw one.
Jimbo: I can handle anything you can throw.
Ernest: Come on bike, get straight. Please bike, come on.
Steve: I didn't think having faith was such a wild idea.
Ernest: The spirits did a miracle and fixed my bike!
Charlie: Now listen Ernest, I don't care how you do it, but you see you get that bike fixed here, by tomorrow, or you're in big trouble.
Jimbo: Brennan's landlady saw us take him.
Tony: Are you sure about that?
Jimbo: Yeah, I just heard her tell that new guy Stoffer.
Tony: What's he got to do with it?
Jimbo: She came to warn him 'cause she thinks he's a fed too and from his reaction he is.
Steve: Oscar hold off sending your men onto the docks.
Oscar: Listen, have you got the chips or haven't you?
Steve: Well, I do and I don't. You see I may have to use them to bargain with.
Oscar: What! Are you crazy?!
Steve: No, just worried.
Steve: I tell you what, you take Ernie to your house this afternoon and I'll make sure the spirits get this bike fixed.
Charlie: You will?
Steve: I guarantee it.
Steve: I've got 'em, you want 'em.
Logan: Indeed I do. But I find it hard to believe that a government man would turn over such a valuable item for a woman he hardly knows.
Logan: No, no, please, I won't give you any trouble, only how, how could you do all this?
Steve: I don't have time to give you another demonstration, I got a bicycle to fix.
Ernest: You couldn't, it was magic.
Steve: Well, in a way you're right. It was the magic of science. You know, the kind of magic that sends man to the moon and things like that.
Trivia
- Steve uses the name Max Stoffer when posing as the longshoreman.
- Steve wears a mustache for the first time during this mission, a preview for the hirsute look Lee Majors would adopt in Season 4. He also wears an earring!
- Director Cliff Bole was a last-minute replacement for another director who had quit the episode. Bole would go on to direct a number of Six Million Dollar Man episodes.
- In a direct contrast to the earliest episodes, Steve is shown being actively interested in finding missions, to the point of even raiding Oscar's files for possibilities.
Gaffes
- Lee Majors calls them silicone chips, instead of silicon, a fairly common mix up. [1]
- The first shot of the episode is an establishing shot of the exterior of the OSI lab. This shot is recycled from the previous episode, "The Bionic Criminal", and in fact Maggie Sullivan can be seen sitting in the back of a pick-up truck as Carla Peterson.
- Why could Steve be concerned that the modification to his bionic eye might affect is other eye? (The bionic technician doesn't seem to think his statement is a joke.)
- Steve's earring disappears during the final fight sequence.
- Lee Majors looks unusually awkward during the sequence when he runs from the warehouse carrying the coconut oil box. He seems to be almost limping as he runs, and when he begins the action of jumping over the rail car, he bends his body in an unnatural way.
- When Steve uses a can of oil with microchips inside to infiltrate the villain's "lair", dialogue indicates that most, if not all, of the cans in that box contained the chips, something supported by Steve hiding the rest of the box. Yet when he uses his "blue flash" for the final time to find a can with the chips inside, there's no indication any of the other cans contained them.
Gallery
