Age Before Duty
Get Smart

A vengeful clerk in the CONTROL photo lab doctors staff pictures with Dorian Gray, a voodoo paint that ages every number correspondingly to death.

A little bit of Dorian Gray in a wastebasket is applied to the clerk’s own picture, the traitor now working for KAOS at a mere $100,000 salary (and a ticket to Cuba, “we can manage that, not Miami”) passes into senescence and expires, taking his voodoo with him.

The Jinn Who Clears the Way
Hawaii Five-O

Wo Fat is the jinn, he clears the way by murder, first of every soldier and guard dog at a government installation, so as to acquire a prototype guidance system. Then, he recruits a young Maoist to the purpose, murders the man’s father and older brother, making him head of the family and thus in a position to see that the guidance system is transported in the old man’s coffin to Taiwan where he is to be buried, finally to the mainland.

All U.S. intelligence is mobilized. McGarrett knows his man, analyzes the plot and presents the evidence to the young Maoist, who cannot believe a comrade could do such a thing. The facts speak for themselves.

Gen. Hong Su issues a coded message from Peking, criticizing the “trail of devastation”, Wo Fat is hardly miffed.

He’s exchanged, after his arrest, for a U-2 pilot, on orders of the State Department.

The Barefoot Stewardess Caper
McCloud

It begins in Paris on Saturday, October 14, and concludes in Boonville on Halloween.

A bevy of international stewardesses have a second career as cat burglars. The plan, devised by international jewel thief Alex Demarest, is to filch the disparate pieces of the Marchesa Collection (Paris, London, Rome, Monte Carlo), and escape to Brazil.

Sir Thomas Langdon shoots one of the girls in the act. He hires a strongarm man to dump her body in the Thames and retrieve the gem, but is finally murdered by the fellow, who wants to muscle in on the Collection.

That’s how Sgt. Broadhurst and McCloud enter the case, searching the girls’ New York hotel room after the first murder.

The American stewardess skims off some of the take to be fenced by her boyfriend, a café pianist in Rome, who’s eventually killed in a shootout with Sgt. Broadhurst. The body is shipped back to the States for a New Orleans-style funeral, in an ending that brings to mind Ocean’s Eleven.

There is some charming second-unit or library footage, and an extremely adroit use of sets, the back lot and Los Angeles locations to give a picture of Europe. J.D. Cannon and Ken Lynch vie in homage to Ned Sparks.

Squeeze Play
Magnum, P.I.

Robin loses “a signed Picasso” and a sizeable quantity of “frog champagne” at cards with a publisher named Buzz. The final wager is a year’s ownership of Robin’s Nest on the outcome of a softball game between Buzz’s Blasters and Robin’s King Kamehameha Club Paddlers.

The Blasters’ victory over real Washington Senators secures Buzz against antitrust action. Buzz has plans for Robin’s Nest that include Higgins as a comedy butler, but not Magnum. “I have my own security.”

The Blasters are a team of ringers. Magnum finds one of his own in teammate Lola’s ex-husband, now a construction worker and behind in his alimony. He once struck a journalist.

Buzz has him arrested at the top of the ninth by Federal marshals on the outstanding warrant.

LOLA: But what about the statue of limitations?

BUZZ: What are you talking about? That’s in New York City!

“She sure could play a sweet second base,” says the ex-husband. The Paddlers lose.

Buzz has a left-hand nephew named Mickey. It’s moving day for the Masters estate, Magnum is playing solitaire on Higgins’ desk, Mickey brings in a copy of the Mona Lisa wearing a bikini top, notes the queen of hearts face-down, the cards are marked and belong to the publisher. “All his decks are marked,” Mickey explains cheerfully.

“So sue me,” says Buzz. “I’ll do better than that,” Robin replies, “I’ll write about it.”