3x8 The Candidate's Wife Affair

I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Candidate's Wife Affair is an obvious and contrived riff on The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In this version of the story, it's the (you guessed it) candidate's wife that's brainwashed. Well, sort of. It's complicated because there are multiple subplots about body doubles and romance. They try to cram a lot into this episode, and very little of it worked for me. When it's not silly 1960s political hysterics, it's a tragic romance tempered for 1960s television.

Body doubles

Senator Bryant is newly wed to Miranda, and Napoleon Solo has been ordered to protect Miranda at all costs. The worst trope of Man from UNCLE is incompetence, and this episode uses it as its inciting incident. Obviously Solo loses track of Miranda because she goes to a beauty salon and Napoleon isn't permitted in because he's a man. Miranda is kidnapped and swapped with a body double.

Irina is, purely by coincidence, a perfect double of Miranda Bryant. She's been brainwashed by science so that she herself believes she is Miranda Bryant. Irina has not been brainwashed to do anything evil. She's just a placeholder for Miranda while the villain re-programs Miranda with science to be evil.

The forgery is detected almost immediately by the UNCLE communications team. They monitor voice prints and detect subtle differences in Irina and Miranda's voices.

Nobody knows where the real Miranda is, though, and Irina really does believe she's Miranda. For much of the episode, it feels like we're supposed to have plausible doubt that Irina isn't Miranda. But the teaser of the episode revealed the swap to us, so as viewers we know what's going on. There's no tension whatever. UNCLE aimlessly tries to verify that the woman they have is not the real Mrs. Bryant, and bizarrely the matter of fingerprints never comes up. It's not frustrating, it doesn't induce anxiety, it's just boring to watch.

Wife swap

By the final act of the episode, the villains have injected Miranda with science so that she, I think, follows the commands of Mr. Bryant's evil campaign manager. Why they couldn't have just killed Miranda and left Irina in place, I don't understand. It was well established that Senator Bryant had only recently met her, and Irina seems to have most of the important memories required to pass her off as Miranda. But for whatever reason, the villains want to swap Miranda for Irina, so they have to go kidnap Irina and replace her with Miranda.

Off screen, Illya and Solo obtain the antidote to the re-programming injection, and de-program the real Miranda. The evil campaign manager tries to get Miranda to do something evil, so she shoots him instead.

And that's the end of the episode.

Oh, and Irina is a beatnik judo instructor. She gets deprogrammed as well, and gets some money from UNCLE for her trauma.

Solo romance

As far as I can tell, there's meant to be a conflicted romance in the middle of this story (such as it is). Napoleon and Irina are, I think, meant to be falling in love. It's really hard to tell, because they barely even kiss, but later Irina gives a heartfelt apology to Napoleon for being too affectionate with him. She emphasizes that she loves her husband, and that Solo's life is too full of violence and deception for her.

The subplot is played extremely lightly, but it's given a lot of screen time and there's Irina's confession scene, so I suspect it was supposed to be a major plot element in an early draft. I could be wrong, but the plot is so contrived that I feel like it was written primarily for the romance. Solo can't fall in love with the actual incumbent First Lady, so the story swaps her out for a fake who believes she's real. Solo isn't sure she's not real, either, so there's still the angst of a "forbidden love" but without any of the 1960s moral implications.

Or maybe it happened the other way round. Maybe the contrived body double swap got written, and then somebody had the bright idea to add forbidden love for lack of anything better for the plot to do between the teaser and the finale.

Actual body doubles

Ironically, in an incredulous episode about coincidental lookalikes, I have to confess that I was confused about a real life coincidental lookalike. The actor who plays Senator Bryant is Richard Anderson, and he looks so much like Julian Glover that I spent most of the episode assuming this was a very early role for Julian Glover.

Here's Richard Anderson in this episode:

Here's Julian Glover in Empire Strikes Back:

It's uncanny, and I hate that it partially absolves this episode. Then again, I've never kissed either Richard Anderson or Julian Glover.

Bad episode

Leaning on the incompetent hero and an obviously recycled plot from a much better movie, this episode doesn't have much to offer. I guess they had to shoot something to show that week, and this is what they came up with. Better luck next time!