After a year's break, I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
You hear a lot about how The Man from UNCLE became popular among the youth of the 1960s. I hadn't been born yet, so I have no idea, but I assume it's true because it's commonly said. I'm guessing this episode is an appeal to that audience. The theme music is swingier, brassier, and punchier, and this episode puts Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin uncomfortably close to teenage girls. It gets off to a bad start when Waverly believes it's necessary to remind Napoleon that the girls at the boarding school are too young for him. Luckily, the writers provide an adult teacher at the school for Solo to court, but Kuryakin is courted by a 16 year old, and ends up going on a date with her at the end of the episode. The date proceeds with the blessing of the girl's father, so I gather it's supposed to be charming for adults and wistful for the teenage girls watching, but obviously it just doesn't translate in the 2020s. Frankly, I'm not sure it ever actually did, but maybe in the 1960s you could pretend like it did.
Taking this episode's claims at face value, according to its time, it's nevertheless pretty weak. We've sort of seen this before. Prep school designed to indoctrinate students as evil minions for a super-villain. This one's a girl's school, and the girls are all sleeper cells programmed to respond to Brahms's Lullaby (the really famous one, you'd know it if you heard it).
The super-villain is a rich guy who showed up at the girl's school one day and started bailing them out of all their financial woes. Apparently this girl's school has no concerns about strange men wandering around the campus, which it reinforces when Napoleon Solo shows up claiming to be a representative of an Indian princess. The school headmistress, Miss Partridge, immediately invites him to stay in the guest house and grants him the freedom to do whatever he wants while there.
What he wants is Ms. Verity Bergoyne, the prettiest and, seemingly the only, teacher employed by the school. They get on just fine at first, until one night she hears Brahms's Lullaby and suddenly tries to kill Napoleon Solo with an fire axe.
Ilya, in the meantime, is staying with young Miki Matsu's home as her bodyguard. She's been hypnotised by the super-villain to memorise all of her father's scientific research, which makes her a potential target for kidnapping. The solution is to place her under house arrest until the conditioning wears off. They aren't sure it will wear off, but that's the best the UNCLE science guy comes up with. Why Miki Matsu's parents aren't home is a complete mystery, but it conveniently puts Miki and Ilya in a house together for the whole episode, which I assume was meant as a fantasy for the teenage girl audience (I have heard that Ilya Kuryakin unexpectedly became the teen idol of the show).
As was often the case with season 2 The Man from UNCLE plots, this one is mostly propelled by incompetence. The UNCLE agents do their jobs astonishingly poorly, from teaser to the end. They botch the pick-up, they arrive at Mr. Mitsu's home and miss the suspicious milk delivery van playing music like an ice cream truck out front, Solo calls Ilya with confidential info before checking his room for bugs (which he says himself while on the call), Ilya lets baddies into the house and then eventually loses Miki Matsu, Napoleon Solo is unable to replicate the hypnosis trigger.
The villains aren't much better. They get caught red-handed in practically every misdeed they do. They crack those weird knowing smiles at Napoleon Solo, establishing that they're aware he's an UNCLE agent but for whatever reason they don't bother trying to thwart him (and he offers them the same courtesy, politely letting them be villains right through the 3rd act.) It's unclear what the point of the evil plot is, or how they've managed to make it happen.
It's a tired plot, and the situations are obviously contrived. Hopefully this season gets better.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.