I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
The mafia decides to blow up Las Vegas. The don puts his bumbling nephew Frank Cariago (Bernard Fein) in charge of the operation, both as punishment and as a final chance to redeem himself. That's the setup, and the way it plays out is a bizarre and wild trip through Hollywood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and more.
Our special top-secret super-spies start the episode with reconnaissance and are, as usual, swiftly detected. But they have enough information to get started. They know they Frank Cariago is important, so they start monitoring Frank Cariago upon his return from Sicily. Illya Kuryakin sneaks onto his property for some typically blatant espionage, and meets Ginger LaVeer (Carol Wayne), Frank's girlfriend and aspiring actress.
Ginger nags Frank about getting a part in a big budget Hollywood picture. The movie is a modern re-telling of the Jewish legend of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities that the Jewish god had deemed evil, and decided to destroy. One of the cities standing in for Sodom (or Gomorrah, it's not clear which) is Las Vegas. The movie ends in the city's destruction, or at least it's supposed to. It's suddenly run out of funds, so the shoot my never finish.
Frank moves in and offers to finance the remainder of the film, provided that his girlfriend is given a starring role, and that he personally manages the end sequence. The director agrees.
The production continues, and Frank orders an actual nuclear warhead from, I guess, the nuclear warhead warehouse. He loads it onto a plane, because I guess we're supposed to think that when a film crew shoots a movie about a bomb being dropped on a city, they drops an actual prop bomb from an actual plane.
This is a bad episode
From start to finish, this episode is stupidly annoying.
Our hero UNCLE agents are inept from the start, and many of the plot beats depend on the baddies taking advantage of mistakes UNCLE makes.
The mafia scheme makes no sense. Even in the 1960s, I find it hard to imagine the TV audience would have believed that bombs in movies were just duds dropped from actual airplanes.
And of course UNCLE foolishly sends Solo and Kuryakin to the movie set to pose as reporters, even though they'd already interacted with the Cariago family in different roles. Obviously they're recognised, captured, and nearly killed.
Illya Kuryakin riding the nuclear warhead from the plane down to Las Vegas is, if you're feeling charitable, comical at best.
Not a great episode, definitely worth skipping this one.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.