3x6 The Pop Art Affair

I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Pop Art Affair is a good episode with a strong guest character and a pretty interesting MacGuffin. This review contains lots of major spoilers.

Man from UNCLE has always been a fish-out-of-water story. Usually this was expressed as a civilian pulled into the world of spies. That's reversed in The Pop Art Affair, though. In this episode, the UNCLE agents get involved in the Greenwich Village beatnik scene. You might expect a series of slapstick double-takes and confused conversations entirely in slang, but it's played refreshingly straight. The UNCLE agents are in unfamiliar territory, but as usual they work hard to make alliances (and sometimes to discourage alliances from eager civilians), and to protect the world.

Admittedly, the episode doesn't get off to a great start. Solo, Kuryakin, and Waverly are on a golf course waiting for a secret meeting with a THRUSH defector, and Illya is in a suit inexplicably pretending to be the caddy. Classic super spy stuff, that. I guess it fits, because the THRUSH defector is a total beatnik cat looking for bread, man. It seems THRUSH forgets to pay its invoices, and he's been busy inventing a deadly gas for them.

The meeting is interrupted by a golf cart with in-built machine guns, which Illya defeats with the missile launcher concealed in the golf club bag. Of course the THRUSH defector dies, so UNCLE is left with portents of disaster, but not much to go on.

As the episode's guest would say, "It's a bad scene, man." But it gets better after that.

What's in a guest

Waverly sends Kuryakin to a beatnik coffee house in an attempt to dig up more information about the mysterious THRUSH defector. In a feeble attempt to fit in, Illya wears a strange looking pendant they found on the dead THRUSH agent. At the coffee house, nobody seems to recognise the photograph of the dead man, but Illya Kuryakin is quickly cornered by a starving artist named Sylvia Harrison (played by Sherry Alberoni). Sylvia is one of the most infectious guest characters the show has had in a long time. She's bright-eyed, friendly, helpful, sincere, and maybe over-eager to fit in. She won't let Illya alone until he lets her sketch his profile (for a dollar, talked down from 2 dollars).

Sylvia eventually remembers that she has seen the man in Illya's photograph, but not at the coffee house. He's an artist, like her, so she'd seen him at the Ole Gallery across the street.

Illya goes to Ole's Gallery and chats with the owner, Mr. Ole (played by Robert H. Harris). It turns out that Ole is a the THRUSH man who'd commissioned the deadly gas, and that the gas isn't functional without a catalyst. It comes out much later that the mysterious pendant is not a pendant at all, but an electronic catalyzing agent that activates the deadly gas.

And the plot is suddenly thicker.

People lie a lot

From that point on, it's a matter of getting hold of the pendant. Illya's got it at first, obviously, but once he realises that Ole is after it, he slips it to Sylvia. Sylvia has no idea what it is, but she digs it and decides that she could make some extra bread by making copies and selling them around the village.

There are some far out scenes that work a lot better than they seem like they would on paper.

• Napoleon Solo visits Sylvia's parents and awkwardly endures their appreciation of his hair cut (beatniks had weird hair styles, so it's the whole "cut yer hair and get a real job" thing). Again, I don know how accurate this episode's depiction of beatnik culture is, but it definitely seems sympathetic.
• Napoleon and Illya go to Sylvia's apartment, only to find Sylvia's flatmate tied to a chair. THRUSH thugs had been by to search for the pendant. Napoleon asks why she hadn't called for help, and she noted that she'd never been tied up before, and that she thought everyone should try everything at least once.
• Illya performs beat poetry to get away from some THRUSH agents, and Sylvia basically falls in love with him then and there.

Essentially, there are a bunch of scenes where lots of different people have to pretend to be someone or something they're not, and it's as intriguing as it ever is on Man from UNCLE. It kind of hurts a little, because some of the people being lied to are innocent, but the people doing the lying are doing it out of necessity.

Not all lies are entirely verbal, either. Ole keeps a supermodel, Mari Brooks (played by Sabrina Scharf) at his side. However, Ole has started to notice that Mari's developing some wrinkles around her eyes. So Mari desperately works to cover up her "flaws" so Ole doesn't replace her. It's sad, and Napoleon warns her, but she refuses to listen, and eventually pays.

Soundtrack

The music in this episode was better than it's been. Action scenes don't get the obligatory brass hits or swing beat. It's pretty steady throughout, and I got the vague feeling that either the music was actually composed for this episode or, at the very least, the editor inserting the music was aware of the intent of each scene.

Another good episode

For an episode that could have easily been the Man from UNCLE equivalent of Star Trek's The Way to Eden, this is very good. Aside from that, it's a really good story on its own. The writers didn't just throw out a bunch of pop culture references to try to trick young viewers into believing it was a hip show while also tricking older viewers into thinking that all modern culture is substandard. They used a subculture, maybe accurately and maybe not (I'm not qualified to know the difference), to provide foreign territory for the UNCLE agents. They allowed the characters to navigate these situations, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

After seeing the teaser, I did not expect to enjoy this one, but I ended up captivated. A very good episode, even with a goofy teaser and lethal hiccup gas (yes, the gas causes hiccups so severe that it leads to a heart-attack).

Seriously, it's good. Dig this quote, dad: "All men look alike with their eyes closed." You don't get lines like that from a story written from formula.