I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series. The My Friend the Gorilla Affair was, presumably, a story that was made up as the were shooting it. The first 20 minutes is Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin wandering, separately and aimlessly, around an African jungle. The plot, such as...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series. The Abominable Snowman Affair is one of those episodes that probably would have been better off left unreleased. The UNCLE agents must have been written into the show only as an after thought, because the story suddenly stops making sens...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Concrete Overcoat Affair is a 2-part episode about 3 competing factions in a war over climate change and marriage. Back in the Man from UNCLE days, an hour-long episode really was an hour long, so this is a fea...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. In The Off-Broadway Affair, UNCLE must learn the meaning of a mysterious phone call from an off-broadway theatre warning them that their entire organisation is at risk. This review contains lots of spoilers.
This e...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Come with me to the Casbah Affair is a cleverly written spy story about a race to obtain a rare book that's used by a Thrush agent to decrypt internal secret communications.
Colonel Hamid is a wealthy Algerian...
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 com...
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The Thor Affair is such a bad episode that I found myself fast-forwarding through the fight scenes, and probably could have fast-forwarded through much of what claimed to be plot. This review contains lots of major...
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 st...
How many times can one band of misfit heroes save the galaxy? How many times can the fate of the very universe be threatened? These are questions that every fan of science fiction and fantasy eventually must face, because in most speculative fiction series the stakes are always increasing. Defeat a...
Little Wars is a book about wargaming, written in 1913 by HG Wells. This is my review of it, and it does contain spoilers (for a 100+ year old non-fiction rulebook for wargames.)
Many tabletop gamers get into a habit of defending their hobby because it's not uncommon for an onlooker to demand an...
In the Savage Sword of Conan comics, there was a story in which Conan and a caravan he happened to be traveling withis ambushed by an army of Lovecraftian aberrations. These ghoulish attackers subdue the caravan's guards, and eventually even Conan himself. Conan is thrown to the bottom of a pit th...
I'd been meaning to read War of the Worlds by HG Wells for literal decades, but I kept putting it off. I'd seen enough of several movie adaptations to fool myself into thinking it was boring or too simplistic. Even the famous Orson Wells radio play didn't appeal to me, and I'm an Orson Welles fan....
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...
I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Since the show started developing the idea of THRUSH as an organisation of crime, it's had an awareness that THRUSH is literally a corporation, with all the concerns a corpor...
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'...
I'm continuing to rewatch every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. The monks of St. Thomas Affair is a good episode, with a plot that actually develops over the course of the story. This review contains lots of major spoilers.
The episode opens with Solo and Kuryakin o...