A Word Called Courage isn't the best plotted of Mannix episodes, yet it has some outstanding features, including an excellent guest cast, good, often quirky acting, and a story with more twists and turns than a roller-coaster. It also has some unsettling scenes of torture, and some bad guys who seem to have more than a few screws loose.
The plot is difficult to accept on face value, as the villains and their underlings behave puzzlingly, and the information they are seeking from Mannix is not even made wholly clear to the viewer. A good deal of the information crucial to understanding the plot points,--one person's name--is difficult to wholly comprehend. I freely admit that I never quite "got it".
Yet this series entry is engaging, even as the character motivations are murky for even a veteran detective series viewer such as myself to get a handle on; and yet for all that, it's competently made and held my interest, if only to see how things were going to work out, and by what means Joe was going to not so much solve a mystery but escape his captors in reasonably good physical and mental health. It's not much of a spoiler to say he did.
The plot is difficult to accept on face value, as the villains and their underlings behave puzzlingly, and the information they are seeking from Mannix is not even made wholly clear to the viewer. A good deal of the information crucial to understanding the plot points,--one person's name--is difficult to wholly comprehend. I freely admit that I never quite "got it".
Yet this series entry is engaging, even as the character motivations are murky for even a veteran detective series viewer such as myself to get a handle on; and yet for all that, it's competently made and held my interest, if only to see how things were going to work out, and by what means Joe was going to not so much solve a mystery but escape his captors in reasonably good physical and mental health. It's not much of a spoiler to say he did.