Max and 99 are posing as window washers on a tall building trailing the Chief, who is at a computer dating agency. They are stunned to see him be introduced to a young woman who comes up and gives him a much-too familiar type of kiss for just meeting someone.
We next learn that he's been seeing her for some time and they are concerned about the security risk. We see Max and 99 planting a bug in the Chief's office on the underside of his telephone. We are told they were ordered to trail him-by whom is a mystery. When the Chief enters, they wind up admitting what they are doing, and get the Chief to agree to stop seeing this beautiful young woman, Gina.
Next we see the Chief with this woman and we learn the truth. She is the wife of a Greek inventor working on a formula that makes old people young again. She has memorized this lengthy formula-complete with details about experiments and such-and has been saying 30 pages to the Chief each day for him to memorize. They are pretending to be lovers to fool you-know-who. The Chief and Gina sit and talk in open areas. The Chief tells her about how two of his own agents know about them and wants to try to learn 60 pages the next day so they can be finished with the whole thing. This is solely to satisfy Max and 99-KAOS seems totally in the dark so far.
Max and 99 invite the Chief to supper the next night, largely to see if they can create a romance for him with someone closer to his own age-99's mother. What they don't know is that two KAOS agents named after famous movie directors, Stroheim and Preminger, have learned that the scientist has not left Greece like they thought and they figure his wife has come to bring the formula to CONTROL. They burst into Max's apartment while Max and 99 are in the kitchen-I guess Max forgot to lock all the half-dozen locks on his door-and they club the Chief and kidnap "Mother"-(she is never even given a first name).
Now comes a part that disturbed me. A civilian, 99's mom, has been kidnapped by KAOS and as the Chief says, if they find out she doesn't now anything about the formula, they will probably kill her. But he lets Max and 99 go to storm KAOS headquarters while he goes back to Gina to "absorb" more formula. Remember that they only needed to try to finish that night because Max and 99 were making him "break up" with her-there was no other urgency.
At KAOS headquarters, which looks more like a warehouse with all sorts of crates bearing large letters that read "KAOS" Stroheim and Preminger are stonewalled by Mother who at one point thinks they are mistaking her for Jacqueline Kennedy. They put her on "the rack" but find that she finds the stretching to be like a wonderful massage, asking if they have a steam room. When she mentions her son-in-law is Maxwell Smart, they suddenly figure the young woman they've seen the Chief romancing must be the wife they had thought the older woman was.
Before they can do her any harm, Max and 99 show up and later other agents come and the day is saved.
Dumb things that lower my score include: At the Chief's office, right after sticking the bug under the phone, Max and 99 each stick the phone right in front of the Chief's mouth, almost like an obvious microphone. I don't get why they need to have the bug pick up what the Chief says in their presence. I thought it was so they could hear things when they aren't in the room. Secondly, since they just stuck it there, how could it already be activated? Thirdly, if it is such a weak microphone that it almost has to be in the speaker's face, what value is it? It should have picked up whatever while under the phone on the desk.
The Chief cannot tell them about his assignment, so he pretends to be really romancing this woman. But as soon as 99's mother is kidnapped, now he can tell them everything.
The formula is spoken clearly by Gina while sitting with the Chief in public places. Any KAOS agent good at lip reading could easily have known exactly what she was saying. In the scene we saw, she was sitting looking away from the Chief and saying the formula, making it easy for someone to see-he face was never hidden by the Chief's head.
The whole business of this scientist in Greece having information that is somewhat longer than 100 pages of information-we don't know an exact figure-and instead of having a paper version or some sort of recorded version, but he has his wife memorize all of it, then come to America and work to have the Chief memorize it does not make any sense at all.
It would be far, far easier, once she's arrived with the formula in her memory, for her to go somewhere-the Chief's home, Max's apartment, CONTROL HQ, and speak the whole formula into a recorder. If it was truly necessary for the Chief to memorize it-it wasn't, he could have listened to the recording. Carrying on this pretend romance for him to memorize, as they said, 30 pages a day is a ridiculous waste of time. Of course, trying to memorize all that info so quickly could so easily lead to one or more mistakes by the Chief when he goes to relay it to whomever, that it is even more of a dumb way to get this information to the right people.
On the less important side are two other really dumb bits. In hastening to rescue Mother, Max is shown clearly standing with his foot against the bottom of his apartment door as he tries to pull the door open. If the door is unlocked, there is no way his foot would not feel the door against it. He tries all the door locks, making sure they are open and tries the door again. Then he shoots all the door locks and again fails to open it. He actually says to 99 that they are trapped; that the must have put something against the door...before he finally realizes that putting something against a door that opens away from the something would not keep him from opening the door.
When the KAOS agents have learned about Mother's son-in-law, they ask, "Then you are not the wife of Dr. _______?" And Mother gets into the game of "I can be just as dumb as my son-in-law" by saying, "No, but if he's not married I'd like to meet him." They JUST SAID they think she's the man's wife, so how could she think he might not be married?
There really wasn't one part of this episode that made sense, almost nobody behaved logically and Max and Mother exhibited dumbness to a few degrees beyond annoying. I cannot give it a score higher than 3.
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