User Reviews

The fifth season of "Get Smart" featured a number of name guest stars (Broderick Crawford, Victor Bueno, John Dehner) as villains. This episode might feature the best of these, Vincent Price as mad scientist Dr. Pyn.

Price certainly seems to be having a great time as Pyn, a KAOS scientist who is making CONTROL agents and top government officials (including the President) hallucinate and go into weird LSD-like trips (the opening sequence where Max sees himself as an Indian Chief, wearing snowshoes while burping his baby crocodile while 99 is made up half white and half black like Frank Gorshin in the "Star Trek" episode "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" is truly something to see). He demands $50 million or else he will send all Washington into a one-way trip that there's no returning from.

Besides Price, there's some pretty good jokes all around as Max and 99 try and sneak into the water bottling plant and go on a tour (after meeting a woman with a strange little boy named Luden!). There's a great scene with Max and 99 trapped in a "unbreakable" glass trap. And a nice ending in which Pyn plans to poison himself but Max plans to foil him with an antidote kept in a secret compartment in a ring.

In some ways this final season episode of Get Smart was quite experimental even by Get Smart standards, and I wonder if it motivated Alan Alda to write the controversial Dreams episode of M*A*S*H that debuted over a decade later. Anyway, here we get various weird dream sequences, and you can imagine the cast would have had a lot of fun with their roles in the dreams. Anyway, I can't say I've seen every episode of Get Smart, but this one I remember for sure, an watching it when I was younger, I probably didn't quite appreciate it for what it was, but if I was to see it again now then I would appreciate some of the elements.

This has to be one of my all-time favourite episodes of Get Smart. Vincent Price hits it out of the park with his portrayal of Jarvis Pym, KAOS's mad pharmacist, and the image of him with his giant psychotropic pill is more than memorable.

Equally memorable are the character's hallucinations. Ed Platt in a bearskin and long golden curls is surpassed only by the moment that Barbara Feldon throws back the covers to reveal her special brand of black-and-white thinking. All that is missing is a cameo by Joe Friday and the Blue Boy.

Overall, a great episode that is as funny now as it was then, without any of the "You can't say that anymore!" issues that often arise with the shows of long-ago. No need for that ring-full of sodium-calcium-chloride with this one.