The opening shows Max dressed as a hippie on a park bench with an informant who gives him a large purse supposedly with important information. She handcuffs it to him, saying there have been lots of purse snatchers in the neighborhood. Suddenly she says someone's coming and they need to put plan x-somethingorother into effect, which means they go into a prolonged kiss. This gives the girl enough time to remove the handcuff key she gave Max.
When he leaves, she phones the Groovy Guru to tell him in 30 minutes CONTROL headquarters will be blown up with the bomb in the purse. When Max arrives, he, 99, and the Chief all observe ticking from the purse. The Chief calls in the bomb squad and two men in hazard suits dash in. When the Chief tells them the bomb is handcuffed to Max, they grab him and the bomb and literally throw him down an oversized laundry chute and leave the room. We hear the sound of the bomb and figure Max is dead. But Max climbs up the chute, saying the bomb fell out of the purse, so he wasn't that close to it. Viewers who look closely can see the purse drop out of Max's hands into the office just before he is dumped down the chute.
Max and the Chief then go to the strip club where Dr. Steele, the CONTROL scientist, in her cover identity is a stripper. She has prepared "lie pills" for Max and 99. Take one of these and you can't stop from lying for the next 15 minutes. Somehow, this is supposed to protect them if they are caught and questioned by KAOS. What's weird is, since they only last 15 minutes, she has just two pills-presumably 1 for Max, 1 for 99. But as Max is actually tasting the pill, the Chief pats him on the back making him swallow it.
This leads to a scene where our couple want to take a cab to the Guru's temple, but Max lies about everything. He winds up getting clobbered by a huge cab driver before 99 figures out that he had one of the pills. I thought as soon as he gave strange answers, 99 should have said, "No driver, ignore my friend. We want to go to X. Max, be quiet." Instead she lets him literally ask the guy for trouble and get socked a couple of times.
We learn that the Groovy Guru plays records on the radio and has hypnotized kids into doing whatever he says. At the Guru's temple where they join two others in a meditation session where they are told by the assistant guru to contemplate their navels while the leader steps outside the room. Smart and 99 can't stay undercover long, they have to discuss what little they've learned in the 3 minutes they've been in the place, oblivious to the thought that someone could be listening.
The guy comes back and leads them to another room-almost closet size. A voice comes on telling them he is the Groovy Guru and they had a listening device in the carpet so he knows who they are. This leads to the best line in the episode, when Max reacts with, "the old bug in the rug trick."
The floor slides away revealing a dark gray level some distance below. Like always happens, these sliding floors always stop with just enough space left for the person or people to stand, looking down at what lies below. After the audience has a chance to understand the situation, the floor slides the rest of the way and our people drop to a lower level. Instantly visible is that the floor, actually nothing in this lower room is the dark gray we saw in the overhead shot before.
It is a large room with three smaller, windowed rooms on one side. The middle room is where we meet the Groovy Guru (Larry Storch). He is sitting at a console with various controls. Like all TV evil leaders, he can't wait to tell his captives exactly what his plans are---sending out his evil messages to the teens on his broadcast that night so they will go out and kill thousands of people. He will do it through a song from a musical group known as the Sacred Cows. The lyrics are straightforward: "Thrill, thrill, thrill. Kill, kill, kill. Make a scene, knock off the dean..." This contradicts Barbara Feldon's intro on the DVD that states that the Guru gets the kids to do his bidding via "subliminal" messages in the music.
When the Guru leaves our agents alone, listening to the music, 99 tells Max to get out the lie pills. When she is told he only has one left, she tells him to break it in two. Now here is where Max is too stupid to believe. He breaks it in two, then gulps down both halves, leaving nothing for 99.
The Guru returns and to see if Max is under his spell, orders him to kill 99. Max lies-saying the gun in his hand wasn't a gun, etc., so the Guru has the two hypnotized CONTROL agents get in a fight with Max. Three punches and Max is KO'd. The Guru now has to hustle to his rehearsal, so he leaves them to take care of later.
He returns just after 99 revives Max. Now he tells them about his super powerful amplifier. In their room, Max and 99 hear loud thumping, and are told it is their heartbeats. Then a mosquito buzzes around, sounding like an airplane. It lands on Max's wrist and he flicks it off, with the bug landing on the floor sounding like a 20-pound weight had been dropped.
Now the sound of the heartbeats vanishes about as soon as we learned what that noise was. Max and 99 now converse in whispers and low-volume voices, but somehow the amplifier doesn't pick up these sounds at all. Nor did it pick up the normal speaking voice of the Guru when he was telling them about the amplifier. He had activated it, but the piped-in sound of his voice didn't seem to be heard by the amplifier even though it was much louder than the other sounds it did pick up.
Guru leaves to do his TV show upstairs. Max takes a tiny tuning fork from his watch and taps it, resulting in the amplifier and control box being blown up. Our heroes rush to the TV studio, where the Sacred Cows are just beginning their song. Max and the Guru get into a 4-punch fight and 99 tells Max how nobody heard the broadcast because she pulled the plug-showing a large electrical plug in her hand.
Just about every scene contained something stupid and/or illogical. I don't mind one wacko event, but that's all we had here. From throwing Max AND the bomb down a chute-without taking five seconds to try to separate them, to the two agents foolishly talking openly about their mission at the Guru's temple, to the wonder of why this temple would have this room where the floor slides away, to the total lack of an explanation for how all these kids are to be hypnotized, and hypnotized to do something that would be very much against their nature, to the crazy amplified room that seemed to only pick up the slightest sounds while missing many others. There just wasn't anything that seemed believable. And only a couple of things were funny.
Early on, the Chief knew the Guru was hypnotizing the kids, and planned a broadcast that night. They appear to have known where he could be found. Since the lyrics were so straightforward, the earlier actions of the teens should have been led by the same sort of lyrics, so what was it Max and 99 were really supposed to find out?
Whenever we see a show with a bad guy questioning a good guy, if the bad guy suspects lying, it doesn't go well for the good guy. For this reason, the whole bit with the lie pills seems absurd, even for a silly show like this. I couldn't see how the pills were ever going to help Smart.
To anyone who thought this a great show-more power to you. I just cannot give it a score higher than 3.
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