Of course the famous nit from the movie. When the Seaview is going under the polar icecaps they have chunks of ice falling all around them, Ice Floats. This same nit made it into the pilot because they reused the footage from the film for the climax of the ep.

Maybe it was superdense ice, with a different molecular structure, similar to ice-9?

Or perhaps deuterium-ice? (wink)

The ice in glaciers is super-dense, but only floats after the momentum of the fall into the water is overcome. Perhaps the Seaview was close to the surface and the ice was falling past it?

Doesn't matter, Derf. It weighs more, but it's still less dense than liquid H₂0.

Ice, shmice! I'm more interested in that extremely cool first scene of the Seaview breaking out from beneath the sea at a 45 degree angle!
35 years later and I have yet to see a submarine as gorgeous as the Seaview.
Okay, everyone, all together now; fall to the right! Fall to the left! Fall to the right! Fall to the left!

You must admit though, ScottN, that HEAVY water ice sounds good ...

Nah... you'd put on too much weight!

Richard Basehart! Richard Basehart! Richard Basehart!

The following Dr Who stories wouldn't be to out of place in TVTTBOTS: The Underwater Menace (Mad Scientist tries to drain the Atlantic), The Macra Terror (Planet of giant crabs), Fury From The Deep (Hypnotic Sea Weed), The Power Of Kroll (Giant Squid), The Sea Devils & Warriors Of The Deep (Intelligent prehistoric amphibious creatures try to reclaim the Earth.)

Here are some others I noticed: (DW = Dr Who Episode, V = VTTBOTS Episode.)

V) The Sky Is Falling: Something Alien Drains All The Seaview's power.
DW) Death To The Daleks: Something Alien Drains All The Tardis's power.

V) The Price Of Doom: An intelligent Plankton attacks.
DW) Fury From The Deep: An intelligent Seaweed attacks.

V) The Last Battle, Death From The Past DW) Silver Nemesis: An encounter with Nazis planning to start the 4th Reich.

V) The Invaders: An eons old being played by a guest start (Robert Duvall) is brought back to life.
DW) The Ice Warriors: An eons old being played by a guest start (Bernard Breslaw) is brought back to life.

V) The Buccanneer: An art collector attempts to steal The Mona Lisa.
DW) The City Of Death: An Alien posing as an art collector attempts to get Leonardo Di Vinchi to paint many copies of The Mona Lisa.

V) The Secret Of The Loch, DW) The Terror Of The Zygons: An encounter with the Loch Ness Monster.

V) The Cyborg: A robot replica of Nelson is part of a plot.
DW) The Chase, The Android Invasion & The Caves Of Androazi: A robot replica of The Doctor is part of a plot.

V) Leviathan, DW) Inferno: Matter from under the Earth's crust turns someone into a monster.

V) The Death Ship, DW) The Mind Of Evil, The Day Of The Daleks & Earthshock: A plot to ruin a peace conference.

V) The Menfish, DW) The Underwater Menace: A mad scientist creates human - fish hybrids.

V) Deadly Invasion, DW) The Faceless Ones: An encounter with faceless Aliens.

V) Deadly Invasion, DW) Warriors Of The Deep: An attack on an underwater base.

V) The Creature, DW) The Power Of Kroll: A Creature grows to a huge size.

V) Shadowmind, DW) The Masque Of Mandragora: An being made totally of energy attacks.

V) The Wax Man, The Cyborg DW) The Chase, Spearhead From Space, The Android Invasion, The Resurrection Of The Daleks, The Caves Of Androazi: Replicas of important personel are used in a plot.

V) Fires Of Death, DW) The Brain Of Morbius, Planet Of Fire: A plot based around elixir obtained from volcanic activity.

V) The Return Of Blackbeard, DW) The Mind Robber: An encounter with Blackbeard.

V) Savage Jungle, DW) The Seeds Of Death, The Seeds Of Doom: A super-sized plant almost ingulfs the Earth.

Wow. A TON of those were also used in Sea Quest DSV and Sea Quest 2030 (2040?).

SeaQuest 2032

Believe it or not, there is quite a great deal of VTTBOTS fan fiction around the net. Most of it is actually not bad as fanfic goes. At least the writers of the fanfics take it more seriously than the original writers did most of the time. I find it a little surprising that such rather static characters as Nelson, Crane and the rest of the Seaview crew could inspire so many people to delve into their characters and relationships with each other.

I admit I compiled the list by looking through an episode guide & noticing which ones reminded me of Dr Who adventures.

"The Terrible Toys", the greatest Voyage episode ever was on SFC this morning at 7! Hope you all set your VCRs!

I thought the THEME from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" ROCKED! I LOVED that submarine ping noise they added!

I liked the episode where Captain Crane was taken under the spell of some evil alien or was it the Admiral

I saw on SCI-FI the episode in which an alien plant zaps the Admiral with some kind of ray and forces him to do his bidding. It wasn't too bad.

Caught the movie today. While it's cheesy and full of bad science, it's not a bad psychological study film.

Nit. At the end, they go home, all's well with the world. Except that the polar icecaps have melted, the world's food growing areas have been devastated, and probably a lot of people are dead... there's going to be a lot of death and plague...

According to tvshowsondvd.com, this series is also coming out on DVD. Presumably Land of the Giants will be coming along eventually.

I've seen box sets of season 1 and 2 of Land of the Giants on eBay, but I haven't seen them in stores yet. Sure like to know when they'll make it around my parts.

I think the auction you saw must have been for bootlegs, since there is currently no official commercial DVD release of LOTG.

Slightly off topic but since Todd mentioned it,12 0 clock high the series is for sale $166 also bootleg I bet.the caption said if you copy the series beware, its ok to copy but it is not returnable.Im waiting for the offical version,too

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does anyone has voyage to the bottom of the sea ?

In the movie, the producers must have run out of ideas in mid-production because they threw in TWO octopi to attack the Seaview & its crew. (Wasn't ONE octopus enough for suspense?)

Why is Barbara Eden's character dancing the CHARLESTON? That's a 1920's dance. This movie is supposed to be in the FUTURE! (I think the director was just looking for a good excuse for Barbara Eden to wave her fanny in front of the camera)

I must add the shark in the sub's tank looks 100% fake.

In addition, it appears that Floyd the barber from Mayberry became a Congressman! (Naw...just kidding...same actor)

I picked this up on DVD the other day. Only half a season, but I can see why; back then they had a heck of a lot more episodes per season than they do now.

The first episode, "11 days to Zero" was pretty cool. I was startled that the captain was not Crane; I thought at first that David Hedison had been added to the cast after the series began. It was quickly explained; the original captain got himself killed, poor chap. There's a nit to that ambush. We see a painter working on an archway as Nelson's car passes through. As it pauses, the man leans down and sprays an "X" on the roof of the car--without anyone noticing! The "X" is centered on the roof, but immediately afterward, you see that the lines now stretch clear to the corners of the roof. Guess the paint must have spread a bit.

They were sneaky on this one--they dropped a lot of hints to suggest that Eddie Albert's character was an agent for the opposition. When Lee Crane is suggested as a replacement captain, Albert suggests that he is too "unimaginative" for the position; he is very brusque when meeting Crane, causing Crane to give him an odd look; he looks upward "significantly" when the sub comes under air attack, and he's ready to scrub the mission when the sub is damaged. When he insisted on joining the underwater divers, stating that he was the best diver on board--which he didn't mention when Crane asked for volunteers--I was expecting ominous music.

BTW, when Crane announced that he was going on the dive, Nelson told him that he was too valuable to risk. Crane got out of that by pointing out that if they were unsucessful, it wouldn't matter.

I noticed that, unlike the other three divers, Crane dressed in a bright white scuba suit. Sure made it easy for that giant squid to spot him! (Not to mention the audience. It's hard to tell those guys apart under the water.)

That scene with the Seaview hurtling half out of the water and smacking down like a whale, was visually exciting, but implausible. That surely wouldn't be good for the sub, not to mention the crew, who would have been tossed around like marbles in a tin can.

In "City Beneath the Sea", the Seaview hauls up a basket full of seaweed--and a dead man. (In the close-up, you can see the dead man's eyes flicker.) Who the heck was he? We never find out. Crane said that the suit was not one used on the missing research vessels, so presumably he was one of the bad guys. Did he die in an accident? Had he been executed for misconduct?

After telling Crane that he was too valuable to risk in the last episode, Nelson says nothing at all about him going undercover. This has always been the paradox of dealing with star characters--you want them to be important characters, but the important characters would not be the ones chosen for hazardous duties.

After searching around for a good place to hide his transmitter in his hotel room, Crane seems to settle for taping it under the sink--a pretty obvious spot. Why didn't he wrap it in waterproofing and carry it with him?

The head bad guy turned out to be confined to a wheelchair. Just how often has that plot point been used before and since? When they first showed him riding up the underwater tube instead of swimming up to the ladder, and having lackeys strip off his scuba gear, I thought that he was just being arrogantly lazy.

Surprisingly, they showed the girl being not quite as helpless as heroines were usually shown at this point in time. Brought to the underwater city, she's been knocked down in the fight Crane instigates, but recovers enough to grab a knife and jump to the attack, even if she is caught and pinned immediately. Later, of course, she properly hovers in the background and lets Crane do all the work.

I don't know what put him in the wheelchair, but in his underwater fight with Crane, the bad guy kicks his legs quite vigorously.

Having been kidnapped, Crane snarls that he is expendable. The bad guy seems certain that Nelson values him. Turns out that Crane was right, although he never got the chance to say "I told you so." Nelson couldn't have known that Crane had escaped from the city when he fired on it and destroyed it.

When Nelson was looking for Crane and met up with the girl, he told her that he and Crane were "partners and enemies", and that Crane had skipped out on him owing one hundred dollars.
At the end, Crane said to Nelson something like, "If you use that "$100 dollar deadbeat" story on me again, I'm going back to the Navy." This seemed to imply that he and Nelson have done quite a bit of undercover work already.

"The Fear Makers" was a great episode, full of tension. Nelson's reactions, listening to the panicked crew of the Polidor right before it blew, was well done. Interestingly, it showed him--before the advent of the fear gas--reacting so hard to the loss that Crane and the two "government" types were concerned.

When we first see the scientists, they are watching a film of an animal test of the fear gas--a cat facing a rat, and frightened by it. I was startled when I saw it. My family has a collection of science and nature books put out by Time-Life decades ago. One of the books deals with the mind, and it shows some still photographs from this very experiment--although I don't remember if it was a gas or some other fear stimulant.

Lloyd Bochner is always a splendid villain, and he's perfect for his role in this, with his sly and oh-so-casual insinuations, feeding the fears of the crew while pretending to study them. I loved the irony near the end, when he discovered that the unstable gas would morph into a deadly nerve gas after eight hours. (Problem is, he presumably has been working closely with Dr. Kenner on this project--why didn't he already know about the danger?)

The psychology of the episode was interesting--while the crew was frightened of dying, and Crane was frightened for his crew, Nelson's fear was in failing to learn what exactly happened to the Polidor, and therefore the gas, instead of chasing him away, drove him to continue, even at the possible loss of his crew.

There was a rather odd scene in the air reclamation room. Bochner's character had come to check on the gas canister, and found a couple of the crew making checks. He then happily told the one man that they were aborting the mission and going home. He knew no such thing--I thought that he was trying to get the man excited about getting out of there, so that he would be all the more upset when he found that it wasn't so. However, when Crane came over the intercom announcing that they would dive again, it was Bochner who got upset and rushed out of the room

Another good scene was when the Seaview sustained some damage, and Crane sharply commanded that they start for the surface. He then caught Nelson's eye. All Nelson did was look at him, and Crane belayed the order and waited for Nelson's instructions.

When Nelson was informed about the gas, he did not seem overly worried about the threat to his crew. His main concern was if the gas had been used on the Polidor. Once he found that it had been, he calmly set about finding a solution to the problem.

The Seaview does have a good crew--after an initial burst of panic when the sub was damaged, they pulled themselves together, and when some vital piece of equipment got jammed, they quietly sat and waited for it to be unjammed--or to die. Only one crew member had to be relieved of duty.

I was too young to remember watching this show, although I'm sure that my parents did. I have a very vague memory of seeing it, perhaps in reruns. I'm really not sure what prompted me to buy it, but I'm glad that I did--it's really well done. (At least so far. I understand that further on the plots became "increasingly ludicrous" and enemy invaders would hide in the same places on the sub, but no one ever remember to look there for them.)

"Mist of Silence" was a surprise, because in this episode, the Seaview is strictly a means of transportation--nearly all the action takes place on shore. In reading more about this series, I understand that, as well as purely sci-fi plots, it also tackled the relevant issues of the day. Revolutions and changes of government certainly fit that criteria.

It was fairly complicated--it took a while to sort out good guys from the bad. I was pretty sure which character would turn out to be the "friend" that Nelson and company had at the palace.

Crane and his men, after being kidnapped (oh, no, they weren't kidnapped, they were "arrested") were told that they were on the list of traitors, one of whom would be taken out every hour and shot. It was very probable that the "lot" would fall on at least one of the four men (the one who was not a regular, of course). You would have thought that Crane would discuss the situation with the men, but when the lot fell on Farrell (I think that was his name) the man went to pieces, which didn't seem in keeping with the high standards demanded of the Seaview crew. The scene would have been just as tense and anguish-ridden if the man had gone with dignity, perhaps asking Crane to take a message to his family.

Nelson and Co. arrived just in the nick of time to save the second crewman, Patterson. I thought that he was going to take advantage of the confusion to try and run, but the gas got to him first. The sudden revelation that Ricardo had come along to kill the President rather than rescue him sent Nelson flying off, although he might have guessed it from some of the comments Ricardo had made earlier.

The fight between Crane and the Colonel who had murdered his crewman was well done, although I wouldn't have minded if Crane had been a little more vengefully savage about it.

The "friend in the palace" finishes off the Colonel, and arranges that the Seaview will not be harrassed as it picks up the team, but then a side character, an Oriental ally of the Colonel, whom we have only seen once early on, suddenly appears and prevents the "friend" from completely shutting down the alarm, forcing the team to a last-minute fight. I wonder if the Oriental was supposed to be part of the same group of bad guys from the first episode?

One of the characters is obviously Henry Darrow, but he is credited as "Henry Delgado." Wonder when he changed his name?

I've been out of town for a week. Back to the nitpicks and such.

"Price of Doom"--pretty standard sci-fi plot, but fairly well done and fun to watch. I can think of better places to have a honeymoon, though. (With bunk beds, no less! That's the early sixties for you.) I was rather surprised that Steve Ihnat had such a short role. Very single-minded character, too. It had to take a decent amount of time for that plankton to grow to the size it did (looking like those novelty items that you drop into water and watch them expand) but not once did he turn from the desk and the tape recorder--not even to glance at his blushing bride to see if she was comfortable under those very thin-looking blankets.

One definite nit--plankton is usually considered to be plant life, and the expanded version certainly looked plantish. Even sea plants, I believe, derive nourishment from the chlorphyll that they manufacture with exposure to light. Why would it suddenly turn carnivorous?

During the Seaview's preparations to dive, you see a very definite change in the film quality. These are presumably some of the film clips from the original movie that Allen used to cut expenses.

They are not particularly subtle in presenting their clues about potential enemies. Dr. Reisner is presented as an irritating, "my way or no way" ex-Nazi collaborator. On the other hand, when Julie Lyle and Phillip Wesley came down to the bay where the mini-sub was kept, and she kept asking Kowalski questions about how the sub was run, and how many people were required to launch it, it was obvious that she was plotting a potential future escape from the Seaview.

It was also pretty obvious in the Pennell's smashed up laboratory, when they suddenly came under attack from a plane. As the men rushed for the door, Julie suddenly ducked sideways and crouched down. It might have looked as though she was frightened, but it surely would have been safer running outside than remaining inside the single clear target for bombing. The men, of course, thought that she had panicked, and Wesley dealt with her briskly with a punch to the jaw. You will note that, although her arms were dangling limply as they carried her off, she pulled them in as they went through the door. Nelson ordered, "Take her to my cabin." Why? Why not her own quarters, or to Sickbay? Later in the series, a ship's doctor is listed in the credits, as would be sensible with a ship of over a hundred crewmen, yet here Kowalski plays medic, including playing around with hypos and sedatives--very dangerous when he said that he was not certain that she was concussed.

Kowalski gets a good bit of screen time. I think that he was the one that escorted Reisner to his cabin when Nelson and Crane decided that he was the saboteur, and he and another man, Fox, were the ones sent to find out what was going in the depths of the sub. Fox being a non-regular, you knew that he was going to end up as a snack for the plankton, and a very harrowing scene it was, too. Watching his hand yanked away from Kowalski's, and hearing him screaming, you couldn't blame Kowalski for almost falling apart when reporting what happened. Despite his obvious terror, he followed the others back.

Wesley had demanded to know what was going on, but Crane and Nelson refused to tell him--they told him to shut up and get out. When he went to see Julie, however, he immediately told her that the sub had been sabotaged. How did he know?

It was rather startling to see a woman munched up by the plankton, but you gotta admit, she deserved it. She was so smug and scornful.

They determined that extreme cold (easy to find in the Antarctic) would both suspend the rapid growth and kill the plankton. If this was the case, what happened to the first batch? It surely would have stopped growing and died shortly after busting out of the lab, but Nelson and Co. didn't stumble over any big green frozen lump.

And what happened to the enemy sub?


"The Sky is Falling"--the first, but surely not the last extra-terrestrial encounter. Pretty well done, with the viewer not knowing for a long time if the aliens were hostile or not.

Another sledge-hammer clue to a future part of the episode--Rear Admiral Tobin is referred to by Crane as "Trigger-Happy" Tobin.

I would like to know where and how the outside cameras are placed on the submarine. They sure get a very extensive view.

They call for a volunteer to go with Nelson and Crane to examine whatever has become attached to the sub's upper hull. Before anyone even has a chance to open their mouths, someone (Chief Sharkey?) snaps, "Kowalski, you just volunteered." This is volunteering? Rather insulting not to even give the men a chance to be noble.

Seeing the alien in the guise of Nelson was startling, but the alien's reasoning was soundly logical--it took a form that was guaranteed not to frighten Nelson, even if it was disconcerting.

This intelligent, advanced being admitted that they made mistakes--a whopper being their coming into Earth's range in the first place. He (She? It?) made another--accusing Nelson of lying to him when Nelson has been stuck on his craft, completely out of contact with his sub and the rest of the world.

I loved it when Tobin ordered Crane to arrest Nelson, and Crane appeared to do so--only to whip out the door and lock both Admirals inside. I wonder if Nelson knew what Crane was going to do? Or if Tobin tried to press insubordination charges against Crane later?


"Turn Back the Clock" I know that you have to make allowances for the SFX of forty-odd years ago, but after seeing the exquisitely produced "Walking With Dinosaurs" series, these little frilled lizards and dressed-up baby crocodiles--!

That having been said...we see a man, clean-shaven after what we will learn was a nine month period without such amenities as razors. Is he of a racial strain that lacks facial hair, or did he pause in his frantic escape to scrape his chin with the edge of a spear point?

We then see him plunge into a pool, armed with a relatively small, home-made balloon which he has just filled up by blowing into it. He seems to be using the balloon to give him air during his dive--but a balloon filled with exhaled air is not going to contain very much oxygen. A little, yes, but surely not enough to take him far.

As for the jungle habitat--it is full of plants, and therefore requires sunlight, so it has to be open to the sky, not subterranean. (And in the Antarctic, presumably it won't be getting sun year round--nit piling on nit.) At the end of the episode, it's clear that the habitat is at least close to the surface (so why hasn't anyone spotted it before?)

Back to the diving man--we find that the diving bells were yanked into a tunnel at 4,000 feet below the surface. Maybe it wasn't quite 4,000 feet up into the jungle habitat, but it had to be pretty deep. This man, on one small balloon of bad air, first swam down who knows how far and then up four thousand feet? Even if he'd had the air, the changing pressure would have killed him.

Nits and all, it was an exciting opening. We then see Lee Crane calling on a young woman, who turns out to be the fiancee of the miracle man. She makes a comment to Lee about Admiral Nelson at last admitting that she is the best underwater photographer around. This is before she learns of what is going on, so it seems that she has been angling for a job on board the Seaview.

It's rather hard to tell if Jason really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. The implication later is that he was faking it. This doesn't make complete sense. During the mission, he attempted to slow things down, in the hope that no one would discover his perfidy in making his escape. Why not simply tell everyone that he had seen the other three men die?

Once again, in order to make use of their stars, Lee Crane ignores his value as an officer and goes on the mission. His job is simply communications--keeping in touch with the sub. A lesser officer could have done that easily.

Lee and Batgirl (oops...all right, Carol) naturally end up in each other's arms as they hide from an approaching dinosaur. It can't have been too comfortable for Lee, having Carol screaming right in his ear. However, when a second dinosaur (dressed-up baby croc) approached and fought with the first, why on Earth didn't they run for it while the two were preoccupied? They just stood and watched the fight, waiting to see who would win and get to eat them. Just their luck that both reptiles went over a cliff.

On first seeing the "native" girl, all I could think of was "Green Orion Slave Girl." I'm sure that's how Vina would have looked if she'd been filmed in black-and-white.

Watching her run through webby tunnels, you knew that a giant spider was going to pop in. The girl screamed at the sight of it. I thought that she was going to cringe there in terror until Lee showed up, or that maybe she would back up right into him, but instead she just walked around it--awfully close. Lee, not being used to such things, just shot it.

Nelson is quite the scientist. Lee shows up dragging a girl with him. Nelson gives her a quick look, diagnoses her high cheek bones and the folds of her eyelids, and pronounces her as Indian. ("Native American" is still a long way away.) He notes that South America is fairly close by, and quickly speculates that a canoeload or two of them had gotten pulled into this habitat hundreds of years previously.

No one comments much about Jason instantly trying to kill the girl the moment he lays eyes on her. Presumably the girl doesn't recognize the gun and it's loud noise as a weapon, because she doesn't consider it much, either.

I would like to know just how Jason discovered that the tribe performs a human sacrifice on the longest day of the year.

(BTW, did you ever notice that in any and all sci-fi stories about primitive tribes locked away for generations, they never seem to evolve, either socially, religiously or technologically? Of course, that would eliminate most of the fun....)

Harriman Nelson, Admiral and scientist, suddenly turns into James Bond as well. Too bad Lee doesn't come equipped with a similar weapon in his shoe heel. Would have come in handy when he and some of his crew were kidnapped a few episodes ago.

Having escaped, they of course have to take the more dangerous route out of there, the easier path being strewn with the odd angry, armed native or two.

The girl, having led them so far and no farther (maybe she knew what was waiting) ceremoniously takes her leave of Jason and goes back. Pretty brave of her. After all, they still have a sacrifice scheduled, and who better than a girl who had fallen in love with a foreigner and betrayed the tribe?

Blocked off by a water dinosaur, they decide to kill it by breaking down a dam--natural or man-made, I couldn't tell. I don't see how a pile of rocks could have held molten lava at bay, and the heat of the lava and the rocks would have destroyed that tree trunk sticking out of the dam.

It was obvious that Jason would die--it was just a question of whether he would atone for his sins by sacrificing himself (wittingly or accidently) or if he would accidently die in a selfish bid to escape by himself. He atoned, but good heavens, he got snapped up so fast! Lee hardly had time to take advantage of the distraction.

We see the dinosaur submerge in the lava, then we see it submerge again. Dinosaur or no dinosaur, you're only going to go down once in molten rock.

I don't understand why lava + ice = mountain explosion. Wouldn't the lava simply melt away the ice until the cold managed to supercede it?

Going through a tunnel to the outside, Lee, oddly, had both hands tucked behind his back. It gave him the air of being out for a casual stroll rather than a desperate race.

We get to see the Seaview plunge out of the water again. Maybe they should film that again in warmer waters; then they wouldn't have to keep having episodes in the arctic regions. What luck! They emerged just where they needed to, and right when they needed to. (Just like Jason lucked out when they found him before he froze to death.)

Watching the explosion from the sub, Lee commented that it would all be destroyed, and Carol's father grumbled that they had nothing to show for it. Nelson pointed out that they had their lives. No one at all pointed out that a whole tribe of people lost theirs, including the girl who helped them to escape.


"The Village of Guilt" another standard sci-fi plot--normal animals grown to giant sizes, but it was fun! There is just something about giant cephalapods....

The other officers scoff at the news story of a "sea monster", but Nelson the scientist points out that there is so much of the ocean that we know nothing about, so who knows? A nit; Crane orders them to dive and cruise at 90 feet. Seeing the Seaview traveling, it is obvious that it is right at the surface.

It doesn't seem probable that an entire village could be bribed or bullied into keeping silence about something so horrifying--especially drinking the way they seem to. Lars Mattson claims that they share the guilt about the three dead men, but the only guilt would be in not reporting it. One small boy, for an unknown reason, elects to give them some facts (and how lucky they had a crewman on board who could speak the language!) Maybe he was just excited at the idea of rowing out to a submarine. Hope that he wasn't punished too hard--the voice of his presumed father coming over the water sounded very angry.

As Lee pointed out, the thesis behind the sea monster sounded good--growing larger animals so as to be able to feed more people. (And the vast oceans would be a better place to stock them than on land, which is overcrowded as it is.) The obvious problem was--why did he create a giant octopus, when there were lots and lots of tastier (and easier to handle) creatures, like the giant catfish that Curley mistook for whales? It becomes clear by the end that any humanitarian concerns have become submerged in Mattson's obsession to prove himself a better scientist than his wife's uncle. Too bad it took so long for that fact to percolate through Sigrid's mind--she might possibly have saved her husband's life.

One nice point--when the fake bomb was being attached to the hull, Nelson and Crane arrived to find Kowalski already suiting up, without waiting for instructions. In a situation like that, you shouldn't wait.

They probably wouldn't have thought too much about it back in the early sixties, but Nelson the Scientist (capitalizing it seems appropriate for him) should have pointed out the many potential hazards that such unnaturally sized creatures could cause the habitat.

Lars Mattson came to an appropriate end (probably wishing that his wife had killed him instead of just wounding him--they do make the deaths as gruesome as they can without blood) and the fight between the Seafreak (Nelson's monicker) and the Seaview was awesome. It really filmed well.

Wonder what happened to those catfish? I can see the entire coastline of Norway getting thoroughly sick of catfish, catfish, catfish, for months on end....

One other small point from "Turn Back the Clock": When Carol came on board, and they wondered where to put her, Lee announced that he had given up his cabin for her use. (Never mentions where he ended up sleeping.) Just a couple episodes ago, they had three guests to accomodate, including a woman, and they didn't seem to have a problem.

"Hot Line" finally informs us as to the time of the series. It is May, 1973, roughly nine years into the future.

A young James Doohan played an assistant to the President. Spent all of his time either on the phone or standing by the President's desk. Nice work if you can get it.

This episode deals with a Russian satellite that turns out to have been sabotaged. It will splash down near the California coast and, if the atomic material inside goes off, the radiation will affect San Francisco. Two Russian technicians are sent to deal with the problem, but one is an imposter. I was very surprised that they let the audience know immediately that the imposter was the older Gronski. (Nice to let Michael Ansara be a good guy; he's usually stuck with villains.) I wonder why they didn't leave it as a guessing game?

Scuttlebutt (the marine version of the grapevine) had the crew quickly aware that they were dealing with Russians, with an atomic bomb of some sort, and with San Francisco. Crewman Clark, who had a wife and child in San Francisco, desperately wanted to get in touch with his family, but they were on radio silence. Crane reminded Clark of this when Clark approached him. It seems to me that Crane was awfully brusque when dealing with Clark. I suppose that it has to do with naval discipline, but he didn't show the faintest glimmer of sympathy or make any attempt to ease Clark's fears.

{Pause here for a bit of trivia. One of my Bathroom Readers had an essay on naval terms, which included "scuttlebutt". A scuttlebutt was a lidded cask that was used for drinking water. A "scuttle" was a hole in a vessel (hence the old piratical cry, "We've scuttled 'em, Cap'n!") while a "butt" was a large cask. Just as, today, folks hang around the office water cooler, so did sailers hang around the scuttlebutt for a drink and a chat, so that the term came to mean "gossip".}

Kowalski, in this episode, comes across as a real jerk. A roomful of crew have been discussing the situation, and Clark reminds everyone that he has a wife and child in San Francisco. Kowalski tells him to stop whining, and says that Clark has no reason to be more concerned than the rest of them, when Clark had just told them his reason. Not surprisingly, a fight nearly ensues, and, when confronted, Kowalski indicates that he has no idea of what the problem was. When Clark later attempts to make a radio call by force, and almost gets arrested for it, Curley quietly reminds Crane that there are several crewmen with families in the Bay area, leading Crane to post a guard and making the radio room off limits. Kowalski could have pointed out to Clark that there were several other men in Clark's situation, but he did not; he just sneered at him.

Malinoff had told Crane and Nelson that he had no experience with scuba diving, so they had him practice. When they reached the splashdown site, they had Gronski and Malinoff go out...alone. Why in Heaven's name would they have a totally inexperienced diver go out, at 400 feet down, with no additional supervision? What if something had happened to one or both of them? Crane threw in an additional worry--that actually came to nothing. He mentioned in passing that Malinoff had had difficulty in learning to clear his mask, as many new divers do. Nelson almost bellowed at him, "Why didn't you tell me this before?" making it seem certain that he would have a problem with the mask, but he didn't. He did seem to have some other problem, but they never specified what it was. Someone mentioned "the bends" but it couldn't have been that; you get the bends from ascending too rapidly from one pressure level to another, and Malinoff began indicating pain when he was still on the ocean floor. Whatever if was, it seemed to pass off and give him no further trouble--until they realized that the satellite had not been disarmed. Malinoff offered to accompany Nelson back out, and Nelson told him that it would kill him. Never went into details.

Why did Nelson go out to the satellite alone? That was just plain st---d. The only excuse you could give for diving alone under those conditions would be that you absolutely had to get out there and there was no one else who could come with you. With a whole subfull of experienced divers, that certainly was not the case here.

>"Hot Line" finally informs us as to the time of >the series. It is May, 1973, roughly nine years >into the future.

I remember in a few episodes, a year would be given at the start of the show as an overlay. One later episode gave its year as 1978, another as 1982. Apparently the series was meant to take place over many years.

>A young James Doohan played an assistant to the >President. Spent all of his time either on the >phone or standing by the President's desk. Nice >work if you can get it.

I canna do it, Mr. President! We hanna got the power!

On a fan site devoted to Voyage, "Submarine Sunk Here" was listed in a fan survey as all-around favorite episode. I'm not surprised; it's a marvelous one. No Cold War enemies, no aliens, no undersea monsters. The enemies here are the mines, the sea itself...and human nature.

One possible nit: Wouldn't you think that the Seaview (and all other submarines) would have records of mine field sites?

The opening gambit was rather confusing. Evans was demanding an emergency leave from Bishop, the officer on watch, and fought with and injured Bishop when Bishop told him that he would deal with it later. In the first place, Bishop's reaction indicated that Evans had a good reason for emergency leave (a problem with his wife's pregnancy). In the second, Evans couldn't very well get leave until they got to shore, could he? He was going to have to wait, regardless.

This episode finally shows a ship's doctor--one who looks younger than everyone else on board. (Shades of Dr. Bashir....)

Once things start popping (literally) the reaction shots are great. The camera shots are all skewed sideways.

At one point, a crewman is unable to hang on to another crewman to bring him to safety, and Nelson orders him to lock the hatch against the doomed man. The man reacts badly to the situation. Thing is, shortly beforehand, three crewman slammed the hatch on a man who was right at the threshold. One grab and yank would have gotten him over.

They never did say just how many men died in the initial mishap. Presumably everyone that was in the engine room, but who knows how many are posted there regularly?

Nelson ordered emergency oxygen lungs passed out to the accessible survivors, despite the fact that they could not possibly use them to swim free at such a depth. Presumably he intended them to be used as a last ditch manuver when they ran out of air, but you could argue that his handing them out led to the death of Collins, who probably figured, "Why would they hand them out to us if it was impossible at this depth?"

It was rather interesting that, immediately after a bunch of the crew decided for themselves that the officious Bishop was to blame for what happened, Nelson showed up and asked them to give up their shares of the bottled oxygen to save Bishop. With very little hesitation, all of them agreed.

Harker spent a good deal of the episode needling Blake, whose inattention to duty during the fight had caused them to blunder into the mine field. At one point, Blake has been ordered to stash oxygen cannisters at various sites in the sub. Harker assumes that he is hoarding air for himself, and Blake goes for him. Not once does Blake mention that he was following Crane's orders. Well, I guess you have to make allowances for his state of mind. Later, after Harker, Nelson, Crane and Evans are forced to listen to Collin's dying moments outside the sub, Harker comments that there is another death to be laid to Blake. I was really expecting that he would say something about Blake hoarding air, and be sharply corrected by Crane. Instead, Nelson points out what seems to have been clear to the rest of the crew: that Blake is going to have to live with the consequences of his mistake.

Blake chooses not to. Learning that a compartment must be flooded--from the inside--in order to tip the Seaview back to where it can couple with the descending diving bell (and BTW, sliding down among a bunch of mines took a heckuva lot of guts) Blake silently went about the chore, knowing that it would mean his death. (Actually, it looked as though he could have managed to slip out after opening the valves.) Crane and Nelson were yelling to him through the hatch, but he ignored them. After opening the last valve, the water pressure was finally such that it knocked him back--an impressive stunt, with no grace or finesse--simply slammed back over a table, into a wall to collapse in an untidy heap. Crane and Nelson apparently heard and interpreted the noise, for they immediately stopped calling to him.

One thing they didn't explain--how the heck did they rescue the crew? At the end, Nelson tells Crane that the Seaview "will be raised", indicating that it's still down there. So how were the men retrieved?

Evans' newborn son was named "Harriman". Nice of him, and made for a cute ending, but it would have also been nice if it had been maybe "Harriman Blake Evans."


"The Magnus Beam" was a combination Cold War and Secret Weapon plot.

They have the undercover Captain Crane captured (natch!) Problem is, it shows at least three guards whaling away at him with the butts of their guns. This should have either killed him or injured him so badly that he would have been incapable of escaping. He not only survives this, he survives an additional beating up later on.

I loved Abdul Azziz and his many cousins! His little "asides" regarding the general, women, and his family life were great.

A re-used film clip causes an odd situation. While waiting for a chance to attack the Magnus machinery, Luana falls asleep on Lee's shoulder. She awakens and they see that Lee's escape has been discovered. Search parties are sent out, putting them in great danger of being found, and Luana...falls asleep on Lee's shoulder again!

Commander Amadi has been brought aboard the Seaview, and it quickly becomes clear that he is an enemy. However, during the whole time that they are stuck in the missile bay (or whatever it's called) no one thinks to knock him out or tie him up. He's allowed to wander around the room, watching and listening to them come up with a plan. Naturally, when they come up with a way to get the outer hatch opened, he tries to stop them and nearly succeeds.

The final scene shows Lee stretched out in the observation nose, being tenderly cared for by Luane. So why isn't he in Sickbay?

"No Way Out" is yet another Cold War plot. I understand that they used that a lot in the first season. This one has Koslow, a defecting Communist agent with lots and lots of info, and the attempts to assassinate him.

Having managed to get the wounded Koslow to the sub (and picked up an assassin as well) Koslow insists that they go back to retrieve his ladylove, Anna, and they do so. For some reason, Parker, the assassin, holds off on any attempt to kill Koslow until after Anna is brought on board.

BTW, the very young-looking doctor of "Submarine Sunk Here" has been replaced with an older model. Too bad. Too young, maybe, but cute.

The number of times Parker gets interrupted in his killing almost becomes laughable. I liked the interchange between Parker and the young guard who had been thoroughly chewed out by Crane for refusing to let Parker by. Obviously Parker was enjoying needling the young man, but if he hadn't, he might possibly have had time to kill Koslow before he was interrupted yet again.

Talking to his "superiors" in Washington, Parker goofs up on his responses somehow, making it clear that he is an imposter. Washington sneaks a message to Nelson, right there in front of Parker, but they take too long to react, and Parker gets away.

This, by the way, is the first--but surely not the last!--time an enemy takes to the ventilation system. It seems to me that, prior to this episode, all the ventilation hatches were tiny little things, but maybe I just missed seeing the big, adult-sized ones.

Anna turns out to be an enemy, too, which brings up a problem--she had been left alone with Koslow, even when he was unconcious, and had made no attempt to kill him. Pretty slipshod work. Another problem--Koslow starts to yell for help. Why the heck did the guard outside wait until Nelson and several other crew arrived to go into the Sickbay?

Anna quickly pretends to be fighting with Parker when the others arrive. The young guard gets his revenge; he's the one who clubs Parker over the head. Nelson leaves her with Koslow while he goes for the doctor (and where was the doctor during all the commotion?) and she promptly attempts to kill Koslow again, unaware that Lee is watching from the air vent. Anna shows a bizarre mix of strength and weakness; she doesn't make a sound when Lee shoots the hypodermic out of her hand. Anyone and everyone would probably scream under those circumstances. Moments later, she is sobbing feebly in Lee's arms. (Lee always seems to get the girl whether he wants her or not.)

"The Blizzard Makers" was a pretty cool episode, if you'll pardon the pun. It deals with an artificially created alteration in the Gulf Stream, resulting in some seriously cold weather for the southern states.

Colonel Klink (Krieger)plays the head bad guy in this one. Supposedly he was also the bad guy in the pilot episode (some shots look like him, some don't) so the implication is that this is the same gang. I understand that they were going to have a specific gang as a recurring villain in the series, but for some reason changed their minds. Anyone know why?

The business of changing the climate specialist into an obedient zombie was rather confusing. They didn't seem to perform any actual surgury--just stuck a nifty looking spiked helmet over the doctor's head for a while, while they simply taped a little gadget--which turned out to be a receiver-transmitter--on his stomach. After this, all they had to do was tell the man a thing, and he would believe and act on it without question. Tell him that a large beaker of fluid was Harriman Nelson--"Whatever you say. Bang!" The little gadget apparently recieved instructions in a high-speed squirt, which the doctor was somehow able to translate.

After the silliness of shooting the beaker ("Take that, Nelson!") the scene quickly becomes tense. After Krieger asks him for a good method of dispatching Nelson, the doctor quietly and methodically looks through a selection of chemicals and selects a couple, measuring them out by eye while Krieger looks on intently, obviously curious but not wanting to distract him with questions. The doctor requests his notes (and how did he know that they had brought them along?) and soaks them in the solution, creating an explosive that will go off with an alteration in pressure--such as a plane reaching 500 feet.

Nelson misses death by one phone call. I do wish they could have squeezed in the crew's reaction to the news that Nelson was not dead, after all.

Later, on the sub (after Nelson almost gets burned to death in his cabin) we see Chip Morton looking through the periscope. (I liked how he jumped just a little when Crane suddenly stepped up in front of him.) Morton asks Crane to take a look, and he does so, to the accompaniment of ominous music. Problem is, I've looked, and I've looked, and I zoomed it as far as it would go, and I cannot see anything to account for their concern. It turns out to be thousands of dead fish floating, but I couldn't see it.

We get a little land-bound excitement, with Crane, Curley, Kowalsky, and the obligatory sacrificial lamb landing on an island and promptly getting captured. Crane, of course, has a Bondian gadget around his ankle that burns through the hinge on their prison door. (Only one hinge. Whoever heard of a door with only one hinge, and that near the bottom of the door?)

It's interesting that when the doctor shows his hand and they manage to capture him, Nelson immediately assumes that something is wrong with him, not that he's an enemy. Finding and removing the gadget from his stomach promptly snaps the doctor back to normal. Crane and Co. are rescued, and the bad guys are satisfactorily blown up.

A nice touch: Crane comes into the last scene with a weather report. He does not say that the weather is back to normal, he says that it's getting warmer. It would take a little while for the weather patterns to work themselves back to normal.

Couple corrections from "Price of Doom."

I had said that it was Kowalski playing medic when Julie got punched out. It was not; it was someone in an officer's uniform. The nit about giving sedation to a concussed patient still stands.

Again with Kowalski--I thought that he had trailed back after the others after he had reported Fox's death. A bunch of the crew crowded into the hallway, but Kowalski was not one of them. As far as I can tell, he was not seen again in the episode.

Couple additions for "The Sky is Falling."

Where did they get all those cameras along the coastline that gave the military such nice, clears views of the saucer heading out to sea and then going under? And the saucer, after heading outward, seems to circle back towards those invisible cameras, because we see it going under from a front view.

When the sub has almost reached the saucer, Sparks (or whoever was on radio at the moment) calls out that the radio is being jammed. Moments later, Nelson notes that the T.V. system has been jammed, also, and he, Lee, and Tobin rush to the observation nose to see what they can see. After the saucer drifts up into view and they've been watching it for a while, we see the crew in the control room...watching it on T.V.

A rather neat moment: the little mini-saucer detaches and starts to float up and past them. Nelson grabs one of the bracing struts at the nose and swings himself around to keep watching as long as he can.

"I always said mermaids make lousy housekeepers." Hey, Lee, you try keeping the ocean clean sometime!

Some additions for "Village of Guilt"

Because of previously filmed clips, Lee's wetsuit appears to change from a light grey to white and back to grey again. Later, when Nelson and Kowalski go outside the sub, they are both in dark suits, but they show the same shot of a white-suited man coming out.

A nice touch, although it was probably inadverdent: Lee comes back into the sub carrying of chunk of tentacle. As he shows it to Nelson, fluid drips out. It was probably just water, but the lighting made it look white, and sort of implied some icky body fluid.

During the scenes where the "bomb" was being attached to the sub, and Nelson coming out, it's obvious that the Seaview hasn't been cleaned for a while--the bottom is all over growth.

After Sigrid shoots her husband, you see the gun out in the middle of the floor. I thought at first that she had hurled it away from her, but as Nelson and her uncle come over to the trap door, you see the gun again, right at her feet.


"The Ghost of Moby Dick"

I wonder if they had a lot of joking on the set during the filming of this one? Were they all calling Richard Basehart "Ishmael"? (He had that role in the movie, for those who didn't know.)

The whale was a pretty nice prop, if you ignored how the back of the tail folded as it swam.

One thing they never explained was how the Doctors Bryce were able to survive having their boat smashed to smithereens out there in the ocean. No way to radio for help, and Ellen Bryce would have had to keep her badly injured husband afloat. None were wearing life jackets.

Whoever did this episode didn't seem to know much about whales. It was 1964; surely they had heard of blue whales back then, who truly are the biggest things ever on Earth? Lee said that the biggest whale he knew of was the sperm whale, and seemed incredulous at the size Walter described: "That would make it bigger than the dinosaurs!" Every school child knows that blue whales are bigger than any dinosaur. They probably wanted to use a sperm whale because it is a toothed whale, and therefore looks more menacing. Blue whales are baleen whales, and confine their diet to nearly microscopic sized creatures.

Chauvanism rears its head; Lee comments that this mission is not appropriate for a woman. Dr. Ellen Bryce cheerfully--but pointedly--says that she's not there to cook and clean, she's a scientific partner in the research.

I didn't really understand the insistance on getting an EKG reading of "the biggest heart on Earth". Wouldn't any whale's heart suffice for what they were allegedly trying to research?

That gigantic heart, BTW, was beating just as fast as a human heart, which doesn't seem logical. They really should have slowed it down. It would have sounded more menacing that way, too.

Having caught up to the whale, and having access to the gadget giving them the heartbeat, no one starts recording the EKG. Walter Bryce says--and Nelson readily goes along with it--that they need to tranquilize the whale first. Huh? What would tranquilizing accomplish? It would, in fact, probably affect the heartbeat, and they want a natural heartbeat, right?

After the whale broadsides them, and they have the regulation sparks, leaking water, etc, etc, etc, someone yells over the radio that if they are hit again, they've had it. Well, they are hit again, and they manage to survive. A nice touch: Kowalski hands Curley the twenty dollars that he had borrowed from him six months ago. (Just when they first spotted the whale; coincidence?) Curley does not seem to appreciate it.

Looking for Nelson to give him a report on the damage, Lee speaks with Walter, who tells him that Nelson is in the observation area. Lee tells Walter that they are leaving the area to make repairs, and Walter is horrified. Lee has to put on his captain's hat and remind Walter that what he says, goes. He then suggests that Walter and his wife remain in their cabin. Walter tells him that Ellen in not in their cabin, and sneeringly says something like "Didn't I tell you? She's in the observation area." It sounded as though, in addition to his obsession over the whale, he's jealous of Ellen and Nelson, but Ellen herself had said that he was focused on revenge to the exclusion of all else.

Nelson doesn't make a good showing in this episode. Walter's wife, who surely should know something about her husband, tells Nelson about Walter's real plans for the whale, and Nelson brushes it off! Lee has to shove a copy of Moby Dick (surely a standard part of any ship's library) at Nelson before Nelson begins to concede that Ellen and Lee may be right about Walter.

It doesn't seem to occur to Nelson any more than Walter that they can always come back after they've made repairs. They found it before, they can find it again.

Nelson finds Walter preparing to leave the sub. (Trying to get into a wetsuit with his whole left side more or less nonfunctional must have taken some time.) He was alone in the room. Where the heck were all the men we normally see in that area? And wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of sensor that warns when an outside hatch has been opened?

Chip was given a little extra to do on this episode; Lee sends him to find the admiral and invite him to come topside now that they have reached the surface. Chip finds the admiral starting to regain conciousness, and hauls him back to the control room at the admiral's insistance.

Lee, very sensibly, was going to refuse to return and look for Walter. The sub is being held together with duct tape and prayer, and must be handled delicately. Nelson insists that they must go back, even after Ellen flatly tells him that her husband is insane. No one suggests that they go back, remaining on the surface, and send down the mini-sub or the diving bell.

Whatever the stuff was that Walter poured into his harpoon, it apparently was not enough to have any effect; that whale took him for one heck of a ride. Tying the loose end of the harpoon rope to his belt!!!! If they'd had them back then, he'd have been eligible for the Darwin awards.

They spoke of the outside camera--"camera" singular, not plural, and yet with no apparent manipulations by anyone in the control room, the camera kept jumping--not panning--from Walter to the whale and back again.

Ellen has apparently grieved herself out over the last six months, especially the last days (they never say just how much time has passed). Nelson seems much more upset at Walter's death than she is.

I took a look at some of the bonus material. One item was a "presentation reel" that apparently was used to introduce the show to those who would be presenting the series. It was in color; showing a nice view of the control room with the crew busy. We then see Irwin Allen fold up the periscope and begin addressing the camera.

It showed a clip that was obviously from the episode "Turn Back the Clock". It was also in color--apparently the first season was supposed to be in color but someone vetoed it, probably to save money. The clip shows Lee and Carol racing across a barren patch of ground, with Carol falling just as the dinosaur looms into camera range. Problem was, Carol was a redhead, not a brunette. Allen's voiceover indicated that the actress was Jill St. John, not Yvonne Craig. Anyone know what happened there? The clip with St. John was actually a little better than the televised scene. The Craig scene had Lee and Carol standing like a couple fools, waiting for the fight to be over so that the victor could eat them. In the St. John scene, we see Lee attempting to urge Carol to keep going, but Carol has frozen in panic. A few moments later, a dinosaur tail comes down behind them and sweeps them over the edge. They land on an outcropping a few feet down and are thereby trapped until the end of the fight.

Another clip they show is Red Buttons, of all people, in Zanzibar, of all places. This was a description of a "lighter" episode. It shows Red, who apparently has interfered in the sale of some nubile young women, being chased through a marketplace (with all the expectable obstacles) in the company of a young woman who looked and sounded like Barbara Luna. Allen's voiceover went on to say, oddly, that Red Button's "mission" on the episode had nothing to do with what we were seeing then. Huh??? I looked at my encyclopedia of Sci Fi shows, and in the first two seasons I could not find any episode starring Red Buttons. What happened there?

The "never before seen" unaired pilot was a little disappointing. I had seen it before--in black and white. Apart from being in color (mind you, it was very lovely to look at) the sole difference in the episode was the opening credits with Basehart and Hedison. Basehart is still at the glass wall map, but he's standing a little differently. Hedison is at the periscope, but he folds it up and turns to check another gadget behind him.

Lee's "white" wet suit turned out to be a light yellow color. During the fight with the squid, there's a startling puff of blood as one of the divers hacks at it with a knife. I'll have to check back and see how visible that was in black and white.

"Long Live the King"

A charming show; the one and only holiday episode.

It also seems to be the only show so far that was deliberately humorous. The whole business of Captain Crane going head to head with a twelve year old brat was great. And Hedison got the best lines on the show: "In my opinion, there's just one person aboard who'd be likely to attack him." "Who?" "Me!" Nelson's burst of laughter and Lee's answering grin was great. Another great one: "Your Highness, why don't you shut up?"

It was odd seeing all the men in civilian clothes. We get the first view of the galley--of course, we might have been seeing it all along, with the camera facing out from the kitchen area of the room.

I realize that the kid suffered one heck of a shock, but he still seemed to go awfully quickly from mourning his father to "I'm King now, and you have to do everything I tell you to!"

Smart kid, though. After confiscating the Admiral's quarters for himself, the prince left a decoy in the bed and curled up--rather uncomfortably--on the other side of the room, stolen pistol in hand. After surviving the first assassination attempt, it did make sense for him to park himself in the control room, surrounded by a lot of people, even if Lee and his crew were chafing about it.

They used a bit of misdirection regarding the assassin. When the prince's valet came to the galley and demanded access to prepare the prince's lunch, Cookie (and what else would he be called?) defended his domain with a meat cleaver. The valet began to draw a knife out of his jacket, which was surely meant to draw the audience's attention to him as the possible assassin.

Having let the prince's obnoxious behavior slide by (mainly because of the admiral), Lee instantly asserted his authority when the ship came under attack. This was the jolt that the prince needed; afterwards he sent his governess to request--not demand--that he be allowed back in the control room. He also asked--fairly nicely--to be the first to look in the periscope when they discovered that something was up on the surface, and Lee allowed it, lifting him up himself. (BTW, either there was a step or box below the camera angle, or David Hedison was quite a strong man; that was no little kid he picked up, and he seemed to hold him with no great effort.)

Having known Carroll O'Connor mainly as Archie Bunker, it was a treat to see him as Old John (possibly AKA Santa Claus?) He did a marvelous job with the character.

One really big nit: where the heck was the guard during the second assassination attempt? It wouldn't have been nice to kill him on a Christmas show, but they should have shown him being knocked out something; that was extreme dereliction of duty.


"Hail to the Chief"

Rather an odd episode. They took so long with the preparations, I thought that they were going to run out of time before they ever got to the operation.

Having more or less shanghaied the Seaview into taking the mission, Lee is told to bring a crewman with an "AA" security rating, and he brings Kowalski. As it turns out, Kowalski is to be a courier, fetching information back to the Admiral by motorcycle. It probably would have been wise if they had inquired beforehand if Kowalski was capable of riding a motorcycle!

The head bad guy stated that he wanted all the available information on the mission, which was why they went to the trouble of waylaying Kowalski. In point of fact, the information Kowalski had was simply the directions the Seaview was to take--information that the bad guys made no use of at all.

Dr. Turner, who had the fancy equipment that might make surgery unnecessary, was leaving his clinic in the hands of Dr. Rettig. He was promptly run down by the enemy, and we see Rettig yelling for a doctor. Apparently in the stress of the moment, she forgot that she was a doctor.

Seaman Clark gets the chance to redeem himself for his behavior in "The Sky is Falling"--he volunteers to crawl into the bowels of the ship open up a stuck valve--risking the chance of being sealed in and drowned if he can't relieve the pressure in time. Naturally, something goes wrong, leaving it up to Lee to provide the heroics in the absolute nick of time.

Turner's machine, turned too high, had caused some problems for the sub: "This is a better ship than we thought; we're going in two directions at once." They had set up a computer watch to triangulate the problem if it showed up again. When it did, and they pinpointed Sickbay, Nelson somehow knew instantly that the problem was also a threat to the president, and provided yet another nick-of-time rescue. BTW, that ray, having shattered some bottles and such on the walls, seemed to be aimed directly at the one man's head for a moment, with no effect.

One half season, and they've had four women as the bad guys. That seems like quite a lot.

A correction for "The Blizzard Makers". I have no idea why I didn't catch it the first time; maybe it was the camera angle. When Lee burns through the prison door, he's burning through the lock and handle, not one of the hinges. (Pretty silly of the bad guys not to search them thoroughly.)

I found an answer to a question regarding the "presentation reel". Listening to the David Hedison interviews in Volume 2 (way, way too short) he speaks of doing an Irwin Allen movie, "The Lost World" with Jill St. John. I already knew that they were using jungle and dinosaur clips from that movie, but I didn't know that Hedison starred in it. (He said that he disliked the movie, and became very tired and depressed while working on it.) Obviously they used a clip from the movie to show as a clip from the show, and while making the show, carefully matched Craig's scene with St. John's. Having Craig and Hedison swept over the edge by a dino tail would have involved additional filming, which of course was a no-no.

David Hedison also stated that, while Allen collected "blooper reels", he refused to let the cast see them. Not even after the series was over and done with. Hedison never understood why not, unless it was that the humorless Allen didn't think they were funny enough to bother with. Luckily, he didn't destroy them. The bloopers were fun, although, again, it was too short. I really hope that they have additional bloopers for the following seasons.

And when does Season 2 come out???

"The Last Battle" was a pretty interesting show, but there was not enough Seaview. (Oh, all right. There was not enough Captain Crane.)

Didn't take long after Nelson's kidnapping before we found out just what he's gotten sucked into, with that mad colonel staring delightedly at his old movies of Hitler.

Said Colonel was very arrogant, but he had reason to be; he calculated pretty accurately how Nelson was going to react. (What the heck did he need that psychologist for?)

Interesting that, after being held prisoner for some three to six years, it took Nelson to show them that they had the wherewithal to create a short-wave radio.

I realize that after some two weeks of tension and worry, Lee was overjoyed to hear from Nelson, but sending a message back was a very bad blunder.

Rather than wasting film showing Lee's scuba crew scouting around the island, they simply had the Colonel announce that Crane would of course send a scuba team out, and then we see Chip reporting, dressed in scuba gear and dripping wet.

I found it very hard to believe that Nelson would not calculate the possibility of a turncoat in their midst. I was pleased to find that I was not mistaken.

I also got the First Season Volume One set. It and The Time Tunnel Season One, Volume One were on sale at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago for only $14.99 each, with some other series box sets. Unfortunately, Volumes Two of both series were regular price. I wish they were included in the deal but oh, well. I remember Time Tunnel better than Voyage, of which all I can recall is a bit in one episode where in a corner, maybe in one of the corridors it seems, a gelatinous like creature or something starts growing. I dunno which season it was or if it's one of the last four episodes I've yet to see in this set. I also wondered if I got it confused with the killer plankton in The Price of Doom since it's been so long that I've seen it.

Anyway, has anyone else noticed that the Enterprise--er, I mean the Seaview--is always the only ship that's available to do whatever mission is required of it?

Well, that is it's reason for existance, isn't it? Listen to the voice over at the beginning of the pilot episode.

"Mutiny"....

AWESOME episode! Probably the best I've seen so far, although I really enjoyed "The Fear Makers" and "Submarine Sunk Here".

The big coelenterate (AKA the Giant Jellyfish) was marvelously done. My one question with it was how did it survive the Neptune exploding right inside it?

Nelson's and Fowler's frantic battle for survival was well done, too, although I do not understand why a) Fowler was the only one stung as they swam through that mass of small jellyfish, and b) how did he get stung on his head and neck while wearing full scuba gear? If he'd gotten it on his face it would have made more sense. This shows up again later with a Seaview diver with bits of jellyfish tentacle all over the back of his suit.

I couldn't understand at first why Nelson ordered Fowler to remove his suit, making him that much more vulnerable to stings. Then I saw that they were making a raft of sorts from the inflated suits. (Is that feasible, BTW?) I'm assuming that the "raft" was actually made up of manniquins in scuba suits; how else do you explain a loose suit blown up with a distinct buttock shape?

They really don't say just how much time went by; several days at least. One of the conflicts in this show is Old Navy vs New Navy; Captain Crane goes head to head with the spit-and-polish Admiral Starke, who eats junior officers for breakfast. Starke turns the Seaview into a Naval vessel for the duration of the mission (finding out just what happened to the Neptune) and he demands Naval discipline of all the crew, in spite of the fact that some of the men may have never been Navy at all. Crane actually confronts him on this, although he doesn't really get anywhere by doing so. (BTW, Crane seems to have forgotten that, when he first arrived on the Seaview fresh out of the Navy, he too thought that the crew was "soft" and needed discipline.)

The Admiral having been found and taken to Pearl Harbor (Fowler didn't survive) we are treated to Richard Basehart's opening salvo of an incredible performance. Crane begins to question Nelson's behavior almost immediately; he is frenetic, restless and jabbering at top speed--but of course this could be a reaction to his time afloat. Crane tentatively suggests that Nelson should spend more time in the hospital, but Nelson brushes it off.

Nelson, in spite of his odd behavior, stands up to Starke in defence of Crane. They reach the area where the Neptune met its fate, and, horribly, begin to parallel the experiences, losing control and going into a helpless dive. Crane manages to perch the sub on a chunk of underwater mountain, first warning all hands to brace themselves for impact. Starke, very foolishly, ignores the warning and is thrown to the deck. After being helped up by Crane, he snarls that it was a dangerous thing to do, prompting a delightful line from Crane: "Admiral, obviously you didn't hear my order to stand fast."

Nelson, meantime, has been standing around doodling. Does he really keep himself so distant from everyone but the Captain? Crane seemed to be the only one who recognized that Nelson's behavior was out of the ordinary. Even Starke, who has known him since Annapolis, doesn't notice anything wrong until the end.

Crane and Chip find, via computer, that they will have to execute a bizarre manuver to get them back to the surface. Crane thinks it through and recognizes why it's feasible, but Nelson will not even listen to an explanation, forcing an incredibly well-done confrontation between the Captain and the two Admirals. Crane is relieved of command, but takes it back at gunpoint--just long enough to bring the Seaview up. Actually, from his expression and his tone of voice, at this point it sounds as if it is Crane who has gone over the edge, but once the sub is safely on its way, he puts down the gun and relinquishes command. Nelson can only see that his once trusted friend pulled a gun on him and goes ballistic. Starke finally acknowledges that a) Crane was right and b) something is seriously wrong with Nelson, but instead of taking him to Sickbay, he suggests that they goes to his cabin--and then just leaves him sitting in the control room.

Attacked by the jellyfish, Starke quickly calls Crane back to duty. Crane settles his frightened crew with a few words, then turns to deal with the problem. Again, the special effects were wonderful.

In spite of the fact that Nelson was stung by a jellyfish, his behavior turns out to be an allergic reaction to the drug he's been gulping down ever since he got on board. They have a suitably manly scene of reconciliation in the Sickbay, and the Seaview goes on her way.

"Doomsday"

This was another marvelous episode, but at the same time incredibly frustrating. I've just gotten on loan a book of science fiction television, which includes episode guides and background. For this episode, they included an anecdote from the writer--both Basehart and Hedison complimented him on the script, saying that it was the best that they'd seen, and would he please write more. If they could have maintained this standard, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea would probably now be regarded as one of the best--and longest running--"science fiction" programs.

This show also brought back old memories. My father was in the Coast Guard, and he once showed us a film he took on board his ship when they crossed the equator and had a "King Neptune Ceremony", hazing those crewmen who were crossing the equator for the first time. There must be a fairly strict protocol for this "ceremony", because my dad's film was astonishingly similar to what was on the episode. The cast must have had a wonderful time filming this part--and Kowalski must have enjoyed the chance to squirt the Admiral and the Captain in the face without reprisal.

They are jerked violently from their silly fun to a terrifying reality, although Crane--and presumably some others--think that at first that it's just a drill.

An accident that blinds Kowalski piles on the tension, although I wish that they had explained just why the console chose to explode at that moment. This provides an interesting counterbalance, as the doctor works steadily to save Kowalski's sight, in the face of perhaps losing everything else.

There's a nice interlude between Patterson and Clark; Clark is embarrassed at possibly meeting doom all smeared and feathered up from the hazing. Patterson points out that it's like his mother always told him: to keep clean, in case you're in an accident, you wouldn't want the ambulance man to see you all dirty, would you? I was actually expecting his line to be the classic, "Always wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident." Maybe the censors didn't want them mentioning underwear.

At the very last moment (natch!) Doomsday is aborted--it turns out to have been human error; a failure to communicate. The joy and relief is abruptly curtailed when the last of the four missiles fails to deactivate. Adding to the trouble (they just kept piling complication on complication) they're in enemy territory and being pursued by ships with depth charges. If they surface to face the ships, the missile will go off. (There is no explanation as to why they can't radio an explanation, either to the ships directly or to the American government, who would then get in touch with said enemy.) Going down to near crush depth to try and get rid of the missile safely, they damage the ballast vents, causing them to lose trim. This hampers Kowalski's surgery. The sub lists right after Nelson warns Crane to keep it steady. I was expecting Nelson or the doctor to snap, "You call that steady?"

Having sent the minisub away as a decoy (and I don't recall seeing it destroyed; it just vanished from the episode, drawing the ships away with it) they finally manage to deal with the missile. Final complication: the young weapons officer, Corbett, on loan from the Navy and increasingly upset about what's been going on, decides to detonate the missile at the surface, so that the public can see what nearly happened. (He seems totally unconcerned about the damage that this will cause.) They had already bled off some of the missile's fuel before he decided on his course of action, which is presumably why the missile slowed and then dropped to the seabed (and, as far as I can tell, did not detonate at all.)

The young actor does a great job of facing off against Basehart, and you have to admit that he had a point. He ends up facing a dishonorable discharge (and possibly prison, although that is not mentioned.)

One thing that was not clearly explained: Nelson mentions to Crane that if Corbett had obeyed orders, the Seaview would have been destroyed; by disobeying, he saved them (and will be punished as a result.) Apparently something in that last complication meant that they would have to sacrifice themselves in getting rid of the missile, but why?

The end of the episode shows Lee and Chip taking readings using a sextant. Isn't their state-of-the-art submarine equipment working? Or maybe Lee wanted to remind himself of an earlier time when they didn't have doomsday missiles to worry about. Lee tries to talk with Nelson (who doesn't want to talk about it, but does). Lee comments that Nelson had given Corbett a second chance and he blew it. Lee seems to have forgotten that it was he who persuaded Nelson to give Corbett that second chance after he initially froze.

"The Invaders" was an interesting idea, but they didn't do enough with it, and it raised too many questions.

In the first place, "Invaders" is a misleading title--if, as Zar claims, he and his people are the result of an ancient, previous evolutionary cycle, then they are not invaders. As Kowalski pointed out, they were here first.

The doctor describes Zar as having the I.Q. of a genius. This seems to be an assumption, not a determination, because when did they have the chance to test him, and how could they anyway? His culture and whole point of view are radically different from ours. Mind you, he does seem to be very smart--he picks up on the language instantaneously. He said that he did so by listening to them speak--well, he must have very good hearing, because once they finally cracked that very thick cannister, no one said very much until he spoke up. His people were smart enough to calculate that the next time "man" evolved, it would be as a primate (he implies that they created a man-shape for themselves so that they could deal with the new species when the time came). How could they know that? It could have been the reptiles that evolved sentience, or even insects.

If they were so incredibly smart, why couldn't they design a more accessible cannister? Maybe one that opened from the inside? If the crew hadn't finally managed to figure out how to crack the thing, Zar would have been left to smother. (And you notice he didn't give them a word of thanks for getting him out.)

Of course, the crew didn't exactly present themselves as intellectual giants. A strange new species on board, no way of telling if he were peaceful or hostile, and they leave him without one single guard on duty!!! Most of the resulting problems could have been avoided (forcing the writer to come up with something more subtle) if they'd just kept an eye on him!

That arrogant little interchange between Zar and Crane about sleep only being an acquired habit, was a lot of guff. If we're deprived of sleep long enough, we die. Plain and simple. In fact, I believe that I read that humans can survive longer without water than they can without sleep.

Given what happened just a short time later, it was foolish of Zar to simply break the hypodermic holding his blood sample. He should have vaporized it. As it is, it's extremely lucky that neither Nelson or the doctor became ill.

Zar also claimed that he was "testing" to see if humans could resist the diseases in his blood, but from the incredibly evil smile he gave, it was obvious that he knew that he was condemning Foster to a hideous death. These people knew 20 million years ago that, if they were rescued from their suspended animation, they would promptly set about destroying life as we know it. Nasty.

Chip and Kowalski volunteered to go down below and see what was contaminating the air supply. They knew that they would have to be sealed in for an indefinite period, and yet they only took along a tiny air cannister containing approximately four minutes of air for two.

I loved the scene in the control room when Zar realized that they had figured out a way to safely deal with his air sabotage and rescue Chip and Kowalski. He starts to speak up, but Crane, fed up to the eyebrows, barks out that guards are to kill Zar if he so much as twitches. (This would have resulted in the death of everyone on board, but no one knew that at the time.)

Having determined the deadly threat that Zar's blood represented, the Admiral immediately decides to destroy him. No qualms, no hesitation about the horrible fate they set up for him. (I do hope the Admiral removed the valuables from his cabin before he turned it into a fireball.)

At the end, while they are burying the remaining cannisters, the Admiral comments on "man's second chance". Crane looks at him and seems to be about to say something, but he keeps silent.

I think that if I had seen "The Indestructible Man" as a child, I would have been terrified. That shambling, clanking menace stalking through the ship....

I do wish that they could have come up with a decent explanation for why and how the robot's programming got altered so that it just wanted to kill everyone.

Michael Constantine put in a fine performance of the anxious scientist, so eager to start collecting the information gathered by the robot that he can't wait the relatively short time to get to port.

One problem with the death scenes: that robot was very strong, but also quite clumsy and slow. None of the four men were so cornered that they could not have ducked and run. They all ended up cornering themselves.

Kowalski mentions that the robot rips through bulkheads "as if they were cardboard". That probably was what they were made of, weren't they?

Remarkably astute robot; it figured out that it could save itself a lot of time and effort by chilling the whole crew to death, rather than picking them off one by one.

Since it could just (more or less) walk right through walls, why did it at one point squeeze itself into those narrow ballast whatchamacallits? A flexible human has a hard enough time traveling through those things. BTW, I loved Lee's exasperation when the Admiral suggested flooding those areas in an attempt to short out the robot: "We just got them pumped out, and you want to fill them up again?"

Dr. Brand comes up with a makeshift gadget for tracking the robot, and Nelson tells him that two men will accompany him around the sub. We never see the two men (although at one point we hear one of them pass on their specific location). When Lee and Nelson catch up to Dr. Brand, neither of them thinks to ask what happened to his two crewmen.

Admiral Nelson has a lot of guts, luring the robot along. I think that I would have made certain that the hatches along the pathway were open, rather than trying to get them open when the robot is only a foot or so away.

Given Dr. Brand's attitude towards the robot--or more specifically, the information trapped inside--it was pretty silly of Nelson to send him to deal with the robot alone, especially when he had stated that the robot might re-activate at any time. Dr. Brand, of course, cannot resist trying one more time to get the information, and nearly dies for it. As a matter of fact, he should have died. The robot killed everyone it came into contact with. We don't get a close look at the three men from the crew's mess--they were bundled into blankets--but Lee's restrained comment that "it's not pretty" makes it pretty clear that they died horribly. Dr. Brand states that "it meant to kill me" and shortly afterwards concedes that its whole purpose now is to kill. So why didn't it kill him?

Notice that Dr. Brand never did confess what he did. His foolishness led to the deaths of three men.

There's robot logic for you: it fastens a magnetic bomb to itself, which will destroy it as well as the submarine. Yet it eagerly follows the flashlights that Nelson tosses into the excape chamber to get itself a little more energy, in spite of the fact that it is going to be gone in seconds.

Presumably the escape chamber has some sort of boosting mechanism in it. How else do you explain a heavy metal object floating out of the sub?

At the end, Dr. Brand announces that he will try again, putting in more safeguards this time. (Assuming that he can get the government to finance it again.) I wasn't surprised at how fellow scientist Nelson reacted to the statement, but I really expected Lee to give him a "Are you crazy?" look.

"The Buccaneer" was a pretty nifty episode. It was interesting to see the Seaview taken over (although Nelson and Crane were probably horrified by how easily it was done) and watching the crew plot to retake it.

Logan was an excellent villain. It's infuriating to have a bad guy so utterly confident that he can afford to be nice to you. Nelson pretty much went with the flow, but you could see how it was grating on Crane. Logan's urbane courtesy was set off by the viciousness of his henchmen: the captain gives Crane a nasty kick in the chest, and another beats up Kowalski while he and the others are standing helpless under gunpoint. Logan was also extremely long-winded, prompting Crane and Curley to make cracks about it.

They have a good, exciting, and important scene without the stars, as Patterson takes to the ventilation shafts (or the ballast tanks; they look a lot alike) in order to spread tear gas around. Kowalski goes to his rescue when two of the henchman realize what's happening and corner him.

I do wish they had specified just where the rest of the 125-man crew were at the time. It's reasonable to suppose that they were on shore leave, but just what was that small group doing?

A bad bit of editing results in a major nit. At the beginning, the small group were in the area housing the mini-sub, when they start hearing a lot of noise and realize that something's wrong. They all head for the hatch, only to be confronted by an armed team of men. Nelson, Crane and Morton are at the forefront. The other crewmen simultaneously lunge forward and are restrained by the officers. No shots are fired, no blows exchanged. After the title and credits run, we come back to the same scene. The group are divided up--the crewmen to their quarters, Morton to the engine room or somewhere, and Nelson and Crane off to the control room. As the crew backs up, you can see a body lying behind them. Later, Curley and Morton both make reference to "Henderson and Marcelli" who have presumably been killed (although Morton was unsure about Henderson. Marcelli had been "taken away.") Presumably these men had been shot at the beginning, but the scene was edited out, making the references confusing.

There is also some confusion as to the cabin where the officers are segregated. Logan distinctly states that Crane is to be taken to "his" cabin. Morton is already there. It's obviously one of the big, luxury cabins (oddly, it has bunk space for four). Later, the Admiral is sent to "his" cabin, but it's the same one that Crane and Morton are in.

As soon as I saw the nice big ventilation grids, I knew that they'd end up running around inside the bulkheads. Crane had to work to get the framework detached, unlike a previous episode, where they just popped them loose by hand. There were a couple nail-biting moments when they had to frantically get the framework back into place before the bad guys came into the room.

There was also a moment where it seemed as though Logan had figured out what they were trying to do. Having planned to sneak one of them through the bulkheads to mess up the gyro system, Logan unexpectedly insists that all three officers come forward to see his painting, although he had totally ignored Morton up to that point. (They never did say why Morton was initially taken off somewhere by himself.)

The end has an interesting psychological moment. Logan had stated--and Nelson ended up believing him--that he would destroy the Mona Lisa if he couldn't have it for himself. After having gotten it, even if only for a short while, he found that he could not bring himself to destroy the painting, even though his plans had been ruined.

John A. Lang:

I think the director was just looking for a good excuse for Barbara Eden to wave her fanny in front of the camera

ANY excuse is a good excuse for a (young) Barbara Eden to wave her fanny in front of the camera!

"The Human Computer" was an incredibly tense episode. I knew perfectly well that Lee would survive to the next episode, as well as three more seasons, but I kept jumping at every odd sound, every shadow, every tiny bit of movement.

I had thought from the synopsis that Lee had been assigned as an observer. He was actually only there to comply with maritime law, whereby a totally unmanned ship is classed as a derelict and can be claimed by anyone who grabs it.

Watching Lee wandering around the "empty" sub, waiting for the manuvers to be completed, struck a lonely note. This was intensified when we see him killing time by playing chess against himself.

David Hedison put in a superb performance. There's actually very little dialogue; he conveys everything by expression, sometimes very subtly. One such moment is in the crew's quarters, when Lee thinks that he sees the shadow of the unknown man. He works his way closer, and then we see a very slight degree of relaxation. A long moment later, he stands up and confronts Kowalski's jacket and sailor hat, hanging from his bunk. (Kowalski can cause trouble even when he's not there!)

One bad error that Lee made--he should have brought a pocketful of extra ammunition for his gun. He shouldn't have assumed that he could deal with the enemy with just one clip.

You keep wondering and wondering when the enemy is going to show his hand. It finally occurs in the missile room, where Lee is nearly crushed. Lee scares the agent off with a couple shots, then turns to extricating himself. It's not until he's nearly free that we realize that he's injured his ankle.

After more cat-and-mousing around, the agent finally corners Lee in an area of the sub where the ventilation can be easily shut off, leaving Lee with just a few hours of air. It's at this point that the agent finally deigns to converse with Lee, leading to a bit of dialogue that could have come directly from the movie Goldfinger (which was released less than two months previously):

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to die."

Exhausted from the tension, Lee nearly runs out of air before he suddenly remembers that there are small emergency air cannisters in the room. He's so frantic at that point that he simply rips open the first cannister and gulps in the air, before fitting a second one properly in place. (I thought that he should have taken the third one along, just in case, but he didn't.) Refreshed, it then occurs to him that he can escape through the ballast tanks, which are full at the moment.

Those tanks and ventilation shafts are claustrophobic enough when they are empty; being full of water made it even worse.

Lee makes it to the control room and rips out some of the computer wiring, thereby fouling up the new program. He then hides up the ladder, leading to still more tension: I kept expecting him to jump down on the guy, but he kept putting it off--and then nearly left it too late when he did jump. A nice fight ensues, ending with Lee pinning the man under the periscope, which must have been pretty painful--the man's gun was in easy reach, but he gave up even trying.

In spite of the ripped-out wiring, all Lee had to do was remove the new program tape, and the super-computer promptly took him back home. The computer, in fact, worked just fine--why didn't they end up using it? Lee's facetious comment that it couldn't lend you $10.00 on a Saturday night doesn't seem like a good enough reason to scrap it.

Couple bits of trivia for "The Human Computer": the writer apparently wanted the enemy agent to be a woman, which would have added an intriguing twist (but probably would have cut down on the closing fight). Irwin Allen vetoed it on the grounds that it would take too long to get a woman made up. This is apparently also the reason that women characters more or less vanished from the series after a while. I guess it never occurred to Irwin Allen to just have the actresses show up earlier on the set to get their makeup done.

That nameless enemy stalking Lee through the ship? Apparently he ended up becoming David Hedison's best man at his wedding. (That could have made for some good jokes at the reception.)

Another interesting bit of trivia from this book of science fiction programming: During the filming of "City Beneath the Sea" when they were preparing some special effects for when the Seaview came under attack, Richard Basehart asked to see the effects done first. Everyone was annoyed, because it would delay filming, but Basehart insisted. The effects were set off...and blew out a chunk of the flooring, right where the actors would have been standing. Apparently Basehart simply began singing, "There's No Business Like Show Business" and took himself off to lunch. Quite a guy.

BTW, I wonder if they ever figured out who the spy at the Nelson Institute was. This invisible man first smuggled in (and out) a tape recorder hidden in a cigarette box during the pilot episode, passed on valuble information about the Seaview to Logan the Buccaneer, and smuggled the nameless agent onto the Seaview, past all the security, in "The Human Computer". You'd think that by now they'd be checking into it.

"The Saboteur"

Another intriguing episode, that opens with a jolt--literally. I was startled, because I figured that we would see Lee being kidnapped. There is no explanation of how he was captured, although he presumably told Nelson at the end.

Lee's mother is mentioned in this episode. Apparently she lives far enough from Santa Barbara that Lee would need to take a plane to visit her. There is no indication of whether Lee's father is still living or not.

In spite of being brainwashed, Lee can't help trying to figure out who his unseen contact is on the Seaview--just like the rest of us. It would seem to be either Forester, the security man, or Dr. Ullman, who's in charge of the missiles they are going to plant. The crew are not really considered, and neither are the plethora of Marine guards underfoot.

One part of the plot rested on an implausibilty. Forester had asked to see the plans of Seaview, so that he could work out what security would be need and where. Nelson told him that he would have to wait until Crane arrived to get the plans. Why wouldn't Nelson, who designed the submarine, not have the plans for it, or access to them? And how did Lee, not knowing that he was going to be kidnapped when he took shore leave, have a set of plans that did not include the access shafts that run the length of the ship?

Lee's brainwashing technique had included electrical jolts. His reaction to the simple salinity test Nelson performs--which uses electricity--was a nice touch.

They missed their chance of killing off another crewman. After being shocked by the sabotaged inertial navigation system, he's taken off to Sickbay, and no one says later that he died. Nelson comes off badly at this point--Forester asks if the system could have been sabotaged, and Nelson says that he doesn't see how. He never thought to look in the panel where Lee had ripped some wires loose. Nor did it occur to anyone to try and fix the thing. Nelson should also have been suspicious when Lee kept detailing why it would be difficult to continue--and kept smiling as he did so.

Lee had quite a time of it, trying to mess up the first missile drop without the entire crew wondering what the !@#$%^* he was playing at. The tension becomes too much, and he blows up at Nelson--twice. The second time, Nelson smacks him one. This leads to the rather cliche statement, "Thanks, I needed that." Lee is trying to cover up, and Nelson is equally anxious to make excuses for his friend, and tells him that he's just exhausted and needs to rest while they make repairs.

Having Dr. Ullman mark the same symbol for "peace" that Lee is getting on his matchbooks was probably a blatant attempt to point the finger at him. I thought that it was too blatant; I thought that perhaps Lee would see that symbol and get knocked off balance.

Another unexpected scene--after Lee knocks out Forester, he leaves Forester's gun right there beside him. I thought that perhaps the others would arrive on the scene to find the guard shot with that gun and assume Forester guilty, but they didn't.

After finding the magnetic comb hidden in Chip's quarters, Forester assumes that they've found their saboteur. Nelson is not so sure, but he doesn't mention until the end--although he presumably tells Forester--that Chip's whereabouts were accounted for when Forester was slugged.

It was nice to see--and a reflection on Lee's character--that at the last, he struggled against shooting his friend. Considering how close he was to Nelson, and that even a graze would poison him fatally, Lee could have shot him several times over before Forester took him out.

The scene in Sickbay was pretty well done, with Lee struggling between his programming and his character. It did seem odd when, after they asked him who he thought the second agent was, he began laughing helplessly and said, "Ullman". Nelson understood the illogic of it being Ullman, who could have sabotaged the missiles himself, but why did Lee think it was so funny?

The other agent--who turned out to be another brainwashed member of the crew--also struggled somewhat. You could see how agitated he was, and he did a very poor job of placing that explosive--it was all jagged and smeared, and not all connected, which explains why, when it went off, it did not blow out the entire pane and flood the room. Forester was not as kind to the second brainwash victim; it looked as though he shot to kill.

An anti-nit from "The Human Computer": So often, in dealing with situations where people are wet, the shooting schedule and retakes result in scenes where the wet person is miraculously dry. They avoided that here; I don't know if they whipped through the shooting at a frantic pace, or just dumped a bucket of water on David Hedison's head when necessary, but he remained literally dripping wet throughout the relevant scenes.

Just how did they determine who got in the credits, anyway? Officer O'Brien, who is in quite a few scenes and a good many lines, has yet to be listed, I believe. On the other hand, in "The Saboteur", James Brolin was listed as the crewman who got electrocuted--in spite of the fact that we barely see the side of his face and he speaks very little. (BTW, I'm presuming that the reason he didn't get killed was that they didn't want Lee with that guilt on his conscience.)

When Lee is shot by Forester, we see him grab at his (nonbleeding) upper arm with his right hand. An instant later, we see him from a back view and his hand is braced against a missile.

"Cradle of the Deep" was a weird one. I understand that they had some difficulty with certain people because of the subject matter--you know, evolution and all.

One thing I didn't understand was why the newly promoted Junior Officer Clark went so totally off the wall in this one, even before the blob started doing its thing. Granted that they were going to a dangerous place where submarines were concerned, but hey--this was the Seaview, not your garden-variety sub! (A better question might be how this skittish personality got promoted in the first place--or onto the sub at all.)

I loved the scene in the control room, where the Seaview lists for the first time in the episode. The crewman nearest the camera keeps his eye on his console and reaches casually back with one hand to brace himself. You can tell he's had plenty of experience!

Another nice touch was when they sprang a major leak and were fitting temporary plates. Lee comes down to help, but breaks off to report to the admiral. He has to yell over the sound of gushing water. The water cuts off abruptly while the admiral is speaking, but Lee still yells back his reply.

I was rather startled to see Chip pull rank (!) and chase the Captain out of the control room.

Lee wasn't very quick on the uptake the next morning when he came back to the control room--maybe he had a touch of nitrogen narcosis, too. Seeing the night crew all acting goofy, he just gets angry. It took the admiral to realize that something was seriously wrong. Turns out that the blob was gobbling oxygen from the air. I had been wondering just what that thing was eating, to make it keep growing.

During the scene where Clark escapes from the brig, the microphone that had been hanging by the door when Lee was in talking to Clark previously was suddenly nowhere to be found--which explains why Kowalski didn't report what happened. It rather seems that neither he nor the doctor explained to Nelson and Crane what Clark had done.

Having decided that carbon dioxide might kill the blob, Nelson assembles a large collection of cannisters (although it seems as though only two are used) and then walks away, telling Curley to bring them to the lab. Like he couldn't help? Or the doctor? Fine time to pull rank.

Scientific arrogance rears its ugly head again in "The Amphibians".

This was a creepy episode, watching Drs. Winslow and Jenkins descend into madness. It was too bad that we couldn't have gotten a glimpse of their former personalities. I suspect that Dr. Jenkins was already well along the path before they even started the procedures. His personality did not seem to really change overmuch. Dr. Winslow, on the other hand, agonizes every step of the way, but slowly, inexorably comes to accept Jenkins' attitude, justifying all that they have done and will do. I do wonder how long it took Jenkins to convince Winslow to justify kidnapping scuba divers and converting them by force. Taking volunteers was one thing, if very dangerous. Did they say to themselves, "Hey, these are scuba divers, they like being in the water anyway, they'll love joining us!"

It seemed as though Jenkins' conversion took a fair amount of time, slowly altering his blood pressure, adapting his eyes to dimmer light, adjusting to cooler temperatures, etc. By the time the episode gets into full swing, some three months later, they seem to be speeding things up.

They never really explain just what they did to those divers to make them so docile. While Jenkins' and Winslow's personalities were altering, their essential intelligence and awareness were still there. Angie and the other divers didn't show the slightest sign of resentment and being changed against their will. Angie didn't care in the least that she was being treated more or less as a slave (Women everywhere were probably gritting their teeth over Jenkins' chauvanistic attitude) and didn't care when Jenkins sent her to blow up the Seaview--and herself, if necessary. (And why not send one of the men, hmmmm?) Presumably they were using drugs or some other method to render their "converts" mindlessly obedient.

Dr. Jenkins (and some time later, Dr. Winslow) obviously had become drunk on power. You could see him taking control from Dr. Winslow. I suspect that, if the Seaview and crew had not taken a hand, Dr. Jenkins would have ended up killing Winslow. After all, you can only have one king of the ocean.

An anecdote from this show: when they filmed the scene of the two Seaview divers being netted (and they had two-way radios; why didn't they tell anyone that they were chasing the girl?), the two divers were left on the bottom of the tank, tangled in the net, wondering when and if someone was going to pull them to the surface before they ran out of air. Fortunately, someone finally remembered them.

I'm wondering if this was an episode where Richard Basehart had been ill; he had very little screen time, and no action--just talk.

They kept referring to the Seaview divers, but we never see if Winslow or Jenkins had started the procedures on them. There is also no further mention of the diver that had been kidnapped just before Seaview's first arrival.

That explosion that was supposed to put paid to the Seaview must have been defective--Angie was directly over it when it went off, and all it did was knock her out in a cloud of bubbles.

Jenkins finally decided that if you want to do something right, do it yourself, and goes off to the Seaview--and straight into their electrical screen. Can't say that I shed any tears.

After zonking them with ozone, the remaining renegade scientist and his zombie crew are taken to the Seaview--and no one thinks to search them for weapons! Crane tells them that the doctor thinks that the process can be reversed, but not one of them speaks up and says, "But I like being like this!" Winslow pulls out his bomb and uses to to get access to the escape hatch, and thereafter shows his full descent--having seemingly escaped, he's going to destroy the Seaview anyway. Crane of course turns the tables on him--and that scene where they blow the door of the hatch was pretty exciting. One thing, though; why did Crane wait until he had givin the order to get underway before blowing the bomb out one of the missile launches? They darn near left it too late.

The ending is rather disquieting. Dr. Winslow is aboard the Seaview, back at its docking point, and stubbornly convinced that he is still right. He also believes that they will not be able to reverse the process. Nelson ends by telling him, "You'd better pray that you're wrong." So we're left wondering what happened. Did it work? Did it work better on the kidnapped divers? Had the damage to Dr. Winslow's brain proven irreversible?

(It would have been interesting to have Dr. Winslow escape from confinement and come back in a later episode to harass them again.)

"The Exile"

Barring the last few remaining episodes of the season, ex-Premier Brynov gets my vote for the nastiest villain on Voyage. According to his brother, he's prepared to set off another world war (although perhaps his brother was exaggerating how extensive it would be) killing who knows how many thousands or millions--just so that he can get back in power.

In some respects, he's rather slow on the uptake. Nelson recognizes the sound of an attacking plane, and Brynov scoffs that they will never find the ship in the fog. Unless...he stands contemplating this new and unpleasant idea, while you can hear the scream of the descending missile.

They like giving little jolts. Coming back after the ship has been blown up, we briefly see a man that looks rather like Nelson slip under the surface. A long moment later, we see Nelson clinging to wreckage. (Whew.)

Brynov's brother dies, after having tried to tell Nelson what Brynov was planning. Thinking that Brynov was dead, he gave up the fight and died, but not before giving Nelson some ideas to chew over. Nelson says a prayer over the body. The attitude of the other men seems to be, "O.K, he's done talking, now shove it overboard."

The survivors quickly accept Nelson's authority, but once they find Brynov, things of course go rapidly downhill. His unrestrained glee at learning that his brother died simply asking Nelson to pray for the two brothers would have warned Nelson that something was up, even if he didn't already guess. When sharks attack, he deliberately sends three of his men to their deaths. I suppose if this had been filmed currently, they would have included some...er...sound effects of the attack. I'm just as happy that they didn't.

One of the men, desperate for water, tells Nelson the truth about Brynov in exchange for a drink, but is shot before he gets it. Nelson instantly realizes that his own death warrant has been signed--but Brynov will keep him alive until Seaview is in sight. Nelson does end up being shot--not sure exactly where, but not badly. They never really show any first aid being applied, or any problems with the wound festering.

Brynov's doctor attempts to help Nelson, thereby proving that he was the "traitor" and he almost keeps the upper hand until Josip, Brynov's right hand man, jumps in. (Oddly enough, no one seemed to notice that Josip "slept" through two shots being fired.) In the struggle, Josip and the doctor fall overboard. Brynov shows no remorse whatever at the death of his one trustworthy associate. Not even a brief epitaph.

One prime piece of foolishness: While Brynov is asleep, Nelson takes a drink--and then dumps the remaining water overboard, the idea being that Nelson needs to outlast Brynov and get the gun away from him. I suppose that they were afraid that if Nelson simply drank all the remaining water--which would have been the sensible thing to do under the circumstances--viewers might think that he was just being self-centered. (Well, he was. He wanted to avoid being killed. No problem with that.)

Brynov drinks some sea water, while Nelson watches and says nothing. Later, Brynov wakes with an exacerbated thirst and gulps down more, while Nelson watches with a grim smile. He then passes out. Nelson collects the gun, only then setting a direct course for the rendezvous point with the Seaview.

Nelson wakes on the Seaview, learning that Brynov, the indomitable survior, was dead at the rendezvous. Lee demonstrates the depth of his friendship and concern: during the entire final scene, he's just inches away from Nelson, watching him intently.

"The Creature" is another giant marine creature. (O.K, that's catfish and an octopus and a jellyfish and now a manta, so far.) Unlike the other giants, this one appears to be a natural (albeit very large) subspecies of manta.

Captain Wayne Adams turns out to be yet another obsessed genius who can't admit that he made a mistake, but Leslie Nielson does an excellent job of it. It was interesting to see the bristling antagonism between Crane and Adams (although it might have done more than bristle if Lee had heard Adams imply that Seaview's captain was no more than a bus driver.

(BTW, I'm presuming that Adams technically outranks Crane. While Captain of the Seaview, Crane's Naval rank {and why does he hang on to it when he's no longer in the Navy?} is Commander, which is a step below Captain.)

Adams keeps insisting that the missile explosion and the deaths of his men (and just how did he manage to survive, without even a scratch?) was entirely the fault of an outside influence, that aborting the launch would have made no difference. I don't see how he can be so sure of that. The attitude of the crew seems to indicate that the general consensus is that he made a grave error of judgement.

They capture a baby version of the manta and it begins broadcasting distress calls, causing the supersized one to attack. At one point, while the manta was leaving them alone, Adams and Nelson were in the lab together. Adams began turning buttons, and his furtive attitude makes it clear that he's not supposed to be doing so, but just what did he do? Whatever it was, brought on yet another attack.

Yet again, a character displays signs of obsession, and Nelson leaves him alone, trusting that he'll be a good boy. Not.

Just how much evidence did they need, anyway? It seemed as though they kept needing more and more. How many attacks did it take before someone decide, "Yes, this thing's ultrasonic ability is dangerous in the extreme!"

You can see the depth of Adams' obsession: Having finally collected sufficient evidence to exonerate him (which still wouldn't explain why he refused to abort when something was obviously wrong) Adams can't get it through his head that he's rendered the subject moot; that his actions endangering the Seaview and crew have blown his future out of the water. I wonder if he thought that killing the manta would make everything "all right". It didn't seem to occur to him that, if it was a natural creature, there would presumably be others out there, messing things up with their ultrasonics.

I was expecting an ending similar to "The Ghost of Moby Dick" but Lee and Nelson managed to rescue him. (The two top officers risking themselves on a rescue! Tch, tch, tch!)

I liked the closing. Mother Seaview, sailing the seven seas with her baby close behind....

Last evening, I watched the theatrical version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Pretty cool movie, and beautifully produced. I can see why they decided not to borrow the theme song for the series, though. Bit mushy.

I was surprised at just how much film was scavenged for use in the series, but then again, Irwin Allen was always a thrifty soul....

I was glad that they started off with visitors on board, so that they had an excuse to show off all the amenities and explain just what they were. I liked the shark tank; too bad it didn't make it to the series. (Or maybe they just kept it out of sight, like the ship's "heads".)

I don't know that I would want my opening shot to be of my rump, but hey, whatever works. What I didn't understand was why the Admiral and the Captain were so teed off about it. They were in what presumably was the crew's mess. All the men (and the one solitary crewwoman) would have been off duty while in there. Who cares what they do in their free time, as long as it's harmless?

After shaking her bootie, Barbara Eden's role mainly consisted of running along the corridors, calling "Lee, Lee!" and defending the admiral's actions.

I didn't really understand why they were out of radio contact for so long. This, of course, led to their amazement when they finally surfaced to see what the heck was going on.

When Alvarez was rescued and brought aboard, someone described him as being "burned to a crisp" but he wasn't even particularly red. I wondered about the dog, which appeared to be a Parson Russell terrier (a wire-haired version of the Jack Russell.) We never see it on the deck; it was always being carried. Never heard its name, and at the end, it mysteriously vanished. (Maybe that's what sent Alvarez off the deep end.)

We see a T.V. broadcast detailing some of the devastation around the world. The announcer then says, "This concludes our broadcast for today." Even forty-odd years ago, I would think that they would realize that, in the face of such a disaster, they would have twenty-four hour coverage.

Fire in the sky, temperatures climbing like crazy, and yet, at that science meeting, everyone is thoroughly dressed.

Doesn't it seem peculiar that, out of the entire scientific community gathered, only two scientists worked out a solution? No wonder everyone on the Seaview was leery of it actually working.

The scene of the emergency crash dive was reused for "The Buccaneer" and, in both cases, the implication was that the men out on deck were doomed. Why? Did the suction force yank them down too deep to get back to the surface in time? The shots of them in the water do not bear this out. As a matter of fact, the admiral brushed the incident off, saying that the police in the Shore Patrol know how to swim as a matter of course. So did they die?

First shot of Kowalski (here known as Kowski) and he's in the center of the fray, as usual.

Sparks was played by the same actor who voiced the character of "Phones" Sheridan on the British series Stingray.

Most of the interior sets were reused for the series, but for some reason, the hatch that the divers used was of a different design.

Having lost both their radar and their sonar, Crane wants to heave to for repairs, but the admiral insists that they keep going. All very well and good, but I should think that it would be obvious to the veriest dunce that they should park someone in the nose to keep an eye on things. It was sheer luck that Connors came in when she did, and it was plain that if she hadn't, Alvarez would have watched the oncoming mines without a word.

Brave of Gleason to volunteer to go out in the mini-sub, but it was out and out nasty (not to mention foolish) to more or less shame the totally inexperienced Jimmy Smith into going with him. First of a long line of expendable mini-subs....

The fire scene was confusing. The Admiral's cabin was definitely on fire, smoke everywhere, but suddenly Peter Lorre's character is shouting, "It's not smoke--it's gas!" They rush to the surface to get ventilated. Later, the assumption is that the Admiral was smoking in bed, although he claims that he ran out of cigars. Crane starts to believe that the Admiral made up the death threats--but in that case, where did the gas come from?

Kowski and quite a few others eagerly seize on the Admiral's invitation to abandon ship, in spite of the fact that there is no way that they would be able to get back to their families in time to die with them. Personally, I would rather die fighting to save my family, but I won't quibble. On the other hand, the Admiral more or less ordered the ship's doctor to abandon ship, as well. This turns out to be necessary for the plot, but it made no sense. The only patients in Sickbay at the time were psychiatric ones. Why not send Dr. Hiller, who is both a civilian and a psychologist, with them?

In the final minutes, they are hammered with one complication after another. Having decided to relieve the Admiral of command, Crane promptly forgets about it when they come under attack by a U.N. sub. They flee for their lives, escape the sub (hey, they should have known that they couldn't go down that far) and get attacked by a giant octopus. (They called it a squid in the chapter headings, but it's an octopus. And the reason it looked so realistic is because it was.)
Then something happens to the reactors. Turns out Dr. Hiller has sacrificed her life (that ominous red badge) in a final act of sabotage. She doesn't have to worry about a slow death, though--Peter Lorre's sharks only allow him to get in their tank with impunity. Crane is knocked unconcious in the same lurch that threw her into the tank. His arm is dangling in the water, but for some reason, none of the sharks decided to take a bite. (Wonder if they ended up dying of radiation poisoning?)

Alvarez provides the final complication, refusing to allow them to set off the missile, claiming that God wants them to die. It doesn't occur to him (and no one else makes the argument) that if God wanted them to die, setting off the missile would not make the slightest difference. Apparently Dr. Hiller's sabotage was enough to convince Crane that the Admiral was right all along, and he hops out to set the missile off manually. I had the impression that they were still down pretty far, so he was lucky he didn't get the bends when they headed for the surface.

Before they even saw for certain that the missile had worked, the two scientists were already congratulating each other.

Just how high would the oceans have risen with the ice caps melted? They might go home to find that they are the only living people left on the planet.

"The Enemies" is another fine episode. It's great when the writers let Basehart and Hedison play off each other.

The episode opens with a shot of the Angler (and what a plain-sounding name for a Seaview-class submarine!) Inside, a minor disagreement escalates to a shouting match, then a fight, and then...the gun. Like the members of the crew, we're left gazing in horror at this sudden, inexplicable breakdown.

One touch that they should have avoided: they shouldn't have had Lee describing the Captain and the exec as "the gentlest men I knew." That was way too blatant, and anyway, would you really want a "gentle" man in charge of a sub?

We find out in this episode that apparently all conversation in the control room is recorded. Seaview's divers retrieved the recording as well as the ship's safe that held the written logs (and how did they manage to heave that from one sub to the other?) Just where was the recording stored, that none of the divers mentioned seeing bodies riddled with bullets?

Tch, tch, tch. There's that star problem again. Both the Admiral and the Captain leaving the ship to go exploring.

I find it hard to believe that neither of them noticed any of the cameras. After they escaped, of course, they found them right and left.

That was a real nifty scene where General Tau made his appearance. I've seen pictures of forced perspective like that before. I had previously mentioned seeing pictures in a Time-Life book showing an experiment that was shown on the episode "The Fear Makers". In the same book, I believe, it showed shots of this forced perspective, using a little boy and his dog, who were about the same size. I would like to know if the people within that set-up see themselves as large and small, or if it's only people outside looking in who see the illusion?

Poor Chip's left between a rock and a hard place. He really doesn't have the authority to demand a search of the island. On the other hand, he never mentions to the General (or to himself) that if Lee and Nelson had left the island, they would have radioed that they were doing so.

How did Seaview's sonar not notice that the mini-sub had been put out to sea by someone? And who provided the badly battered bodies that had Lee's ring and Nelson's watch? They had to have been General Tau's own men, and in that case, they probably wouldn't need to drink that hate drug to instigate a mutiny.

Malachi Throne put me in mind of Peter Sellars--playing Inspecteur Clouseau--disguised as a Chinese. Well, I suppose that he did the best that he could. Actually, his ice cold "scientific" attitude played off well against the General's impatient demand for a weapon.

Nelson's guilt at having it "soft" and Lee's resentment at being treated worse were quite logical, but you'd think that both of them would wonder why they were suddenly allowed to see the other. If they had accidently seen how the other was being treated, the guilt and resentment could have stood, but deliberately being shown on a television made it clear that someone was messing with their minds.

Nelson the Scientist figures out what's going on fairly quickly once they're allowed to escape. Thing is, the moment they both realized that Lee might have ingested the drug, Nelson should have confiscated Lee's gun--and Lee should have been anxious to give it to him.

I would also have thought that Lee, knowing the possibilities, would have struggled at least a little against his rising hate.

Admiral Nelson is something else. Pursued by a madman with a gun, he grabs the time to re-route the plumbing system of the island's safe water supply with contaminated water.

Lee must have been in the grip of literally blind hate--he kept swinging a heavy stick at the trapped Nelson--and missed every time!

They really should have included an explanation for why Chip returned to the island--after all, he presumably thought that Nelson and Lee were dead. Did he somehow manage to get the bodies aboard and examine them? Did he remember that they surely would have radioed the Seaview that they were leaving the island? Or was he just coming back to try and complete their mission? And how is it that General Tau and his men didn't notice them the second time, when he had a whole platoon confronting them the first time?

For that matter, how the heck did they manage to sneak back off the island with a raving Captain in their midst? Did the General's men avoid going out unless they were directly ordered to? Or maybe they slugged Lee over the head. (He's used to that by now, surely.)

BTW....

Forgive me for not mentioning this before. One of the sources for some of the trivia I've passed along here comes from the book Science Fiction Television Series, by Mark Phillips and Frank Garcia. It covers 62 shows running from 1959 through 1989, and is excellent.

Another source is Mike's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Zone. I'm sorry, I don't know how to create a direct link, but it's easy to find, and well worth it--it's a great website!

"Secret of the Loch" is a very atmospheric piece--every outside shot in Scotland is at night, with lots of fog and gloom.

Even allowing for the atmosphere, you'd think that someone would have questioned why a supposedly living creature has a light flashing at regular intervals down its throat.

If MacDougal had been a little quicker on the uptake, he might have noticed Crane's reaction to the news that Nelson had not brought along the packet of information meant for Carruthers.

Why did MacDougal save Nelson from being shot? If it was because he thought that Nelson didn't have the all-important packet with him, then why did the killer try again? He had to have figured that MacDougal had a reason for keeping Nelson alive a while longer.

I liked the scene in the pub, where Nelson was confronted, and reacted in character. You could tell that Lee appreciated the Scottish accent, too.

Watch the level of that bottle of Scotch. It goes down very fast, and as far as I can tell, neither Crane nor Nelson had any of it.

Monster or no monster, finding that deep underwater access to the loch was a very important discovery.

The torpedo launching system is sabotaged. Having seen blinking lights that indicate a problem, Crane sends the "duty electrician" to see to it--but the first people on the scene are "damage control"--mere moments after the explosion. Is someone getting precognitive?

That was a distinct pack of explosive put in the panel. How could anyone not concede the possibility (if not the probability) of sabotage?

Lester from the Home Office travels across the loch. Given that he claims that he knows just what is going on, that was pretty foolhardy. And if he did know, why did he start screaming, "The Monster!"

Seaview's equipment is excellent at spotting--and identifying--objects near them in the water. Why didn't they recognize the approaching object as a submarine, or at least something made of metal?

Even six minutes' time would be pushing it to retrieve a packet out of Nelson's safe, getting suited up, and launching. Three minutes would be impossible, and they cut it even finer than that.

I was expecting Nelson to maybe knock MacDougal out, or lock him up, and then go over in the mini-sub with a limpet mine in hand. Of course, this discounts the possibility of "Nessie" blowing Seaview out of the water the moment they saw the mini-sub was away. On the other hand, since "Nessie's" crew knew that MacDougal was not on the mini-sub, why did they let it keep approaching?

I liked how they left open the possibility that "something" might still be there in Loch Ness.

Say D. K. do you have Voyage's and five of us are left?

That's what the Seaview should be about- rescueing people , not detsroying monsters from the deep

"And Five of Us are Left" is in the second season, which should be coming out in late October.

Voyage is always at its best when dealing with people rather than things.

"The Condemned" is such an episode, although I found the end ultimately disappointing. The episode as a whole is excellent.

We have yet another obnoxious scientist. (Nelson himself can be irritating at times; is it a requirement of the profession?) He seems to have a right to be proud of himself; his system, if proven, will allow subs to descend to unheard of depths, and make previously unimaginable discoveries. Nelson, a "pure" scientist, is genuinely uninterested in personal publicity, and finds Falk's headline-grabbing distasteful--and a waste of time that could be better spent on the job at hand.

A probably unintentional bit of irony: the test hull somewhat resembles a package of dynamite. Hmmm.

It seems rather odd that they did not equip the unmanned test hull with a camera. Of course, that would have meant that they would move well out of the way before going down again....

The unmanned test sucessful, they go down again with a foursome: Crane, Falk, Dr. Archer, and an assistant, Tracy. (Cards, gentlemen?) The descent is quite tense. It seemed funny that only Lee reacted to the first alteration of the air mixture--and it almost seemed as though Archer expected that he would be the only one. Some time later, the molecules were somehow altered (I didn't understand this part at all) causing a spectacular display that made it look like the hull was going to blow up. They make it to the bottom and, for some reason, don't see the creature (plant or animal?) that's down there. Falk's sneering comment to his (presumably now dead) father waves a red flag at us.

Coming back up, an accident bleeds off a quarter of their remaining air supply. Falk cold-bloodedly cuts off Tracy's air supply, first knocking Crane out so that he can't be a witness. The three surviving men are rushed back up to the sub and immediately put into the decompression chamber (this is the first time we see this, but it would surely be a mandatory requirement on a sub).

I was really expecting Falk to smother Archer or something in the chamber, but all he did was extract a promise from Archer that he wouldn't give Falk away. Archer indicated that he would be delighted to destroy Falk if it would accomplish anything. (He indicates that telling the truth because it's the right thing to do would be childish. Childish?) I really can't comprehend Archer's attitude--he plainly shows that he resents Falk, and, as we begin to guess, denouncing Falk will do little harm to the project--because it is actually Archer's project, and it would mean that Archer would get the credit he deserves.

I also do not understand Lee's attitude. He is captain of the Seaview; throughout this first season, he has shown time and again that the safety of his ship and his crew are his primary consideration. Many times he has tried to quell scientific enthusiasm that was endangering the ship. He has also risked a charge of mutiny (and hanging) to save his crew. So why the heck was he so anxious to push the project to completion at the risk of his ship? Nelson was not advocating abandoning the project; merely taking more time to work out all possible problems. The sea bottom was still going to be there a week later. And suggesting that Nelson wanted the experiment to fail--! I'm surprised that Nelson didn't smack him.

Falk goes over Nelson's head, clear to the President, to get the next phase underway. I'll have to go back and take a closer look to see just what Lee's reaction was to that piece of brattiness.

The ubiquetous press agent nearly blows them up by starting to light a cigarette when the atmosphere has been changed to a more volatile mix. Falk sharply reprimands him and won't let him play with his camera. I loved Nelson's suppressed amusement when Archer dryly commented on his surprise at Falk refusing to have his picture taken.

Archer collapses just as a crisis in temperature occurs, and our suspicions are made plain--Falk needs Archer desperately. Archer manages to revive sufficiently to correct the problem, and they make it to the bottom.

Archer finally becomes fed up with Falk's arrogance, and starts telling him off, but dies before he can say anything important. (I was really ticked off about that.) The advent of the monster (who really doesn't look like he can move; he seems to be fastened to the sea bed) makes it imperative that they get the heck out of there, but they can't--Falk doesn't know how. Nelson's furious comments finally shame Falk into making the ultimate sacrifice to save the Seaview. His use of light as a means of distraction--there in the darkness of the depths--was very clever. However, I really, really wish that they had come up with a better solution. They had stated earlier in the show that an unprotected person at that depth would be crushed so small that he could be held in the hand. When Lee suggested sending out divers, since electricity had not worked and torpedoes were not feasible, Nelson stated--correctly--that a diver would be crushed the moment he left the sub. Lee seemed to think that breathing Falk's special air mix would somehow protect a diver from the thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. They let it go at that, which is nonsense. If he'd put on a deep sea outfit--just maybe.

At the end, Nelson sweeps the truth under the rug. Admiral Falk, liar, cheat, thief...and killer...got just what he wanted. (And did he cheat his way to his admiral's rank, as well?) Nelson did make certain that Archer would get the credit that he had coming, but it was still disappointing. Of course, that's how it often goes in life.

BTW, I really think that this episode could have done just fine without the monster.

"The Traitor"

Last episode of the season. *Sigh* Now I have to wait until October.

I thought at first that this episode was going to be a kind of follow-up to "The Saboteur", as each deals with a set of missiles that have been hidden in the ocean. However, in "The Saboteur" they knew where the missiles had been placed--since they did the placing. In this episode, they only know the general location of each missile--they have a nifty gadget that checks to see that the missiles are in working order without giving away their precise location.

Admiral Nelson is confronted with a painful choice: betray his country or let his sister--his one surviving family member--die.

Nelson's cover is that his sister has been injured in an accident, and he's going into Marseilles to see how she's doing. In his cabin, Lee spots a passport that's fallen to the floor, picks it up, and starts looking at it, prompting Nelson to snatch it away and yell at him. Under the circumstances, it would have been logical to assume that it was Nelson's passport; so why bother looking through it?

Nelson is searched thoroughly for both weapons and the map he is supposed to have brought to the kidnappers. (At least as thoroughly as early-sixties television would allow.) Nelson has the map well hidden, however; and he uses this to his advantage, refusing to hand over the information until he has absolute proof that his sister is safe. We get a look at a video telephone, one of the few casual props that really give a futuristic touch.

Fenton, the kidnapper, insists that the map must be verified, which can only be done on Seaview. Nelson tells him that they can't possibly get an extra man on board, and Fenton tells him that that's already been taken care of. And how. Fenton is one of the two top-level security men coming on board the Seaview!

Having seen Nelson in action for a season, it was pretty clear that he was working very hard to stay one step ahead of Fenton and thwart the whole plot. Of course, to make everything look as natural as possible, he kept Lee out of it. We get to see Lee being gradually forced, step by step, to accept the unbelievable--that Nelson is a traitor.

Not much privacy on a submarine--everyone on board heard the message that Lee had a private, coded message come in. He should have had Sparks simply call him to the radio shack. Nelson could still have deduced what Lee had done, rather than having it handed to him on a platter.

The fight between Nelson and Hamid--the second security officer--was really well done. As a top security man, Hamid was very experienced at hand-to-hand combat, and he very nearly defeated Nelson. Would have done it, too, if he hadn't leaned on the desk and put his face right in front of Nelson's fist.

Here's where we get a rather glaring nit, simply because they had to play it that way for the plot. Nelson leaves his cabin, goes clear down the hall and around a corner to call the Master-at-Arms to his cabin to take Hamid into custody. This gives Fenton a chance to sneak into the cabin and murder Hamid. Now granted, Nelson's telephone had been smashed up during the fight, but they have those ship-wide microphones everywhere on the ship--except, of course, when it's inconvenient to the plot to have them too accessible.

Confronted with a charge of murder, Nelson finally takes Lee into his confidence. Having been forced to accept Nelson's treason, Lee took some persuading, which made sense. The final proof was the picture of Nelson's sister--that was not his sister. Apparently someone figured that the bad guys would target Nelson for the information, and would use his sister as leverage, so the real Edith Nelson was hidden away, and an agent took her place. Lucky that none of the kidnappers had ever seen the real Miss Nelson.

Nelson suddenly reveals a cupboard full of Bondian gadgetry. He wants Lee to follow him to the kidnappers' hideout, but at a safe distance, so he sprays some stuff on his shoes that will leave a trail that can only be seen by a special lens set into sunglasses. (Actually, this special substance and lens was invented some one hundred years earlier by Artemus Gordon of The Wild, Wild West! I'm sure that he would be gratified to know that his inventions were still being used.)

Another nit--Nelson's badly scraped face heals up completely in a very short time. Of course, we don't know just how long it took them to go back to Marseilles after aborting the mission.

Lee's team consists of himself, Chip, Kowalski, and an unfamiliar face. Anyone not know that that poor man was going to bite the dust? And to add insult to injury, they don't even miss him! They couldn't have known that he'd been shot, but they didn't even make a token look around or ask about him. Seaview crew or Star Trek redshirts--there are just some jobs you shouldn't take.

Couple of little points.

In "The Magnus Beam", Nelson rigs up an electronic counterforce to get the escape hatch open for the diving team. It was only good for about 90 seconds. Ummmm...how did they get the outer hatch open?

When the General's main henchman (after Amadi) gets shot by Azziz, the henchman is facing away from him, but then he rolls over and clutches at his stomach.

Sure hope that none of the men trapped in the missile room were standing under the missiles when the magnetism suddenly cut off....

From "The Indestructible Man", they had a nice little special effect. Most of the time on this show (at least in this first season) when a person is shot, you assume the hit because of how they react--they get knocked back, jerked around, or suddenly clutch at their arm or shoulder or whatever. Occasionally you will see blood seeping--after the fact. In this episode, when Benson shoots at the robot, the bullet richochets back, and a bloody patch instantly appears on his back around the right shoulder. Nice touch. (Actually, Kowalski was lucky he wasn't hit by the same bullet.)

Anyone notice that the science institutes mentioned on this show are named for specific scientists (as opposed to something like "Bureau for Marine Research"?) There's at least three: the Nelson Institute, the Denning Institute ("Turn Back the Clock") and the Bryce Institute ("Ghost of Moby Dick")

One of these days I'm going to run back through the episodes and see just how many times Lee Crane got bashed over the head. Guy must have a skull made of granite.

If you have the "American Life" channel on your cable system (I don't think it's available on Dish or DirecTV), Thursday is "Irwin Allen Night" (my words, not theirs). Lost In Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and Land Of The Giants all run in a block (with some replays) from 8 p.m. through 2 a.m. ET. More here.

If you don't have AmLife, is Thursday still "Irwin Allen Night"?

Sorry, Adam, couldn't resist.

The episodes "Hail to the Chief" and "The Sky is Falling" were written by supermodel Christie Brinkley's dad. No joke.

So far I've bought one volume each of seasons 1, 2, and 3, and I'm ready to make a couple observations.
I remember this show from my childhood, and a bunch of scenes still remain in my memory, but as I'm watching this again it's like a whole new series to me. I grew up preferring Star Trek and Lost In Space, so I guess I paid less attention before.

The credits; in the first season we see the Seaview rising towards the surface and then traveling across the surface of the sea. In the following season credits we see her sinking vertically. For a show called 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' I think it would have been more appropriate for the Seaview to be traveling downwards diangluarly, like we see during the episodes, but that's just me.

This series is perfect for gay men or mysoginists (sp?). Episode after episode after episode just has men in it, with no women to be seen. And several times when a woman has been on an episode, she turns out to be a spy or traitor.

Kowalski doesn't have a first name, apparently, although he does have 'Ski' as a nickname. He's also a jack of all trades; I've seen him at the sonar, repairing euipment, acting as a security guard, co-piloting the Flying Sub, and as part of a land-based tactical squad. Pity the poor ship's Doctor, though, who just goes by 'Doc' or 'Doctor'. No given name or family name has been uttered, as far as I know.

Chip Morton seems to suffer the most out of all the characters, for a lack of characterization. This isn't meant as an insult to Bob Dowdell who plays him, but the writers didn't seem to script Chip as anything but an Exec that carries out his orders.

The Seaview gained the Flying Sub in the second season, which meant that a hatch down into the ship was required. Unfortunately, the set guys really screwed up, as the hatch is about a foot away from the forward observation windows, while the hatch that leads into the Flying Sub is in the center of the craft, perhaps 10 feet from the nose of the smaller craft, so they don't line up. Worse, the hatch on the belly of the Seaview where the Flying Sub exits is several yards from the Seaview's nose, so they're even further off-center.

And speaking of the second season, they merged the control room to the observation area, which had to be approached through a door in the previous season. And as the control room still has a periscope, this would mean that the periscope is near the bow of the ship, rather than the conning tower.

I love the Seaview (8-window version, and 4-window refit), and the Flying Sub. I'm just having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that they both pre-date the Enterprise and Galileo shuttlecraft and Klingon D-7 and Romulan Bird of Prey, by 2 to 4 years. Beautiful, futuristic designs for both of the subs. I thought for a long time the two series ran virtually concurrent, but almost 60 episodes of Voyage were aired before anybody even saw 'The Man Trap'.

And speaking of Trek, there's a surprising number of Trek guest actors and actresses appearing on Voyage. Too many to name here, but actors that played Garth, Anan 7, Rojan, and Nona were seen here, years before the Trek roles that made them even more recognizeable.

Watching all these DVD's Voyage has surpassed Lost In Space in entertainment value for me, and is quickly catching up to Irwin Allen's other favorites of mine, Time Tunnel and Land Of The Giants.

"...for the Seaview to be traveling downwards diangluarly."
DIANGLUARLY???????? Oh, man, that must have been a long day for me!
Of course, I meant to say 'diagonally'!

More observations;

Neither the Seaview or Flying Sub have their names or letters or numerical markings on their hulls.

The Seaview possesses nuclear weapons, but she really isn't an American Naval sub. How did she manage to stock them?

Crane and Morton frequently pick up the microphone and order 'Maneuvering' to come about on a certain course. I thought maneuvering was carried out by the two guys at the helm steering wheels in the control room? Is 'Maneuvering' a special room somewhere else in the sub?

The actors in the monster suits or monster voiceovers are never given credit at the end of the show.

The Missile Room is in the aft section of the Seaview, and yet torpedoes are loaded even further back in the room, seemingly pointing backwards, instead of forwards where they're shot out.

Whole scenes were re-used in various episodes, such as 'No Escape From Death', which was practically a 'clip show'. Also scenes and the monster from 'The Mermen' were re-used in 'The Mermaid', even though both species have no relation to one another-- it's not a sequel episode.

Steve -
1-You've never been stationed on a naval vessel, have you? Most, if not all, naval fighting ships have all-male crews. Especially subs. So NO, 'Voyage' was NOT done for gays or misogynists; that part was just trying to be realistic.
2-Women as traitors? I suggest you read Theodore Sturgeon's novelization of the MOVIE 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea'.
3-Kowalski's first name? Again, I suppose you've never been in the Navy; sailors often address each other by last name only; or by title, such as "Seaman Kowalski".
4-Either Seaman Kowalski had been cross-trained in a lot of different things, or somebody didn't want that many lower-ranking crewmen to be familiar to the audience.
5-Seaview's periscope, (according to the movie novelization by Theodore Sturgeon), could "lock onto something by light or radar or sonar or infrared"; and "this gets rid of the 'greasy pole' that hangs down in the middle of most subs". In other words, Crane or whoever was actually looking into a video pickup, which could have been placed anywhere on Seaview, connected to a periscope head, which could have been placed anywhere on Seaview.
6-Seaview was "available to the Navy for weapons testing", again, according to the novelization of the movie, written by Theodore Sturgeon.

7-George Takei guest-stars in an episode of 'Voyage', in which the Flying Sub goes up a river into Viet Nam.
8-Some submarines have had torpedo tubes at both ends. Also, since the missile tubes are amidships, just behind the conning tower, torpedoes launched from the exact same room would almost have to pass through the reactor room (if launched astern). So, either the Seaview's torpedoes had to pass through a network of curving tubes to be launched, or somebody decided not to build the sets for one or two 'torpedo-and-nothing-else' rooms.

That doesn't change my point, though, Mike; the torpedoes are seen to been loaded, pointing towards the aft of the ship, but are seen being launched from the front, beneath Seaview's curved...'fins'? Not sure what to call them.

I didn't say the show was made for gay men, I just pointed out that if you wanted to watch a show with no women around, this was it. I understand it was out of necessity and realism-- this isn't the Enterprise, after all.

The Seaview does have nuclear weapons. I've heard this stated over and over again in various episodes of various seasons. The episode, 'Doomsday' even centers around Seaview's requirement to launch her nuclear arsenal.

Ahem - OK, I DO LIKE 'Voyage', BUT they messed up on the torpedo thing. Period. I'm not sure what to call Seaview's curved lateral bow extensions, either. Canards, maybe?

I was NOT DISPUTING the fact that Seaview has nuclear weapons. Basically, Admiral Nelson would have to have made some arrangement with the Department of the Navy in order to get authorization for them.

Another nit: Those huge air ducts that Crane and others were almost always crawling through. Or, the vast amount (in general) of interior volume.

OK, how about this: I read somewhere that Seaview's outer hull was supposed to be 90 feet in diameter. Given all the stuff that she was supposedly capable of, plus a hangar for an ACTUAL flying sub that may or may not even resemble the one we remember, what would a post-SeaQuest Seaview really look and be like?

D.K. Henderson wrote: ""Turn Back the Clock" I know that you have to make allowances for the SFX of forty-odd years ago, but after seeing the exquisitely produced "Walking With Dinosaurs" series, these little frilled lizards and dressed-up baby crocodiles--!

That having been said...we see a man, clean-shaven after what we will learn was a nine month period without such amenities as razors. Is he of a racial strain that lacks facial hair, or did he pause in his frantic escape to scrape his chin with the edge of a spear point?

We then see him plunge into a pool, armed with a relatively small, home-made balloon which he has just filled up by blowing into it. He seems to be using the balloon to give him air during his dive--but a balloon filled with exhaled air is not going to contain very much oxygen. A little, yes, but surely not enough to take him far.

As for the jungle habitat--it is full of plants, and therefore requires sunlight, so it has to be open to the sky, not subterranean. (And in the Antarctic, presumably it won't be getting sun year round--nit piling on nit.) At the end of the episode, it's clear that the habitat is at least close to the surface (so why hasn't anyone spotted it before?)

Back to the diving man--we find that the diving bells were yanked into a tunnel at 4,000 feet below the surface. Maybe it wasn't quite 4,000 feet up into the jungle habitat, but it had to be pretty deep. This man, on one small balloon of bad air, first swam down who knows how far and then up four thousand feet? Even if he'd had the air, the changing pressure would have killed him.

Nits and all, it was an exciting opening. We then see Lee Crane calling on a young woman, who turns out to be the fiancee of the miracle man. She makes a comment to Lee about Admiral Nelson at last admitting that she is the best underwater photographer around. This is before she learns of what is going on, so it seems that she has been angling for a job on board the Seaview.

It's rather hard to tell if Jason really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. The implication later is that he was faking it. This doesn't make complete sense. During the mission, he attempted to slow things down, in the hope that no one would discover his perfidy in making his escape. Why not simply tell everyone that he had seen the other three men die?

Once again, in order to make use of their stars, Lee Crane ignores his value as an officer and goes on the mission. His job is simply communications--keeping in touch with the sub. A lesser officer could have done that easily.

Lee and Batgirl (oops...all right, Carol) naturally end up in each other's arms as they hide from an approaching dinosaur. It can't have been too comfortable for Lee, having Carol screaming right in his ear. However, when a second dinosaur (dressed-up baby croc) approached and fought with the first, why on Earth didn't they run for it while the two were preoccupied? They just stood and watched the fight, waiting to see who would win and get to eat them. Just their luck that both reptiles went over a cliff.

On first seeing the "native" girl, all I could think of was "Green Orion Slave Girl." I'm sure that's how Vina would have looked if she'd been filmed in black-and-white.

Watching her run through webby tunnels, you knew that a giant spider was going to pop in. The girl screamed at the sight of it. I thought that she was going to cringe there in terror until Lee showed up, or that maybe she would back up right into him, but instead she just walked around it--awfully close. Lee, not being used to such things, just shot it.

Nelson is quite the scientist. Lee shows up dragging a girl with him. Nelson gives her a quick look, diagnoses her high cheek bones and the folds of her eyelids, and pronounces her as Indian. ("Native American" is still a long way away.) He notes that South America is fairly close by, and quickly speculates that a canoeload or two of them had gotten pulled into this habitat hundreds of years previously.

No one comments much about Jason instantly trying to kill the girl the moment he lays eyes on her. Presumably the girl doesn't recognize the gun and it's loud noise as a weapon, because she doesn't consider it much, either.

I would like to know just how Jason discovered that the tribe performs a human sacrifice on the longest day of the year.

(BTW, did you ever notice that in any and all sci-fi stories about primitive tribes locked away for generations, they never seem to evolve, either socially, religiously or technologically? Of course, that would eliminate most of the fun....)

Harriman Nelson, Admiral and scientist, suddenly turns into James Bond as well. Too bad Lee doesn't come equipped with a similar weapon in his shoe heel. Would have come in handy when he and some of his crew were kidnapped a few episodes ago.

Having escaped, they of course have to take the more dangerous route out of there, the easier path being strewn with the odd angry, armed native or two.

The girl, having led them so far and no farther (maybe she knew what was waiting) ceremoniously takes her leave of Jason and goes back. Pretty brave of her. After all, they still have a sacrifice scheduled, and who better than a girl who had fallen in love with a foreigner and betrayed the tribe?

Blocked off by a water dinosaur, they decide to kill it by breaking down a dam--natural or man-made, I couldn't tell. I don't see how a pile of rocks could have held molten lava at bay, and the heat of the lava and the rocks would have destroyed that tree trunk sticking out of the dam.

It was obvious that Jason would die--it was just a question of whether he would atone for his sins by sacrificing himself (wittingly or accidently) or if he would accidently die in a selfish bid to escape by himself. He atoned, but good heavens, he got snapped up so fast! Lee hardly had time to take advantage of the distraction.

We see the dinosaur submerge in the lava, then we see it submerge again. Dinosaur or no dinosaur, you're only going to go down once in molten rock.

I don't understand why lava + ice = mountain explosion. Wouldn't the lava simply melt away the ice until the cold managed to supercede it?

Going through a tunnel to the outside, Lee, oddly, had both hands tucked behind his back. It gave him the air of being out for a casual stroll rather than a desperate race.

We get to see the Seaview plunge out of the water again. Maybe they should film that again in warmer waters; then they wouldn't have to keep having episodes in the arctic regions. What luck! They emerged just where they needed to, and right when they needed to. (Just like Jason lucked out when they found him before he froze to death.)

Watching the explosion from the sub, Lee commented that it would all be destroyed, and Carol's father grumbled that they had nothing to show for it. Nelson pointed out that they had their lives. No one at all pointed out that a whole tribe of people lost theirs, including the girl who helped them to escape."


Actually, Irwin Allen cheated on this episode. For most of it that takes place in the dinosaur world, he simply went and grabbed footage from his 1960 feature film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. David Hedison (Lee Crane) was in this movie, and Mr. Allen even got the same actress, Vitina Marcus (who played the native girl), to guest star on this episode. That way, he could easily slap the Lost World footage with the new bits in this episode (the scene where the native girl and Crane run into the giant spider, for example, originally was in the movie). Rather clever, he saved a lot of money this week, using footage from his movie.

Looks like some comments are long overdue, and since I've started watching my new DVDs of the first half of season 3...

Re. the opening credits; really picky nit; the silhouette drawing of the Seaview that Nelson adjusts on the glass chart is a little different from the actual Seaview. The conning tower is drawn in the center of the sub, when its actually about one third of the way back from the nose of the ship.
I told you it was really picky!

Some episodes of Voyage jump around in time throughout the season. In the first bunch of episodes in season 3, 1976 and 1980 are shown as the date of when the episode takes place. I suppose seaon 1, despite looking very 1960's, was actually the 1970's, because the crew seems to remain the same from 1965 to 1980 at this rate, with Crane stuck in the rank of 'captain'.

'The Day The World Ended'; It starts off with other nuclear subs disappearing mysteriously one by one from a world chart, leaving only the Seaview, and becomes a very good, atmospheric episode of the Seaview discovering that they're literally all alone in the world themselves, with New York City and Washington D.C. devoid of people. Great story and direction gives the episode an eerie, hopeless, mysterious feel to it.
The one who's causing this makes me think that he could be an X-Man-type mutant, or perhaps a special human with a super-powered 'ability', as they would say in 'Heroes'.

'Night Of Terror' - An odd title, since it doesn't necessarily involve 'night', but rather an unusual island, which should have been in the title, instead.
There's a close-up from below of the open diving bell hatch of the Seaview, and as she's rocking back and forth underwater, you can clearly look all the way up into what is obviously a model of the sub, since you can see up and through the ballast tank hatches at the top of the ship. Considering the detail shown of the Flying Sub bay, I'm surprised they didn't block the inside of the model with a simple piece of plastic or something-- just so you wouldn't notice that it's a hollow model.

'The Terrible Toys' - Not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It was really cool seeing the Seaview approach a giant 150-foot tall spaceship, which had crashed into the ocean. Almost like watching the Enterprise approach an alien ship.
The close-up of the toys that Kowalski spreads out onto a table doesn't match the position of the toys in the long shot at all.
Paul Fix (who was Doctor Piper in the Trek episode/pilot 'Where No Man Has Gone Before') plays this episode's guest star, and man does he look terrible. It's been about a year and half at most since he did the pilot and he looks ill or something.
There was also a cool scene of the Flying Sub launching from its bay, but with a camera view looking out the windows, from behind Nelson and Burke's (Fix) chairs. Quite rare to see that angle-- I don't remember any other episode that did that.
To use the Flying Sub as a decoy against the alien ship, Nelson comments that it has more power than Seaview. Huh? A nuclear-powered sub with numerous generators, reactors, and two huge engines isn't as powerful as the Flying Sub? That's odd. More manuverable, definitely, but more powerful?
I've heard it before, but I'd thought I'd just comment that a riff or two of 'Time Tunnel' episodic background music finds its way into this episode twice.

And just to put Season 3 into perspective with the first season of 'Star Trek' that ran just a few days ahead of it, here's when the first batches of episodes were shown in relation to one another;
Star Trek - 'The Man Trap' - September 8, 1966
S.T. - 'Charlie X' - September 15, 1966
Voyage - 'Monster From The Inferno' - September 18, 1966
S.T. - 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' - September 22, 1966
Voyage - 'Werewolf' - September 25, 1966
S.T. - 'The Naked Time' - September 29, 1966
Voyage - 'The Day The World Ended' - October 2, 1966
S.T. - 'The Enemy Within' - October 6, 1966
Voyage - 'Night Of Terror' - October 9, 1966
S.T. - 'Mudd's Women' - October 13, 1966
Voyage - 'The Terrible Toys' - October 16, 1966
S.T. - 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?' - October 20, 1966
Voyage - 'Day Of Evil' - October 23, 1966

In 'Deadly Waters' a time line is firmly established from the opening scene, which shows a plaque by the observation windows of the Seaview that reads;
'S.S.R.N. seaview
Keel laid September 15, 1972
Commissioned July 26, 1973
This ship dedicated to the development of undersea resources for the future of man'

This episode involves Kowalski's brother Stan, and just when there's a chance for the writers to establish our Kowalski's first name, all his older brother does his call him 'Kid'.
Stan Kowalski is working with an experiment diving suit, which includes an astronaut-like helmet. When we see him or Crane using it underwater, they both wear diving goggles underneath, but when they come aboard the Seaview, their helmet visors are raised and they aren't wearing goggles underneath.
There's a scene of the Seaview avoiding torpedoes, however it's the 8-windowed version from the original movie.
The opening credits of scene 1 show a downward view of the Seaview sinking towards a seabed, but dialogue and action indicate that they're still sinking, all the way down past the seabed that they were definitely descending towards, until they fall beneath crush depth.

'Day Of Evil' involves an alien that wants to use the radioactive fall-out of a nuclear war to feed his people, and he sets the Seaview's reactors into overdrive with minutes left to repair them.
Meanwhile, despite this life or death dilemma, Patterson is sent to fix the proboem, and he merely strrolls, walking calmly to the reactor room. I think an emergency alarm would have convinced him that this was kinda important!
Patterson and even Crane leave the door open to the reactor into the corridor-- allowing radioactivity to escape, instead of locking it behind them.

'Thing From Inner Space' - Grammatically, I think it should have read, 'THE Thing From Inner Space'.
For some reason Nelson, himself, is working the sonar.
Sharkey's photo of his new girlfriend is a small black and white photo..almost as if it were taken sometime before 1966 (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). You'd think that being in the 1970's the picture would have been in color!
8 episodes into Season 3, and Nelson has had his desk placed against 3 out of his 4 walls of his quarters. Kinda strange, not being able to decide which wall looks the best!
8 episodes into Season 3, and this makes the third time Patterson has wound up in sickbay. Who does he think he is, Captain Kirk?

Observation; did Irwin Allen like the name 'Chip'? It makes a semi-return in Land oF The Giants with the dog being named 'Chipper'.

'The Death Watch' - There are only three characters in this entire story-- Nelson, Crane, and Sharkey, without even a single extra in the background, and it's set entirely on board the Seaview, so this makes it the ultimate 'bottle show', saving money and with no new special effects required. Even the lady that performed the voice-over for the new ship's computer went uncredited in the end, which I think was very unfair. I suppose she should be considered the fourth character, even though she's never seen.
The Admiral and Crane are trying to kill one another, and only Sharkey can keep them apart to prevent them from doing so.
The scene of Crane sneaking aboard the Seaview at the Nelson Institute dock is a direct re-use of the scene from the pilot episode, 'Eleven Days To Zero'.

'Deadly Invasion' - The usual Irwin Allen science fiction, in which anything goes. Aliens arrive on Earth using tiny spaceships about the size of a 75-millimeter cannon shell, but one takes the form of an old navy buddy of Nelson's from World War 2. It's Warren Stevens, but he did a much better job of alien-invading-a-ship with Star Trek's 'By Any Other Name' as Rojan.
The 8 'spaceships' rain down on the Pacific but change course and impact the Seaview. The plugs aren't serious, but time is odd here, since the impacts take place 1:31 into the teaser, and just 27 seconds later Sharkey is bringing one of the shell/ships into the control room, without any indication of any more time than those 27 seconds passing.
The underwater base design has been used many times before, but SATO-6 must also be a TARDIS, because despite having a circumference roughly that of the Flying Sub, it's huge inside, with hallways and rooms galore.
And while the Flying Sub is docked onto the roof of SATO-6, the aliens somehow maneuver the Seaview to dock with the base, but via the conning tower hatch, since Crane and his men ascend the ladder in the control room to enter the base.

"The Death Watch" was an unusually good episode for the third season of VTTBOTS, a time when the show had already embraced its cliched "monster/menace of the week" formula. Despite being in color, it seems more like a first season episode, in tone and script.

Sometimes I got the impression that Nelson and Crane were graduates of the Dana Scully School Of Thinking. Someone would see something, a monster, and neither would believe it until they saw it themselves. Uh, guys, don't you remember last weeks episode!

'The Haunted Submarine' - Nelson encounters a ghostly ancestor of his who died in 1822 (and conveniently looks just like him to save on the cost of hiring another actor).
Captain Seamus O'Hara Nelson wants Admiral Nelson to join him on the high seas and see the world, but the true intentions are more sinister than that, of course.
The Seaview seems to be susceptible to supernatural powers, since mere cannonballs fired from Captain Nelson's old ship strike the sub on the surface and send it rocking back and forth, when they should have just (possibly) dented the hull slightly.

'The Lost Bomb' - I liked this episode very much, as the Seaview fights another submarine for most of the epsiode. An enemy sub shoots down a plane carrying a very, very powerful bomb, and it's up to Sharkey and an old friend from his past to deactivate it.
Torpedoes from the other sub (which is called the 'Vulcan' and comes from an undisclosed enemy country) fires torpedoes at the Seaview-- the 8-windowed version.
We find out Sharkey's full name is 'Francis Ethelbert Sharkey', thanks to his old friend coming aboard.
Sparks hails the other sub, but refers to their ship as the 'SSNR Seaview'. I could have sworn it was 'SSRN', not 'SSNR'? And Nelson doesn't even correct him.
To lure the Vulcan away from the damaged Seaview, they use the Flying Sub as a decoy, and Nelson warns that they're not to engage because they don't possess weapons strong enough to fight the Vulcan-- but I could have sworn the Flying Sub had lasers, which would be very useful.
There are FOUR Star Trek connections in this episode:
1. The enemy sub is called the 'Vulcan'. Pretty cool hearing Crane and Nelson say 'Vulcan', even though they don't mean 'Spock'.
2. The script was written by Oliver Crawford, who co-wrote the Trek episodes 'The Galileo Seven', 'The Cloudminders', and, by himself, 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield'.
3. The incidental music was created by Trek theme creator Alexander Courage.
4. And possibly most intriguing, on the bomb there are unusually-shaped lugnuts or locking gears on the outside of the tall bomb, and they're the exact same star-point/delta shield design of the Enterprise badge/insignia worn on the crew's uniforms!
This episode was first aired December 11, 1966, which places in between the Trek episodes 'The Conscience Of The King' and 'Balance Of Terror', with Crawford's 'The Galileo Seven' airing several weeks later.
Paul Sawtell, who created the theme music of 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' had been anextremely prolific creator of music for tv series and movies, with 319 titles, and 7 soundtrack titles composed, with 'Voyage' being his last professional music produced. He ending on a fantastic note, as far as I'm concverned! He was born February 3, 1906 in Gilve, Poland, and died August 1, 1971 (age 65) in Los Angeles County, California, USA.
Some of his famous credits include:
1959-1963 Hawaiian Eye (TV series) (music supervisor - 133 episodes)

1959-1961 Maverick (TV series) (music supervisor - 6 episodes)

1959-1961 77 Sunset Strip (TV series) (music supervisor - 14 episodes)

1959-1960 Bourbon Street Beat (TV series) (music supervisor - 38 episodes)

The DVD packaging, and the still images on screen showing episodes and scene selections show the 8-windowed version of the Seaview, even though this would be the second season that the 4-windowed version was seen, the 8-windowed version seen only in the original movie and first season.
And during any torpedoe attacks for the next 3 seasons! :-)

The fourth season episode, 'Journey With Fear' by Arthur Weiss comes across as a standard Irwin Allen episode, loaded with all the essentials that make his shows memorable (and unfortunately, the target of fans that look down on it).
For example;
1. Rocking back and forth of the Seaview amid exploding control consoles: check.
2. Aliens that speak perfect English despite very alien look: check.
3. Use of the Flying sub thrown in: check.
4. Shooting bullet-proof aliens: check.
5. Aliens that can pop in and out of nowehere instantly: check.
6. Thick-headed aliens that, even when presented with the facts, don't believe humans: check.
7. Use of equipment and props from 'Lost In Space' and 'the Time Tunnel': check.
7. Use of sound effects from those two shows: check.
8. Having the Seaview crew perform functions and tasks that as submarine crewmembers, they should have no knowledge or training or skill for: check.
9. Weak science: check.
10> Generic title using standard scary word like 'terror', 'horror', 'death', or 'doom', rendering it unmemorable: check.
Good ol', VTTBOTS! This was cool when I was 14, but these days...eek.

The basic plot is aliens from the planet Centaur (who also call each other 'Centaur' instead of a proper name) think Man are sending capsules up into space as a prerequisite before invasion. Never mind that it's just a little 2-man capsule that can't even travel at 5 % the speed of light, but for some reason Chip is one of the two astronauts on board. Chip? Why? Last time I checked he was a sailor, not an astronaut.
So the paranoid aliens zap Chip and his shopmate and the whole capsule to Venus, which is rocky and has limited unique vegetaion and normal gravity and air they can breath, and unfortunately for our heroes, has a big solar storm once a month that pulls apart the surface. Oh, yea, that's where the Centaurs have set up a base to spy on Earth, and the storm will occur in 6 hours.
Crane prepares a second capsule to be launched from Seaview, but he's scooped up, too, capsule and all, so he tries to rescue Chip (the other astronaut is killed earlier).
Nelson has to deal with Washignton and a visiting Centaur alien, who even after he's given a tour of the Seaview, doesn't seem to realize that Earth is not a threat to his planet.
So, long story short, chases, Flying Sub attacking the transference beam with a laser (shot from INSIDE the ship through the windshield by Nelson!), bouncing around as Venus falls apart, and more weird science before our heroes are returned to Earth-- despite surviving the pelting of dozens of baseball and cantaloupe-sized rocks on top of them.

Did I mention that both capsules (attached to rocket/missile-type craft) are launched from within the Seaview? When the frist is launched, the ship tilts from the launch-- which should have screwed up the rocket's trajectory.
And as we've all seen the huge billows and clouds of firey smoke produced by missiles and rockets, it seems crazy that the rocket launches in a wide open missile room, which would be flooded with the exhaust!

And as for crew doing things they shouldn't be doing, Chip, as I said, is suddenly an astronaut, Crane is planning to fly the rescue mission, Nelson acts as a rocket launch director, Kowalski is on communications, radar, and other duties, and Sharkey supervises the preparation of the rockets.

Writer Arthur Weiss couldn't even come up with a name for the mission, like 'Gemini', or 'Apollo', or 'Hercules' or whatever.
The rockets are referred to simply as 'Flight', as in, "This is Nelson; come in Flight. Flight, do you read me?"

As I said, if you want an example of the usual lower range, mailed-it-in Irwin Allen show, this is the one.

Oh, and the floor of the capsule is carpeted.
Fire hazard, anyone?

'Man of Many Faces' was one of the better 4th season episodes, mainly because of the lack of Bug Eyed Monsters.
A spy is impersonating not just Nelson (and framing him for murder on live TV), but Crane and everyone else aboard to prevent the ship from destroying a scientist's electro-magnet.
There's even some action and a car chase on land, finally getting away from the ship for a while.
The scientist wanted to control the tides by zapping the Moon, but instead is bringing it closer and closer to Earth, so it's up to the Seaview to reach it in time, while dealing with imposters and sabotage aboard ship.
I suppose the idea is that once the ray is off the Moon it'll slingshot back into its proper place, because one the ray is destroyed, no attempt is made to push the Moon back, or even any comment on it at the end.
Great scenes with 2 Sharkey's, and a knock down, drag out fight in a crashing Flying Sub.

Bloopers are; Doc is tied up on the other side of a partition in sickbay as the fake Doc injects Crane with a needle, but despite just being 10 feet away and conscious, he doesn't kick the walls or chairs or utter a sound. Anyone can make noise, even with a gag in their mouth.
And I don't know what kind of poison the fake Doc injected into Crane, but all the real one had to do was smell the hypo to know what kind of poison was used, and inject a wonder drug that immediately saved his life, and even made it possible for Crane to leave sickbay virtually in perfect health!

Turn Back The Clock

Dr. Ernst Zeigler does some chemical work & declares the material to be a section of the esophagus of a edaphosaurus. Crane comments about it being a dinosaur & Zeigler says it come from the Mesozoic, probably the Jurassic period.
Errrrrrrrrrg...
1. Not sure why a paleontology lab has all those chemicals around. They usually work with stone, not living tissue.
2. IIRC they have not discovered any soft tissue of Edaphosaurus, but that doesn't stop the Doctor from confidentally declaring the material to be a particular extinct animal's esophagus.
3. Edaphosaurus was NOT a dinosaur, it was a pelycosaur.
4. It did not live in the Jurassic or even the Mesozoic. It came from the Permian period. It was extinct before there were dinosaurs!!!

Crane wants the esophagus tested with an atomic clock.
Why? It's way too fresh for that.

Amazingly the atomic clock reveals that the creature died last year.
What atomic radiation are you measuring that would tell you that?

Geeze Carol, you're a photographer, just don't stand there calling for Lee, snap some pictures of the creature!

DK Henderson - The clip shows Lee and Carol racing across a barren patch of ground, with Carol falling just as the dinosaur looms into camera range. Problem was, Carol was a redhead, not a brunette.
Watching that scene in black & white (after reading your comment) I did notice that Carol's hairstyle became a little poofier & was lighter than in the close-ups. ;-)

Also while the "dinos" are fighting there's a shot of Lee holding Carol, then a shot of Lee & Carol standing apart (with her hair poofier & lighter) and then Lee's holding Carol again.

As I said in my 2008 post, Irwin Allen used most of the footage for this episode from his 1960 adaptation of The Lost World. He even went as far to get Vitina Marcus to guest star, since she had been in TLW (she appeared on all of Allen's shows).

The 1961 film, which ran from July to September, cost $1,580,000 to make and made $2,300,000 at the box office, according to Wikipedia, in the top right-side box, but several paragraphs down below the same page it says that it cost $2,000,000, and made $7,000,000 at the box office.

2 fourth season epsiodes;

'Savage Jungle' is about an alien in human form played by Perry Lopez (Estaban from Star Trek's 'Shore Leave' episode), who carries around three doll-sized, silver-faced, jungle soldiers in a box that he can make grow into full size, and his plans to turn the Earth into a jungle planet for their race.
The Seaview is smothered from the inside out with jungle growth, but also encounters a massive hunk of seaweed outside that latches onto the sub. Nelson builds a gamma ray projector to destroy the seaweed, and here's the strange part.
He shoots it through the windows of the Seaview. The seawwed explodes into nothing, but the windows are intact. Lucky they didn't shatter, huh? And somehow this one zapping kills all of the plants inside the ship, too, and they just move onto their next destination. Bit of a quickie ending.

'Flaming Ice' concerns a group of aliens, known as 'Frost Men', whose downed saucer needs the nuclear energy of the Seaview to lift off. After freezing the crew into unconsciousness and layering the controls with a coating of ice, Kowalski, of all people gets a chance to play the hero. The ice is gone from the ship, but where did it go? The temperature was raised to normal, but shouldn't the floor have had a couple inches of water on it from the melted ice? It didn't.
The aliens discover that they only have to transfer nuclear power into their ship, and not remove the reactor from Seaview. However, this will somehow melt the Earth's entire polar cap and flood the Earth. The aliens get their power, and take off, and Nelson and his men make it back in time to the Seaview to blow the saucer out of the sky.
Uhhh, right.
The aliens had left, they got their power, they didn't want to invade Earth or turn it into a frozen world like their own. But Nelson still had to kill a bunch of them, even though they were leaving! He could have even offered to help to rebuild their reactor or repair theirs, but this was Irwin Allen story-telling, and every single alien from another world was an enemy and must be killed, so they used them lame excuse of the polar ice cap melting.
A shame, really, because it was a decent episode.

Best not to think too logically when watching this show. It's just fun

Depends on the episode. ;-)

I think a big problem with the series is a sense of schizophrenia when it comes to what kind of show it is, especially in the first season.

On the one hand you'd have serious shows set in the military/drama genre, and on the other hand more fantastic science fiction/monster of the week stories.

So if you wanted to watch a fun sci-fi romp, but got a dramatic episode instead, or vice versa, the result could be unsatisfying even if the episode was otherwise well-done.

And on a sorta related note. I was recently rereading the issue of Weird Heroes (volume 2?) where Harlan Ellison contributed a story about his pen name Cordwainer Bird and in the introduction he mentions the first time he used his pen name for a script that he had felt had been ruined by executive meddling was an episode of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. (The Price Of Doom, I believe.) IIRC he felt that Irwin Allen was so confused over what direction the show should go as well. (Wish I could remember his exact quote as it was rather funny.)

Yes it was volume 2 and the ep was The Price Of Doom and here's the quote.

"Uncle Irwin managed to confuse himself so thoroughly as to what the direction of the series should be that he collapsed the minds of all intelligent writers unfortunate enough to fall within his sphere of influence."

Am I the only one to sometimes wonder if maybe Harlan puts more thought into his insults then his stories? ;-)

Am I the only one to sometimes wonder if maybe Harlan puts more thought into his insults then his stories

I can't stand the man. He still tells anyone who'll listen how Gene Rodenberry screwed him over on City On The Edge Of Forever, blah, blah, blah.

Harlan, it's been nearly fifty years, get over it!

Besides, I don't think your version of City would have been so fondly embraced by the fans.

In the episode 'Edge of Doom', Nelson is informed that Crane might be an imposter.
At one point, battle stations are called, and the crew races about to their posts. However, a couple guys actually run up the ladder in the control room up to, I believe, the conning tower, or at least the hatch leading outside. Just one little problem...the Seaview is deep underwater! Where are these guys going??? Abandoning ship?
There's also a matter of an unfinished story element, which would be the enemy sub following Seaview. She attacks, Sparks warns her away, and we never see it again, even though it must be connected to the imposter.
Sharkey is knocked unconscious, and seems to stay that way a long, long time-- about three-quarters of the episode, in fact.

The Fear-Makers:
Season 1, Episode 3 on the original transmission order, season 1, episode 7 on the DVD order.
The episode begins with the tragedy on another submarine the Palidor caused by the crew reacting to fear gas.
This has consequences on the Seaview crew as it question how long the crew can survived in the submarine with a couple of observers on board.
One of them Davis (Lloyd Bochner) is in fact an enemy agent and he placed the fear gas on the Seaview in order to cancel the Seaview's mission.
However when the fear-gas evolved into something more this leads Davis to panic and reveal himself for what he is to the Nelson and Crane.
Quite tense episode and fits well with its premise especially the lead-up to Davis exposing himself as an enemy episode in order to save his own life.

Saw Richard Basehart as the lead character in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour 1.9 The Black Curtain.
This was broadcast in 1962 a couple of years before Basehart’s lead role as Admiral Harriman in Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea.
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode also feature Harold J Stone and I discovered that Stone later reunited with Basehart in Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea when Stone guest starred in the episode Mutiny.
I have not seen Mutiny yet and the reason why I know Stone’s presence in this episode is because I am currently on disc four on the season 1 set and one of the episodes here is Mutiny with the DVD menu showing a still of Stone in this episode.

The Indestructible Man:
Season 1, Episode 21 on the original transmission order, season 1, episode 22 on the DVD order.
The episode title refers to a robot which wreaks havoc when it came aboard the Seaview.
A very enjoyable episode and the robot is very menacing by the trouble it causes.

The Buccaneer:
Season 1, Episode 22 on the original transmission order, season 1, episode 23 on the DVD order.
A very brilliant episode in which the villain Mr Logan who uses the hijacks and uses the Seaview to steal the Mona Lisa.
Broadcast in 1965, Mr Logan is described as a genius with the stealing of Mona Lisa being his latest scheme.
14 years later in 1979 Doctor Who presented its own plot of the theft of the Mona Lisa in City of Death with the villain behind this Scaroth also described as a genius.
GB Atwater is superb as Logan in his passion for the Mona Lisa even killing one of his own to protect it.

I was sad to discover afterwards that Henry Kulky (Chief Curley Jones) had died four days after this episode was aired but is still seen in subsequent episodes.
Very tragic as he was a fun character to see.

The Human Computer:
Season 1, Episode 23, season 1, episode 24.
Lee is alone on the Seaview as part of a test in which it is under the control of a computer but found an enemy agent is also on board.
Very good suspense of an episode in which Lee has to face off this adversary in an otherwise empty Seaview.

The Traitor:
Season 1 finale on the original transmission order, Season 1, episode 28.
Guest stars George Sanders as the villain Fenton.
Nelson is forced to do Fenton’s bidding after he held Nelson’s sister hostage.
The sister is played by Susan Flannery and is credited for playing The Sister. With a credit like that it could easily be misconstrued that she was playing a nun.
However she wasn’t Nelson’s sister but a government agent posing as her as part of a plan for Nelson to infiltrate Fenton’s organisation.
Very good how this all played out with Nelson pretending to be a traitor.

The Fourth Season of VOYAGE might just be the greatest sausage party season in the history of television.
In 26 episode, not a single female is seen.
The last female guest star to be seen on VOYAGE was Diane Weber, the played the titular character in the late third-season episode "The Mermaid".

The Fourth Season was the one where many episodes were just stock footage of previous ones, slapped together.

CHEAP! CHEAP! CHEAP!

You've heard of 'Reaganomics'?
I believe this was called 'Allenomics', because of all the money he saved.

I'd like to know if his Network tried to screw him over in the third or fourth season by cutting his budget.

Todd - "The Fourth Season of VOYAGE might just be the greatest sausage party season in the history of television."

Careful, Todd! You might just invoke the Wrath of Mike Brill! (See posts from April 2008)

Irwin Allen was infamous for cutting corners, whenever he could.

The Enemies:
Season 1, Episode 29 on the original transmission order, season 1, episode 31 on the DVD order.

Guest stars Henry Silva, Tom Skerritt, and Malachi Throne.

The crew of a submarine crashed to its demise as a result of an argument between its captain and one of its officers

On learning about this on the Seaview, Nelson and Crane investigate what led to this demise and the blackbox records a conversation between the said two men in which one of them mentioned about being on an island.

Eventually Nelson and Crane came to this island and soon became prisoners and experimented on which led to each ot them believing the other to be the enemy.

Intense that this led to a fight between Nelson and Crane but fortunately got solved in the end with the main villain meeting his demise in the process.

One of those first season episodes, before the monsters and aliens took over.

So basically an early version of SeaQuest in having a similar pathway in its storytelling.

At least, the Seaview was never transported to another planet for an entire season.

I remember years ago discovering the show on some site (Hulu? Something else?) and realizing how schizophrenic the first season was. Like one episode might be about the Loch Ness Monster and the next a serious submarine drama with no sci-fi/fantasy elements and then an episode with an alien, and the next the crew is captured by an evil dictator. Yikes! Pick a direction and stick with it. Trying to eat your cake and have it too will just confuse/disappoint the audience.

Not that the individual episodes were bad, but someone who wants to watch a serious drama and gets a "silly" sci-fi story, or watch a speculative fiction story and gets a "boring" drama, can really affect a viewer's enjoyment.

There's some early Wild Wild West episodes that are just straight westerns and suffer the same disappointment factor because they lack the "wild wild" elements that people expect.

At least, the Seaview was never transported to another planet for an entire season.

That was for all of one episode, not a whole season.


I remember years ago discovering the show on some site (Hulu? Something else?) and realizing how schizophrenic the first season was. Like one episode might be about the Loch Ness Monster and the next a serious submarine drama with no sci-fi/fantasy elements and then an episode with an alien, and the next the crew is captured by an evil dictator. Yikes! Pick a direction and stick with it.

And they did, monsters and aliens galore!