The Six Million Dollar Man 1.03

Operation Firefly

Oscar sends Steve to Spain to look for Karen Abbott, the daughter of Dr. Samuel Abbott, a scientist who has invented a new laser. Dr. Abbott has disappeared. Oscar hopes that Karen, who is known to possess ESP, can help them to locate her father.

Steve makes contact with Karen. She is skeptical at first but after she uses her mental abilities she gets a premonition that her father is in the Everglades she agrees to help Steve find her father.

Steve and Karen survive an attempt on their life while they are in Spain and then travel to Florida. They travel into the Everglades with a guide but they are attacked during their first night in the swamp. Their guide is shot and killed.

Steve makes them a new canoe out of the trunk of a tree. Steve and Karen travel deeper into the swamp. They find her father but he is being guarded by armed men and doesn't believe that he is in danger or that Steve is really a government agent. Dr. Abbott trusts the men who are guarding him.

Steve is locked up at gun point but escapes. Dr. Abbott soon learns that the men guarding him are not what they claim to be. Steve helps Dr. Abbott and Karen to escape from the armed men and together they make their way back to Dr. Abbott's lab in Boston, MA.

Thoughts

Simon Scott played the part of Samuel Abbott. He was previously seen in The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women and War (1973) and will also show up in an episode from the fourth season of the show. He played a different character in each of these appearances. He also appeared in three episodes of The Invaders, one of them was from the first season (1.13 - Storm) and the other two from the second season of that show. He played different characters in each one of those episodes.

Steve fights an alligator while they are in the Everglades. The alligator looks very fake. There's a moment when Karen falls into some quicksand. Her pants are all dirty but moments later her pants are as clean as they were before she fell in the quicksand. Steve falls into the water twice; Karen falls into the water once but moments later their clothes are perfectly dry and their hair looks perfectly coifed.

Steve jumps over some quicksand late in this episode but they don't use the sound effect that will later become one of the calling cards for this TV show.

The bad guys finds Steve's ID, which he left in his tent, when they attacked the camp and killed the guide. I understand that they needed to get their hands on his ID so that Oscar could later be convinced that they had captured Steve but I thought it was very sloppy of Steve just to leave it lying about even if it was in his tent.

This is a decent episode. I like it well enough. It isn't great television but its a step up from the previous episode which made considerably less sense.