Episode 6: Whatever Lola Wants....
Previous: Episode Five: Live a Little.... Kill a Little Next: Episode Seven: The Princess and the Paupers
The opening is noirish to the point of being almost surreal: A knife embeds itself into a painting, and then the camera pans to show a terrified man with his back to a door near the painting. The camera pulls back to reveal the back of another man's hand forming a claw.
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| Ok! Ok! Your secret relationship with Salvador Dali is safe with me! |
The frightened man opens the door into a hallway where he is chased onto a fire-escape where the claw-man throws the knife into the poor man's back and then tosses the body into a dumpster directly below. (Through the miracle of network standards and practices—censorship—the knife in the back kills the man immediately without any death agony or blood.)
Honey parks her AC Cobra right in front of a downtown office building. I guess if you're her, you can park anywhere you want. (See also Episode Nine: The Flame and the Pussycat".) She goes up the elevator to the door of an office, which opens to reveal the claw-man. He says his name is Vargas (Richard Angarola), and he wants Honey to go with him to a gala. He wants Honey to meet a man named Rodriguez and find out where Rodriguez is going next, because wherever that is, it's where he has banked a large sum of money that he stole from Vargas's brother.
Sam is ticked that Honey is acting as a escort rather than a detective. (William Bast wrote this script, and as usual, he likes having Sam and Honey bicker, and also having someone start a sentence in one scene and someone else finish the sentence in the next scene.) Sam acts as Q to Honey's Bond as he shows her the gadgets she will use on this case: a microphone in a pendant and a fountain pen that sprays stinky smoke in the bad guy's face. For her part, Honey thinks something stinks about Vargas's story, but Sam says that what they don't know about a client's real intentions can't hurt them. Sam can be really dumb: Of course, what they don't know about what's really going on can get them killed.
The gala is held at a mansion. Lola (Audrey Christie), the hostess, is taken with Honey and immediately introduces her to Rodriguez (Johnny Haymer), who escorts her onto a balcony and waxes poetic about the moon before inviting her to fly with him to Paris.
While Honey dances with Vargas, Rodriguez and his buddy, Gunter (Horst Ebersberg), eye her date. Gunter recognizes Vargas as someone who used to work for their organization but betrayed them, and then supposedly died in what now seems to have been a staged accident.
Honey thinks the job is over, but then she sees that Vargas has been captured by Rodriguez and taken into a drawing room. She tells Sam over her radio-disguised-as-a-compact. (The pendant is a one-way device, while her compact is two-way.)
Sam tells her to get out, but she refuses to leave her client behind. Honey goes into the drawing room, but nobody is there. She figures out that a door-sized mirror is probably some kind of a door, so she presses the frame around it until the mirror-door slides open. Suddenly, Lola appears behind Honey. (Where did she come from?)
Honey is put in the same cell with Vargas who comes clean—partly, at least—about what is going on. He is mixed up with an international syndicate that fixes horse races. Wherever Rodriguez is going next is where a race will be fixed, and Vargas planned to follow him and find out which horses to bet on. He previously had an informant, a jockey, but that source took a steep dive into a dumpster. (Vargas does not quite confess to murdering the jockey, but Honey figures that out.)
Honey and Vargas lure a guard into the cell. The guard BTW has a submachinegun that is awfully light. He holds it in one hand with no effort at all. In any case, Honey sprays him with her stinky-smoke pen.
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| "Aim for the T-zone, Honey!" Notice that Vargas's other claw hand can be seen in upper right of photo. |
Eventually, the guard stumbles after them, though, firing his toy gun. It sounds like the Foley artist (sound-effects guy) threw together some random and unrealistic gunfire and ricochet noises from old movies.
Honey and Vargas make it back through the looking glass, only to run into Lola and Gunter...
...who march them back down into the same basement that we saw in the previous episode. (They have redecorated it, but it's the same staircase.)
Instead of returning them to their cell, Lola shows them the nerve center of her operation. (Just as any respectable Bond villain would do.)
Lola announces that she is going to stick Honey and Vargas each in a crate and ship them to South America. Honey starts talking loudly to Sam. Suddenly, it dawns on Lola that the pendant is a microphone and grabs it from Honey's neck, but rather than destroy it to prevent Sam from hearing any more, she tells Gunter to go out and take care of the chauffer who brought Honey to the event. Naturally, Sam is still listening and is consequently waiting for Gunter when he shows up.
Sam's way of pretending to saunter in and join the hoity-toity guests, as if he belongs, reminds me of Jean-Paul Belmondo trying to imitate an uncouth American in the movie "Breathless."
But Sam does find the magic mirror.
Once outside, Sam sees the truck hurtling down the driveway. He has the layout of the grounds down pat and, even in the dark, he takes a short cut to head off the truck. He makes the driver careen off the road so the box containing Honey slides out the back and breaks open, allowing her to come to Sam's aid. She grabs Lola from behind as the woman is about to attack Sam. (With what is not clear; maybe a knife, or maybe her designer purse.)
The sirens start wailing. Subdued but defiant, Lola says she wants to look good for the newspapers, so she opens her compact, which turns out to be a detonator with which she blows up the mansion.
It is a fast-moving, if uneven, episode with plot holes and other inconsistencies, but the villains are sufficiently arch, and the excitement is palpable.
In the epilogue, Sam puts on a bad Latin lover accent just to lure Honey out for a hamburger. The ambivalence of Honey and Sam's relationship is painful. Their interplay is bickering with sexual tension. They are part Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Do either of them mean it when they flirt? Is Honey's deference to Sam mocking or does she really like it when he is masterful (as she said in a previous episode)? I think the show is trying to have it both ways.
Explosions: 1
Overall rating: 4/5 (Despite massive plot holes)
Martial Arts rating: 2/5 (no judo or karate to speak of, but several fights are exciting)
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