Goodbye My Love

In this one, Richard Kimble falls for the female singer at a nightclub he's working at. They seem like quite the couple but she's actually into a man who often gets drunk there who Kimble has to drive home where that man's wife is waiting, confined to a wheelchair. Turns out that singer has seen the newspaper clipping offering a reward for his capture which gives her an idea...Jack Lord plays the alcoholic, two-timing man a year before becoming the straight arrow Steve McGarrett in the original "Hawaii Five-O" and he's terrific here, that's for sure! As the singer, Marlyn Mason has quite the pipes when singing two Frank Sinatra tunes: "Strangers in the Night" and "I'll Never Smile Again". So not only does Kimble have a brief romance here but also the cops aren't looking for him this time around! So that's my recommendation of "Goodbye My Love".

One of the best episodes of the series, this one hits all the beats of a horror movie or psychological thriller. Guessing the motivations of the characters is difficult and the music is overpowering.

Kimble, using the name Bill Garrison, works as a parking attendant at a country club, where he is dating singer Gayle Martin (actress Marlyn Mason) who works there. Unknown to Kimble, Gayle is in love with wealthy club member Alan Bartlett (actor Jack Lord), with whom she is having an affair. Alan's wife, Norma (actress Patricia Smith) uses a wheelchair, having been crippled in an auto accident three years earlier. Gayle wants Alan to leave his wife and marry her, but Alan is reluctant because the money is Norma's, and he likes living the rich life, not having to work.

Gayle is dating Bill (Kimble) only because she discovered his identity. Kimble is unaware of her relationship with Alan, and is fooled into thinking she cares for him. In a plot development similar to that of the Season 1 episode "Garden House," Gayle persuades Alan to scheme to hire Kimble to work at his house, so Alan can kill Norma under circumstances where he can blame Kimble.

Dick is toiling as a parking attendant at a club where he is carrying on with the sexy piano player. Shades of the very first fuge. Unbeknownst to him, but knownst, to us, said piano player, Gale, is also fooling around with rich guy Bartlett. Dick must be parking cars when this is happening, because they don't hide it. Gale is in possession of a newspaper story about the price on Dick's head, which she must have been keeping in the event she would run into him some day. Bartlett sees the story and they hatch a scheme for Kimble to kill his poor crippled wife, or at least frame him for it. Actually the wife is not poor at all. She's the one with all the money. She was injured in a car accident and it seems like there is more to that story that will come out later, but it never does. Anyways, the plan is to get the servants out of the house and have Kimble be the only one there with her, since Bartlett had given Dick a cushy job in the house. The wife finds the Kimble reward story in a drawer in her house, with no explanation as to why it would be there. She thinks Dick has been sent to kill her, but he convinces her that her husband is the danger. Sure enough, the husband shows up and she gets up and pushes the wheelchair down the steps, breaking his leg. He implicates Gale and she gets arrested by a cop who resembles the emperor in Star Wars. Dick runs away, looking not only for the OAM, but for a woman who can help him forget the piano player.

We are a year and a half before Jack Lord, who had always been looking for a big TV series success in a show he could own a piece of, (which is why he turned down the roles of Ben Casey and Captain Kirk), got a call that a show based in Hawaii wanted him for the lead. Here he's still stuck playing bad guys in other people's shows. Here he's a scheming husband trying to get rid of his crippled wife, (played by Patricia Smith) so he can marry a sexy young chanteuse, (Marlyn Mason). They find out who Kimble is and Lord hires him to work around his mansion so that he can be easily framed for the murder. It winds up with Kimble fighting Lord to protect Smith in a creepy sequence, made more so by the image in one's mind of Lord as McGarrett, enemy of criminals and protector of innocent victims. The ending is something of a disappointment, more a whimper than a bang.

Some ironies: Both David Janssen and Jack Lord had guested on Naked City in different episodes Lord was in "The Human Trap" (11/30/60), based on the Cheryl Crane case in which a daughter stabs a playboy to defend her mother. Janssen was in "A Wednesday Night Story" (11/1/61) in which he played a philandering husband who wants to kill his wife so he can marry the family's pretty Swedish governess. And Patricia Smith played a policeman in the first regular episode of Hawaii Five-0, "Full Fathom Five", (9/26/68), about a Bluebeard who marries rich women and then kills them to inherit their money. What goes around comes around- and around and around- in the wacky world of television.