Race Against Time: Part 1

Joe Mannix is assigned to help take a certain doctor to a certain country to help bring back to health a certain rebel leader in that certain country ruled by a dictatorship. Of course, there are a lot of obstacles in the way. I'll stop there and just say, yes, this resembles a "Mission: Impossible" script. That show, like this one, was produced by Bruce Geller so it's possible it was written for that other show before it was cancelled the previous season. Be that as it may, I enjoyed this one enough as a nice change of pace for the "Mannix" TV show. I especially liked that female villain who seems to have control over everyone. Now I'll review Part 2....

I have seen nearly every episode, but somehow had never seen this two parter. I almost skipped it because of the bad reviews, but went ahead anyway. I thought it was terrific. I will state the consensus positions of the other reviewers, and why I saw things differently.

1. Unrealistic. My response, so freaking what. Most of the show was unrealistic. Joe would have been killed a 100 times by now if realism mattered. Heck, he even rose from the dead once. And escaped an entire house of top tier hitmen after having been drugged. I could go on.

2. Poor acting. The others thought Joe looked disinterested and the doctor was too over the top. I thought they played their parts well. I saw Joe as being more under control and on alert than disinterested and the doctor's shifting emotions worked for me. I also thought the female buddy was terrific, but her husband the general was wrong for his part. And the actor playing Victor did not have the charismatic presence needed.

3. Not a typical Mannix. That is true, but I liked the change of direction. Much better than another small town with dark secrets and a crooked sheriff. I do agree with the reviewer that said they should have had a better backstory for using Joe. I also agree that the pacemaker angle was disappointing. It would have been better if Victor just needed some vaguely defined complicated surgery.

4. Continuity errors. You reviewers that get all worked up about them, have a drink, smoke a blunt, get laid more, something. They are just not worth obsessing over,

This one is about a rebel group who need a certain doctor (played by John Colicos) from the United States to come to their country to perform an operation on their leader, who has heart trouble. But there are two major flaws right from the start. The first one is why do they need this particular doctor to do the operation? Despite what they claim, he is certainly NOT the only doctor in the world who can install a pacemaker!! Why don't they get someone from their own country to do it? The second problem is why do they need Joe? This is never explained, because there is NO explanation. He isn't needed. They only need the doctor. Joe is simply along for the ride, which means there was no reason to make this episode. None. There's no mystery, no murder, no investigation, no nothing. It's about a doctor performing a heart operation on a third-world rebel leader. That's it. It doesn't even seem like a Mannix episode and should actually be on some other TV show, like Mission Impossible, since it involves a military dictatorship, spies, rebels, etc.

John Colicos doesn't help matters with his bad attitude and constant yelling and angry outbursts. He acts like he doesn't want to be there and he should have stuck with that inclination and REFUSED to be a part of this fiasco and then maybe it would have never been made.

I didn't think any episode could be as bad as The Gang's All Here from earlier this season but this one comes pretty close, and this is only part one of this atrocious debacle. It gets much, much worse in part two. There's absolutely nothing to recommend in this epic flop.

I've been binge watching Mannix for the last 3 months beginning with season 1 up to this disaster of a story. My first impulse, as with one of the other reviewers, was that this was a discarded Mission Impossible script, as it clearly resembles no Mannix episode to date and has all the hallmarks of a MI episode right down to the doofus banana republic soldiers who can't fight their way out of a paper bag and phony street scenes in a fictitious country that appears to be totally Americanized right down to American cars lining the streets, but then I looked at the writer's IMDB credits and discovered he never wrote for MI. So that is a mystery. With respect to Mannix, he could have easily stayed home and they could have used a guest protagonist in the same way the used other actors to do the remaining Perry Mason movies after Raymond Burr died. It seemed to work okay. But more importantly, notwithstanding being handed a louse script Mike Connors seemed to take advantage instead of trying to make the best of a rotten situation. In the scene of him in the front seat of the airplane waiting for the pilot to start the stalling engine he showed no tension, no suspense even though he knew the soldiers with machine guns were hot on their tail. He just seem to be not there or at best just starring into space, which gave us an opportunity to see how much he's aged by the 7 season. The rest of the Part 1 goes down hill from there. And John Colicos just like Anthony Zerbe (two very exacting actors) in every thing I've ever seen them both in was not at all convincing and it was if he was calling in his part. Sadly, I did not stick around for Part 2, sad because the episodes are now dwindling down and I feel cheated, but nonetheless moved on to the next episode after Part 2.

Lorne Greene once quipped (and I paraphrase) that in all of Bonanza's fourteen years, he was proud of the number of very good episodes they did and then he added that in order to full a season there were, of course, scripts which should never have been filmed.

That's the case with this Mannix two-parter. One reviewer previously mentioned that he felt both the original Hawaii Five-0 and Mannix ran out of story concepts. I realize that it may seem so but (I'm a member of the Writers Guild) the real reason for these long-running detective shows losing story impact was the network trimming them to fit in more commercials and also trimming budgets. The format and storytelling style established in these programs suffered tremendously when CBS insisted on the reduction in their running time. Mannix, without it's pre-credit teaser doesn't have time to adequately establish a premise and resolutions are forced to be rushed---quite unsatisfactorily so. Even the end title music and credits are faster! It seems that five to ten pages of what would have comprised earlier scripts are chopped out of later scripts. It causes stories in the style of that day to suffer. If this had been the first or second season, this ridiculous premise would have fit into just one dreadful episode; instead we got two stinkers in a row.