Half Nelson

David Banner(Bill Bixby) arrives in Baltimore and befriends a midget wrestler named Buster Caldwell(played by Tommy Madden) who has a big heart but a bigger mouth that gets him in trouble when his self-aggrandizing boasting gets the attention of gangsters who misunderstand Buster's motives. This of course also gets David in trouble, as he tries to help his new friend(and his fellow community of little people) out of this mess. Disappointing episode suffers not only for being a rehash of first episode 'Final Round', but wasting the developments of previous episode 'Interview With The Hulk'. Why the series is retracing well-worn territory now is unfortunate.

This ep, a chance encounter ends with David staying under the roof of a little person named Buster. (I still don't get why people with dwarfism prefer the term little people over midgets. If I had that condition, I sure wouldn't like being compared to one-inch-tall creatures from Irish folklore.) Buster is something of a compulsive liar, and boasts to his acquaintances that David is fencing money for him from a well-publicized heist. This gets them in trouble with the crooks who pulled the heist, since the money is now missing.

The gangsters plot is boringly routine, but "Half Nelson" shines with its handling of dwarfism. The key scene is when Buster brings David along to a party, only to find David is the only person there over four feet tall. Buster has a bit of a row with the hostess over this, and his contention that people shouldn't limit their friends to people of the same height seems just. But the hostess points out to David that things are different for little people, like it or not. "Half Nelson"'s honest and complex look at the struggles faced by little people makes it all the more unacceptable that shows like the Simpsons (in the episode "Eeny Teeny Maya Moe") took such a shallow handling of the issue more than 25 years after this aired.

The episode isn't trying to set people with dwarfism as a race apart, either. Buster is as well-characterized as an individual as he is as a little person, and as David points out near the end, the inner demons he faces are just variations of ones that all humans face.

To top it off, there's a terrific encounter between Banner and McGee in which David amusingly tries to pass himself off as one of Buster's fellow wrestlers. "Half Nelson" mostly fails on the action/drama front, but undeniably succeeds on the human front.

Given that I'm such a sucker for this show and enjoy it immensely, I've tended to write almost exclusively favorable reviews for the episodes. However the series did have a few stinkers and "Half Nelson" is one of the worst offenders.

The story line is pilfered from the 1st season episode "The Final Round", which was better executed in every way. Here we have a dwarf who's got some issues and he manages to drag David into a very messy situation.

This episode is from the very uneven Season 4 of "The Incredible Hulk". This season featured some of the series's best moments; "Prometheus", "The First", "The Harder They Fall" and "Interview with the Hulk" but it had it's fair share of lulls. Arguably the last truly great episode of the series was "Interview" and in my view the series should have headed straight to a conclusion from there on. What doesn't help "Half Nelson" is the fact that it followed that great episode.

The formula had reached it's peak and the episodes were getting a little too repetitive. As usual Bixby is good and so is Ferrigno and even the lesser Hulk episodes make for easy 45 plus minutes to watch but "Half Nelson" is one of weakest from this enjoyable series.

This episode is a mixture of the serious and the silly. The serious part is the lives of "little people" as lived among "giants". It tries to shed some light on that and is successful to some degree, although at times seems oversimplified. But they did try and I give them credit for that. The silly is the wrestling and the characters involved with that.

It's fun to see Elaine Joyce play a wrestler's girlfriend with over the top sex appeal and sexual desire. She has a crush on one of the "little people" and they kiss a few times which was probably not very common on TV in 1981.

The main drawback I think is the acting. It feels clunky and one-dimensional, like you're watching people in their first year at acting school. Bill Bixby is just fine as usual. Overall it's just a so-so episode, kind of cliche and not terribly interesting, but watchable.