User Reviews

Special guest star William Shatner as Josh Long pops up in this episode as an eccentric astronaut friend of Steve's from years back. Exposed to some gamma rays in space Josh goes a little too erratic for the suits in NASA and they want him grounded. Steve though, tries to figure out if they should do so or not by palling around with Josh and examining him with a friend's eye.

Shatner - being Shatner - is brilliant in this episode, hamming it up to the extreme. I almost expected Mr. Spock to appear from behind a cardboard rock halfway through the episode. Nobody can deliver a line like Shatner and especially if the line has to do with communicating with Dolphins !!! In the end - inner turmoil about a childhood act combined with the strange electrical impulse inflicted upon him in space - causes Josh to go one step beyond what he or anybody else wants.

Another episode where the old phenomenon of Steve's old friends ending up dead, raises its ugly head again. If I was an old friend of Austin's I'd keep my head down. But Shatnet for me was brilliant - his final scene spitting out a wave of mathematical equations is pure 100% Shatner. The only bad thing about him was his dreadful wig.

I know it is almost required to say that William Shatner is a bad or hammy actor and certainly this episode does have some pretty campy scenes between Shatner and Majors.

However there is also a lot of pretty good acting by Bill. I don't want to get into spoilers but suffice it to say that Shatner's character is going through a difficult time both medically and emotionally and he delivers with some very subtle acting that shows the pain he is in.

Towards the end where he is experiencing what amounts to a mental breakdown and split personality he is also quite compelling.

Don't get me wrong, the Shat certainly provides a lot of wooden acting but in this episode he shows he's got some chops as well.

In the original episode, william shatner is "burning bright" at the end and quoting his advanced theories of cosmology and I think he misread the script and it wasn't caught originally but when it showed on sci-fi channel 10 years ago they cut that part out so somebody else finally noticed. He was quoting the equation of a helix or something made up but trying to sound complicated and he what he should have said was x1 = acos(wt), x2 = bsin(wt), x3 = bsin(gt) but instead of x3 he said "times 3 equals" and they never fixed it. It was such an emotional scene that they either missed it or didn't want to redo it. I didn't realize this was a mistake until I took calc in college and watched my old tape. Also, as steve is catching him if you watch in slow motion you can actually see him laughing. They must have had several takes. Also, as he's carrying bill out, its a dummy and the head is stiff and doest bend but it was a cool effect at the time because it shows how strong steve was. I guess lee had a bad back then too....

This is one of the saddest episodes. You really feel for Shatner's character. Endowed with ever-increasing psionic powers from his last mission in space, Josh Lang, a friendly and nice man, finds he is unable to control his abilities to the point where his mind actually hurts those who come near to him and he spirals into delusion, reliving an awful accident he witnessed as a child where he dared his best friend Andy to climb a dangerous tower leading to his friend's death. Evidently, he carried the guilt subconsciously for his entire life and now is unable to keep from believing he can return to where it happened to save his long-gone friend. In the final minutes of the episode, he has climbed to the top of the very tower he dared his friend to climb all those years ago and finally loses all control as his very mind itself, burns out. It's so sad. He dies upset and distraught over a simple dare he made as a child that had horrific consequences. You really do feel for him. It was a sad ending, to an otherwise nice and friendly guy.

This episode was one of the best of the show- one of the more cerebral ones.

William Shatner plays Astronaut Josh Lang that was affected by radiation on a flight. The effect expresses itself as enhanced brain activity which increases geometrically. In the end his abilities include telepathy, telekinesis, and apparently an ability to short out electrical activity in the body.

This was something of an unusual episode as there was really very little use of Steve Austin's bionic capabilities. In addition the lead actor was not really Lee Majors here but William Shatner who simply dominated the scene. Not that the acting was good- it was typical 1970's SF action series poor.

What I find intriguing was that although Shatner's character was the antagonist he turned out to be a very sympathetic character. He never fully understood what was happening to him and he was plagued by vague haunting childhood memories. The worst part was that he ended up killing someone very much against his will but couldn't stop himself. Even then it's difficult to think of him as an evil character- more of a tragic one.

Finally when his brain reaches it's maximum and then burns out we find what was driving him -a fatal childhood incident. The ending was quite sad with Steve Austin just brushing past the Police carrying his body. I like to think that Josh was joining his childhood friend.

Once you get past the 1970's bad scriptwriting you have a quite serviceable psychological story. In fact this was much better than the Star Trek episode where a similar event happened.