Offbeat & somewhat boring SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN episode has OSI Colonel Steve Austin -- who is an astronaut -- and his boss, former state prosecutor Oscar Goldman, getting mixed up in an assassination plot against a district attorney targeted for elimination by hired killer Gary Lockwood, best known for his role in 2001. Perhaps inspired by the House Select Comittee on Assassinations hearings, the plot revolves around Lockwood's labyrinthine scheme to do in the noble DA, Steve's efforts to bring him to justice after seeing him gun down an assistant DA by mistake, and plenty of harried motorcade scenes with people ducking in and out of doors while trying to protect a guy who isn't smart enough to even wear a flak vest as protection from being picked off by a sniper.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with an astronaut who flew to the moon, was smashed up in a test flight accident & re-built with super-powered bionic limbs. Well, you got me, and this episode is probably the only real misfire from the series' otherwise excellent First Season, who's episodes all had more grown-up themes than the later years where Steve would battle against Bigfoot. Here he does gumshoe work in trying to solve a murder mystery and, quite frankly, the formula doesn't work. It is like a ROCKFORD FILES jaunt with a bionic man: Other than tearing the door off a cab and warding off a killer pickup truck, Steve's bionics are relegated to the sidelines in Gratuitous Bionic Displays meant to remind viewers of what series they were watching. At one point he even goes to visit a tailor for clues and the gentleman kindly brings up Steve's fame as an astronaut just in case anyone was wondering if Lee Majors hadn't done this show on the side.
It's still some of the best TV of the 1970s and Majors flaunts a wardrobe of leisure suits and denim coordinates that will tweak the bad taste gland in any fan of schlock entertainment. But aside from the insight that OSI Colonel Steve Austin puts ketchup on his hot dogs, the show really doesn't contribute or add anything to the series ... Unless you want to cite the running gag where Steve destroys private property with his bionic gratuity and promptly peels out a wad of $100 bills to pay for it, as well as the gag reply to casual questions about how he can do his amazing feats like seeing in the dark ("Well, I eat a lot of carrots"; good advice for younger viewers maybe). He is also able to prance around Los Angeles running 60mph with nobody even looking twice at him, suggesting that stealth materials may have been used on those leisure suits. And the episode's strangely squarish, Nixon/Ford era law & order mentality is quite unique in the raging Age of Aquarius. It's well made, but what were they thinking?
4/10; Lockwood's assassin character would later be brought back in the 2nd Season episode "Steve Austin, Fugitive" to reprise is role, though I have't the foggiest idea why.