User Reviews

Tracking down an undersea lab, Seaview is rammed and sunk by an enemy sub. With a major bulkhead in danger of collapsing, and both the air and ballast systems disabled, they have only X number of hours to effect repairs, or everyone onboard will DIE! (What, AGAIN??) On top of that, a giant squishy tentacled thingie created by the enemy lab is endangering the ship, and, Crane, Kowalski & Patterson (WHO ELSE??) get swallowed by it.

All this would be annoying enough, if it weren't for the added absurdity of stock footage taken from what appears to be several previous episodes, including at least ONE from season 1! You have compartments being flooded under red lighting (to disguise it being BLACK AND WHITE footage being re-used), you have this week's only guest-star, Paul Carr, crawling thru a flooded air tube and getting his arm caught in some machinery he's trying to fix (all under BLUE lighting, same reason), and you have 3 divers walking around inside the guts of a giant monster (in full COLOR).

I guess we can say Ralph Bakshi learned a lot watching Irwin Allen (check out the 3rd season of SPIDER-MAN from 1969 to see what I mean).

The HERO of this hour is Chief Sharkey! Ordered to fire a missile to destroy the monstrous tentacled thingie, he hesitates, worried that the 3 divers might still be alive inside, and suggests a way to save them-- WHICH WORKS. Damn. If I'd written (and directed) this episode, I'd have had all 3 guys (especially the Captain) thanking Sharkey-- IN FRONT OF THE ADMIRAL-- while promising him a pay raise.

I honestly can't think of any other prime-time tv show from the 60s that managed to regularly get away with this kind of murder. I sometimes wonder if Irwin Allen had incriminating pictures of somebody at 20th Century-Fox Television? It's possible! After all, we KNOW the guy in charge, William Self, frequented The Playboy Mansion. (That's how the Adam West BATMAN show started.)

This under cooked pudding of an episode is an absolute disgrace where the cheapskate Irwin Allen patches together stock footage with a questionable set of new scenes and expects fans not to notice stuff (or if they notice, not to mind) from the opening series that was made in black and white. Some of these scenes were used more than once during the show's run, eg Nelson getting knocked out and very very wet in a storage compartment.

I can't imagine that the regular cast were too happy about this, and maybe the sly exclusion of Richard Bull ("Doc") and Arch Whiting ("Sparks") was doing them both a good turn...but it was sooo hamfisted. Kowalkski exiting sickbay tells Crane that Doc is looking after Clarke ( the wretched Paul Carr) who got his injuries in series one and then we get Patterson sat in the radio shack. We've had "Sparks" played by anonymous extras in other episodes but of course, having Patterson sat in the radio shack saved Irwin Allen the cost of paying either Arch Whiting (credited or not) or some unknown face.

The whole thing just reeked of cheapness. Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek wasn't immune, re-using the original pilot episode and filling it out to a two parter with the idea of putting Mr Spock under trial but Irwin Allen was guilty of this over usage of stock footage over and over again.

A solid 0/10.