Get Smart (TV Series) And Baby Makes Four: Part 1 (1969) User Reviews

99 and Script in Labor

[zsenorsock · 6/10 · 2 February 2008]

The birth of the Smart twins should have been a memorable highlight of the 5th season. Instead, the story is stretched into an unsustainable two-parter that is NOT one of the better fifth season shows.

Way too much time is wasted on scenes where Max "rehearses" getting 99 to the hospital, using tiresome fast motion driving and a lot of really predictable stuff involving wrong hospitals. Buried in all this is a really interesting KAOS bad guy, Simon the Likable (Jack Gilford, who was starring in a popular series of Cracker Jack commercials at the time) a agent who people could not help but like. There's also a good scene where the Chief tells Larabee they've tracked a KAOS courier to the bus terminal and will get him for sure unless they get some sort of bad break ("Smart is at the terminal Chief." "That's it!" "What's it, Chief?" "A bad break."). Simon's powers are used pretty well and Gifford is great pretty much just smiling and looking friendly.

But again and again the writers fall in to the "make Max TOO dumb" trap, such as when he takes Simon's trench coat instead of his own and thinking Simon's map is his, drives 99 to the secret KAOS headquarters instead of the maternity hospital. I mean, he mapped out the route and we saw him practice it in this same episode! I know it's "Get Smart", but it makes no sense for him (and certainly her--99 is no dummy) to get to a place that CLEARLY is not their hospital, yet they accept it unquestioningly.

I'm sure they expanded it into a two-parter for sweeps, but this episode would have been MUCH better as a one part episode and a lot of the fat could have been cut out.

Two Keystone Cop-like car rides

[FlushingCaps · 6/10 · 24 January 2021]

We see Max rushing out of his apartment, throwing a suitcase into his car-after first throwing it against the closed window, and starting to drive away, leaving behind 99 at the curb not sure if he will come back for her. He does, and the two take off.

Max is driving as recklessly as you can imagine, racing to the hospital, while 99 is supposed to be telling him all the shortcuts he plotted from a map he drew up. They get pulled over by a motorcycle cop, who, on hearing that 99 is having a baby, agrees to follow Max who insists he knows a shortcut.

This leads to a Keystone Cop-type scene with the car and motorcycle speeding along, ducking into alleys and buildings and coming out from another doorway on the same street-obviously no shortcuts here, and they pull up to a hospital as Max boasts of it taking "under 9 minutes." Problem is, he has detailed that they left at 8:20 and arrived at 8:31-I assume the youngest reader here can easily figure that is NOT nine minutes.

Then 99 says the problem is that this isn't the right hospital. Well, it wasn't really a problem because this was only a test run-the baby wasn't coming now.

As for work, the mission is to find the new KAOS headquarters they've been seeking for four months. Larabee and the Chief get wind of a KAOS agent being spotted and followed to the bus terminal. Max is there and ordered to follow a man in a sailor suit. But the P.A. calls for a bus to the Navy yard and suddenly a dozen or so sailors rush past and Max has no clue which was the one he was supposed to follow.

There is a scene where Max is said to have spent hours making a map out of street names 99 has been giving him, before he finds out she was suggesting names for their baby. Somehow all these names are also street names-he's even figured out how long it will take-which I don't see how you can do from looking at a paper map of streets-not to the minute.

The Chief tells Max, and 99 in their apartment, about the most evil KAOS agent coming to town, known as Simon the Likeable. He has such a friendly smile that nobody can resist being nice to him.

We are treated to a scene where a doctor and nurse are revealed to be KAOS agents wanting Simon to get to their Sanitarium, which is the new headquarters. The doctor explains that Simon has been instructed to go to a coffee shop in the bus terminal and hang his coat on the fourth hook, where someone will leave a map to the sanitarium so he can find it.

Because this coffee shop is where Max lost the other agent, he is told to go there and see what he can learn. Before he arrives we see Simon enter the shop and order coffee. As he entered another customer jumped up and offered him his stool-even though there were others open. The waitress offered him her phone number, even though Simon (Jack Guilford) appears to be at least 60 years old.

Max arrives and he sees Simon and likes him so much that when Simon clumsily spills hot coffee all over Max's suit and pants, Max just says, "That's alright. I was a bit chilly anyhow." But a phone call from 99 telling him the baby is coming see Max dash out of the shop, grabbing Simon's trench coat-which was next to where Max put his coat, and did look the same. Overall I agree with my fellow reviewer's complaints about them sometimes making Max "too dumb," but in this case, rushing to get his wife to the hospital, I think grabbing an identical coat is not one of these cases.

We get another slapstick-like car race with shortcuts that don't save a thing and they pull up to the very sanitarium we viewers earlier saw to be the new KAOS headquarters. At first the doctor and nurse think these CONTROL agents know about the headquarters, but after talking with them, they conclude that they have stumbled onto the place and really just are there so Mrs. Smart can have her baby. But, they can't take any chances so the episode ends with both of our favorites about to be killed, in separate rooms.

Silly as they were, the scenes where Simon gets treated like a king just because of his sparkling eyes whenever he smiles at someone. But the wild car rides were too dumb to be good. It's one thing to have one car trying to shake a pursuer by driving into a building and coming out another exit shown to be 50 feet down the street from where it went in, but Max was not trying to shake the cop escorting him from behind. Later, he drives through a theater and comes out on the same street just yards before where he turned into the place earlier.

That was when he was following the KAOS map in the trench coat he took by mistake. Now he's spent "hours" making out this map, yet he cannot remember anything about how he's supposed to go? And even if Max is an idiot, how could 99 not know immediately that the place they arrive at is not their hospital? She expresses concern to Max because the doctor, her mother, and the Chief are all missing even though they should have been there by then, yet she never questioned why the hospital is not right.

Just couldn't see a way to score this one higher than a 6. Sorry about that.

Special delivery of great laughs

[lbowdls · 9/10 · 23 January 2020]

This is a classic 2 parter with the character Simon the likeable. It's full of great laughs with the typical Max hi jinx leading to an even better conclusion in part 2. Don't believe the other reviewer this is brilliant.