Route 66 (TV Series) There I Am - There I Always Am (1962) User Reviews

High on Tension-Low on Character Development

[rwint1611 · 6/10 · 26 May 2008]

A young woman with a very offbeat and impulsive personality decides to jump off her charter boat and swim over to what she thinks is a deserted island. Here she meets Buz and gives him a very chilly reception until she gets her foot stuck in some rocks and he goes all out to try and save her from the incoming tide.

This is definitely one of the more intense episodes of the series as Buz tries absolutely everything, even considering cutting off her foot, in order to free her. The actors are put into an actual incoming tide and watching them fight off large waves that crash against them creates an amazing level of realism. Maharis gives a great performance as usual and has pretty much the whole show to himself as Milner goes into town and his completely oblivious to everything. This is good since, in my opinion, Maharis was clearly the better of the two actors and deserved more screen time to begin with.

Moore is good as the very glib and detached woman. She speaks with an interesting accent and seems almost like the Julie Newmar-Vicki Russell character, but with much more of an acerbic edge. The problem is we never learn much about her and why she acts the way she does as the entire episode is pretty much taken up with Buz trying to save her. The end result is an episode that is exciting, intriguing, and frustrating all at the same time.

Grade: B

A tense and captivating episode

[cliometrician · 9/10 · 20 April 2013]

I have to correct the first reviewer above on the lady's parting words to Buz. She said: "I told you how it was with me, just one wave after another. Same old pattern over and over again. There I am, there I always am. I lost you a long time ago."

Joanna Moore, mother of Tatum O'Neal, is excellent as always, especially with her normal Georgia accent that she frequently used in guest star roles. Here, she's not just a damsel in distress in this one--she's a melancholy free spirit, bored with the commonplace existence of life, always searching for something just beyond her reach. It's hard to imagine her character as ever really happy, save for those few moments when she does something, or goes somewhere different, just for herself, to break up the loneliness.

This episode was just a short time before she was in Mayberry, playing Andy Griffith's girlfriend for a few episodes. George Maharis is at the top of his game, as you can almost feel his desperation as he searches over and over for some way to rescue her. Just an excellent dramatic episode.

5/4/62 "There I Am. There I Always Am"

[schappe1 · 25 June 2015]

This is another episode I remember from years after I first saw it. Joanna Moore, (Tatum O'Neal's mommy), plays a jaded sophisticate who decides to dive off a yacht off the coast of Catalina, (weren't we just in Cleveland?!?). She comes ashore where Buz is preparing a fish dinner from his most recent catch. Tod is in town getting her skin diving tanks refilled. It's just the two of them on an otherwise deserted beach in the offseason. They have a clever but somewhat snippy conversation in which she tells him she doesn 't need his- or anybody's help. He goes back to his fish and she wanders around trying to dry out in the sun.

Eventually he notices that she's along some rocks and isn't moving. He goes to see what's wrong and finds her foot has slipped between two rocks and is stuck. Her ankle hurts and may be broken. She admits she may need some help. Buz is unable to free her and searches around for some tools to pry her loose but doesn't seem to have anything beyond a useless spear gun. Tod has the car so they can't use it. Their initial joking calmness evaporates when they notice that the high tide water-line is above her head, (that seems awfully high and even at the end of the crisis, it's not higher than her knees).

He's got to find someone or something that can help or she'll drown. But he can. They are in a remote part of the island and the few buildings he can find are boarded up. He finds a truck but it can't be made to work. He even swims out and breaks into another yacht but the radio doesn't work, (no cell phones in those days). He tries to summon help by draping a tree branch over a telephone line but the sole emergency crew is working on a job at another part of the island. Buz returns to the now cold and wet woman, both of them trying to fight off panic. He concludes that he'll have to cut off her leg, But even that option is gone when his only knife gets lost in the surf and carried out to sea.

Eventually the yacht she jumped off of returns and, even though they can't see what is happening, they come into the beach with just the tools they need and free her. She returns to her normal flighty personality. Her sugar daddy tells her "He's interesting but you'd get bored with him in an hour. On that cheery note they shove off in a boat for the yacht and leave Buz there. I would have liked a scene where Tod gets back and asks Buz what he's been doing while he's been gone and Buz wryly says "Nothing". I also wondered why Buz didn't look for a crowbar or some other tool that might actually be useful in the places he went through.

Despite the quibbles, it's a very memorable episode. The sense of increasing panic really gets to you and it's quite a catharsis when she's freed. The idea is not original. Barbra Stanwyck had to find help for her trapped husband Barry Sullivan in the 1953 movie "Jeopardy" and came up not with Alex Trebek but instead, ironically, Ralph Meeker, the star of the previous Route 66 episode, who happens to be a criminal on the run but is persuaded to help anyway- for a high price.

George Maharis gives a great performance in this episode. In James Rosin's book on the series, he says this is the episode where the hepatitis showed up, although he blames it on the dip in the river in "Even Stones Have Eyes". The first symptom was that the whites of his eyes yellowed. This is in black and white and you can't see any difference. He looks healthy enough here but he didn't appear in any of the four remaining episodes of the season.

187 hours in 1962 Catalina

[commander1958 · 9 September 2011]

She is the jaded, beautiful damsel who doesn't care if she is in distress. He is her rescuer that can't quite close the deal.

After she bails on her party boat, swimming into Little Harbor with only her dress, attitude and a champagne bottle, our angel becomes entangled in tide-pool rocks below the high tide line.

All attempts at rescue fail until her not quite equally cynical friends come looking for her and rescue her with the anchor from the boat.

Draining the offered flask on the shore, she leaves with a parting line: I know you think you love me, but I am a train wreck, and not good enough for you: "There I am - there I always am."