Rainbow's End

One week David's assisting at car races, the next week it's horse races. Will the next episode be about a marathon runner? Seriously, you'd think they'd avoid putting two episodes like "Ricky" and "Rainbow's End" one after the other.

Anyway, this is a pretty routine episode. David's interested in the titular racehorse because his trainer has brewed up a Native American Indian herbal concoction which turned him from a dangerously feisty mount to an even-tempered, potential champion steed. Female eye candy comes in the form of a hopeful jockey. Danger comes in the form of the jockey's pop, who holds a grudge against the owner of Rainbow's End because a patent he sold him a while ago turned out to be more lucrative than he thought.

There's enough intrigue to pull you along through the episode, but once it's over, I realized that the intrigue didn't amount to much in the end, and what it did amount to was left without explanation. We're never given a real sense of why the jockey's father would go to criminal lengths.

For that matter, we're never given enough on the jockey to care about her, and the herbal concoction simply has no effect. It doesn't make David's transformations change, or make the Hulk any different, or anything. This is, in sum, an episode full of ideas that aren't given a proper beginning, middle, and end. It doesn't even explore how the jockey deals with the fact that her father is a dangerous lunatic.

David Banner(Bill Bixby) visits a horse track to seek out the help of Native American Thomas Logan(played well by Ned Romero) who is using an herbal compound to calm a raging prized horse named Rainbow's End, and David hopes he can persuade him to let him use it, in order to cure himself of the Hulk. The compound seems to work at first, but the Hulk does re-emerge under stress, as the crazed father of a girl jockey threatens to kill the rider at the climatic race, not knowing it is his daughter... Above-average episode is both quite thoughtful and intelligent, with Logan being a well-written character and it all leads to a touching farewell. Most underrated.

David Banner (Bixby) manages to persuade American Indian horse-trainer (Romero) to give him a go as a stable-hand, after Bixby discovers that Romero uses an ancient concoction to aid the performance of his employer's racehorses. But when Bixby discovers that Romero's drug is being laced with acid he suspects there may be sinister forces at work, conspiring to affect the outcome of races as a result of a sour horse-trade that occurred some years earlier.

Low-key instalment had an intriguing prospect in the natural medicine antidote, but it was overtaken by the feuding horse-trading saga. There's an energetic scene in which Bixby rallies to save the star-runner from a burning barn which predictably raises his green ire, showing once again that the Hulk is really a friend to all creatures, great and small (except those who misbehave). Overall, I found this episode only mediocre.