"Jeannie at the Piano" opened the fifth and final season in all too familiar fashion, with the entire series switching gears two episodes later. Relaxing in the NASA recreation room at the spinet piano, Major Nelson finds himself performing a short concerto in front of an amazed Dr. Bellows. The doctor convinces General Schaeffer (Vinton Hayworth) that their maestro deserves to go out on a concert tour, unaware that Jeannie's magic isn't in her master's hands but in the piano itself, forcing Tony to keep other people from sitting at the little spinet. Trouble arises when Dr. Bellows trades it in for a better one, Tony scrambling to recover the original before his final concert. "My Master, the Great Caruso" was the ultimate in this type of entry, this one quite a few notches below. It was curious that, for a show set at the NASA space program, there was never any acknowledgement of the Apollo 11 lunar landing of July 20, blasting off from Florida's Merritt Island on the 16th and splashing down in the Pacific on the 24th, little more than a month after the final STAR TREK broadcast. If Sidney Sheldon's intent was to avoid dating the series by referring to current events, the hippie episodes would have already blown that idea sky high!
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