Route 66 (TV Series) Between Hello and Goodbye (1962) User Reviews

Adjusting Without Maharis

[dougdoepke · 19 June 2015]

The best part of this episode may be the locations. That Pacific Ocean Park opening is a real grabber and gets repeated at the end. Tod's duties as a Park worker also take him to other interesting and exotic features. Catch too the cutting edge cool jazz at Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood. On the other hand, this is the first episode without Maharis who would subsequently leave the series altogether. I'm guessing that Tod's blue-collar job at the Park was originally written for Maharis, while Tod would be the white-collar realtor. But with Maharis's abrupt departure, Tod, rather awkwardly, gets both jobs.

Anyway, the delectable Susan Oliver gets a lot of screen time as a highly disturbed young woman, Chris, who behaves in wanton fashion, plays word games, and also gives writer Silliphant opportunity to indulge his penchant for philosophical prose. Chris runs a gamut of emotions that Oliver covers quite well. Too bad the actress died relatively young. Bernardi, familiar from the Peter Gunn series, plays a psychiatrist trying to find out what makes Chris tick. The episode's main twist is not hard to spot and sets up an interesting contrast. All in all, however, the entry's most notable for Maharis's absence that would soon become permanent. Too bad, because whatever their personal feelings, the two made a great team.

Classic look at Pacific Ocean Park with rare footage!

[rmilford-57071 · 10/10 · 1 July 2020]

With it's iconic location - the innovative perching of an amusement park on a pier above the sea in Venice, California - it's rather troubled and storied decline and ultimate demise, as a native Coastal Californian son POP has always had a certain charming allure for me.

This quantity and quality of footage of Pacific Ocean Park is hard to come by and this episode truly delivers the goods from its heyday. It also is foreboding as to a place that despite it's glamorous, fun appearance always had a bit of a darker side.

The story line is typical of Route 66 although this time we have Tod sans his sidekick Buzz. If you are fan of vintage somewhat creepy seaside amusement parks and Los Angeles history, this episode is a much watch for those reasons alone! I highly recommend!

5/11/62 "Between Hello and Goodbye"

[schappe1 · 29 June 2015]

Buz, (unseen) is now in the hospital for the last four episodes but Tod calls him, (or is seen leaving the hospital) in each of the last four episodes of the season. What's interesting and kind of impressive, is that, in what must have been very short notice, the scripts we re-written exclusively for Tod with no character even resembling Buz to say his lines, (unlike "Suppose I Said I was the Queen of Spain" next season where Robert DuVal is clearly a stand in for Buz). I agree with the previous reviewer that the fact that Tod is oddly holding down two jobs at once suggests that one of them, (probably the one at Pacific Ocean Park) was supposed to be Buz's job. Somehow it works.

After "The Three Faces of Eve", (the 1957 movie that won Joanne Woodward an Oscar), every dramatic TV show had to have its "split personality" episode where an actress gets a dream role playing two very different versions of the same character, both inventions of that person to deal with some sort of trauma. The depictions of this illness, (and medical science isn't even sure if it's a real condition), are simplistic and inaccurate, (I'm not a psychiatrist: I used to take disability claims, including some based on this condition). Usually there are many different 'personalities', (I interviewed one person who claimed to have 103 of them), and the root cause tends to involve childhood sexual abuse. That couldn't even be referred to on TV in 1962 so in this episode Susan Oliver, (the lucky actress who gets the showy role in this one), was traumatized when he Daddy ran off with a show girl and broke up their happy home when she was a kid. We're not supposed to know that the two 'sisters', (one repressed, the other a playgirl) are the same person but we've seen all this before and nothing comes as a surprise. And the "cure" at the end is laughable.