The Night of the Dancing Death

One of this show's Saturday serial-style episodes, complete with hokey costumes for the bad guys (and gals). This kind of thing worked way better when the show decided to add a sense of humor to its bad-guys-in-costumes eps, but this was played straight, script-wise. Written straight, we could say. Thus, though Richman is quite good as Prince Gio, he has no chance to make the character anything beyond a caricature, and Gio's over the top display of manufactured rage at the story's start gives the teleplay's main twist as much surprise power as Bob Conrad removing his shirt. And there's some very obvious lip-syncing going on in the scene in which the story's missing person is discovered. Unaccountably, her lines are dubbed with an American accent. Also odd is the confused demeanor of the actor, as if the director had failed to explain the scene to her--she watches a moving prop as if amazed by its motility. I'm just glad WWW became so much better at presenting this kind of plot.

Every ep of WWW rates as a 10 for me

This ep is a full 12 years before George Lucas has Luke rescue the princess

BONUS - I learned a bit of world history. I knew there is a part of the world called Chihuahua. Thanks to WWW, now I learned that there was a Province of Pomerania (1815-1945) woof-woof.

The Latvian actress Ilze Taurins (portraying the character Marianna) is easily the best thing about this episode (although it must be noted that a Latvian accent isn't precisely identical to an Albanian one). As the femme fatale, she slips from seducing James West to trying desperately to murder him with equal alacrity and facility. As lead villain, Gio, the character actor Peter Mark Richman does an OK job with a one-dimensional role, but his over-the-top, testosterone-fueled rage just has nowhere to go without any humor in his part of the script (cowritten by the famous or infamous Fred Freiberger m, a producer of the original Star Trek series) for this relatively weak installment of the series. I round up this episode to a rating of 7 out of 10 stars for Ms. Taurins.