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Knight Rider Season 1 Episode 13

Forget Me Not

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8.3

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Episode Summary

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AIRED: 12/17/82

A young woman he met at a party has information important to Michael preventing the assassination of a visiting South American president, but her amnesia makes getting that information problematic.

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Fan Episode Reviews (1)

Michael works with a woman to stop an assassination attempt on her South American president father. But a kooky young woman whom he meets at a party overhears key info about the plot – before suffering amnesia. Some fair moments, but doesn't fully work...moreless

7.5

By Jay-Spacedust, Jun 15, 2011

This review contains spoilers.

'Forget Me Not' ... not the worst episode in 'Knight Rider's first season (far better than the dud 'The Final Verdict' a few episodes previously), and this story has a few fair ideas and moments, but it sadly ends up feeling rather half hearted, with not enough drive to the plot to make it as good as it potentially could have been.

The story starts with Michael already working with young Marie to try and prevent the assassination of her father, a South American ambassador. Sometimes I don't mind things starting a way into the proceedings, but I did find that on this occasion, it left some early stages of the plot a bit hard to fully grasp and get into, as there felt to be a number of questions and holes that were never fully answered, at least not early on enough.

The first stages of the story play out rather James Bond-esque, as Michael, after leaving the beautiful Marie at the beach house, infiltrates the bad guy's mansion, where a party is being held, meeting several more "lovely ladies" as he creeps around the lavish estate trying to get info about the plot. It is here he meets the kooky Micki, who goes on to accidentally overhear the bad guys' assassination plot, and soon after leaps from a moving car as they try to get rid of her, tumbling over the side of a cliff and loosing her memory. Tsh, always the way isn't it!!

Micki is played by Judy Landers, a regular 1980s guest role performer often cast in such "quirky bimbo" roles, who often trod the fine line between being likable, and out-and-out irritating, as she does her with Micki. Don't get me wrong, Landers works with what she's given regarding the character, but I know many will find Micki's kooky routine rather grating.

The overall plot of the episode feels like it should be a good one, but never really feels tight enough or fine-tuned enough to make the episode feel like one of the show's better outings. For one thing, even beyond the blurry opening about the planned assassination attempt, we never really feel to be introduced to the bad guys sufficiently (instead getting a couple of nameless henchmen), and the assassin – while supposedly a huge threat and having potential – feels to be introduced too half-heartedly too late on, leaving him to not feel the huge menace we are led to believe he is. Not to mention that the whole "trying to get Micki to remember in time" thing lacks the urgency it could easily have been given.

The climax, of K.I.T.T. pursuing the assassin, who is fleeing on horseback, is maybe a little better than I had remembered, though is still nothing really spectacular and maybe goes on for a little too long. Also, some of the time, I felt that this whole storyline was maybe a pre-existing plot concept (as maybe evidenced by the multiple writing credits on the ep) that had been "moulded" to fit the series, as was sometimes the case with shows in their first season ('Starsky & Hutch', for example).

This is the final episode to use K.I.T.T.'s original "blinking red light" voice modulator (though it will be seen on the opening credits until the end of the season); from the next episode, the first of several incarnations of the more familiar "three bar" modulator would be introduced. Also note how, after sounding very subdued in the early episodes, K.I.T.T.'s voice is evolving by this point.

I've commented in some of my reviews for previous episodes in the season, how most of K.I.T.T.'s on-board monitor graphics in the first season are embarrassingly bad, looking to be converted from some dodgy old Atari game. When Michael and K.I.T.T. are pursuing the bad guys' car, at two points during this story, notice the amusingly video racing game-esque graphics on K.I.T.T.'s monitor – they are actually footage taken from the earlier episode 'Deadly Manoeuvres', when Michael was indeed playing a video game through K.I.T.T.!

Also to spot is use, once again, of stock footage of the car plummeting over the cliff, taken from the 1977 film 'The Car'. This footage had already been used to represent K.A.R.R. plummeting to his (seeming) doom in 'Trust Doesn't Rust' a few episodes ago, and here is used again! As well as being totally unconvincing model-wise (even in the brief shots we get, we can clearly see the whole front of the car, especially headlights, nowhere near resemble K.I.T.T.'s), this whole sequence – as K.I.T.T. comes to rescue Michael from the henchmen on the beach – feels so weak, even by production standards of the era. We get the unmatching stock shots, following by K.I.T.T. landing on the beach at a totally different, totally unconvincing angle!

As covered in a couple of my previous episode reviews, most first and second season episodes were also re-edited into a hacked-up half hour format (for some US syndication and overseas markets). I may be mistaken, but after the initial run of 'Knight Rider' had finished in my local ITV region (Thames; where they annoyingly chopped their final fourth season episodes up into two halves, playing the first half on Mondays, and the conclusion on Tuesdays, in a 5:15pm slot!), I seem to recall this was the first of these sawn down half-hour versions of the first season that they showed (as per usual, not even in any sort of proper order). Even as a young boy who wasn't "in the know", I could tell that these horrible 22-minute versions were heavily chopped down from the originals (often leaving the plot near impossible to completely follow), and loathed them as a result.

Anyway, all-in-all… there are some reasonable concepts in this story, and for that, I *want* to like this episode a lot more than I actually do. It's not the weakest episode of the first season (as I mentioned at the top, my vote would probably go to 'The Final Verdict' on that one), and I suppose the episode is alright for a watch every few years, but considering some of the other greats the series offered, it's hardly one of the better episodes. I give 'Forget Me Not' a 7.5 rating (for its better elements).moreless
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Cast & Crew: STARS

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Patricia McPherson	Dr. Bonnie Barstow
Edward Mulhare	Devon Miles
William Daniels	KITT
David Hasselhoff	Michael Knight

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Cast & Crew: RECURRING AND GUESTS

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Alejandro Rey	Rudy del Fuego	Guest Star
Judy Landers	Micki Bradburn	Guest Star
Mike Lane	Jerry	Guest Star

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Trivia, Notes, Quotes and Allusions

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TRIVIA (8)
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- When KITT is freeing himself from the parked cars to meet Michael at the party's entrance, black padding can clearly be seen on the bumpers of all the cars as KITT causes them to make contact with each other.
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- Near the beginning of the story, KITT says to Michael "Around you ready to be briefed before you attend this, uh, party?"; This is the only time in the entire series that KITT uses such speech disfluency – ordinarily he would never use utterances such as "uh".
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- In the shots of Michael pursueing the bad guys' car (at two different points in the story), the computer game-looking graphics that appear on KITT's monitor are actually recycled from when Michael was seen playing a computer game through KITT in "Deadly Manoeuvres" earlier in the season.
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- In the United Kingdom, one-off BBC Three programme 'Great TV Mistakes', presented by comedian Robert Webb as part of a series of occasional themed shows, featured three bloopers from this episode – the shot of Micki jumping from the villains' car visibly being a stunt person in a wig; shots of KITT, when boxed in by other cars outside the party, pushing them, revealing the other cars to have huge pads of rubber on the bumpers (fenders) to prevent damage; and the visible shadow of a film crew during one of the scenes at the horse ground. (To note regarding this TV programme is that only one particular episode was selected as an example of TV shows such as 'Knight Rider', and does not really represent an overall view to bloopers in the series).
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- After freeing himself from being parked in to meet Michael at the party's entrance, as KITT brakes and slides to orient himself, for a split second a hand can be seen on the bottom right of the steering wheel before the driver side door opens.
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- When KITT turbo boosts off the cliff's edge to the beach to help Michael, the shot of a car going over a cliff is clearly not KITT. It is actually a stock footage shot from the 1977 film The Car, previously used to represent KARR falling over the edge of the cliff in "Trust Doesn't Rust". The shot also shows the car falling near vertically, but when KITT lands he is shown coming from a more horizontal angle.
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- At the climax, when Michael lassos the assassin his arms are bound to his body. In the subsequent long shot, the assassin's arms flail freely as he struggles on the ground. Following shots again show his arms bound, and then flailing freely again as Michael engages him to complete his apprehending.
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- When the white car and horse trailer enter the stables, you can see a camera stand shadow on the ground
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QUOTES (2)
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- Micki: Michael, if you don't stop driving like this, I'm gonna jump out.
  Michael: Again?
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- Michael: How many languages do you speak now, anyway?
  KITT: Should I count the archaic tongues?
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NOTES (5)
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- The German episode title is "Zwischen zwei Frauen", meaning "Between Two Women". The French episode title is "Amnésie".
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- This is the first of Michael Horsley's two, unrelated appearances on Knight Rider. He can also be seen in season three's "Knight in Disgrace."
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- Music: Linda Ronstadt's "Get Closer" (cover version)
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- This is the first of Judy Landers' two, unrelated appearances on Knight Rider. She can also be seen in season three's "Knight Strike."
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- When the series was first broadcast in the UK, this episode was the most viewed episode of 1983, clocking up 12.9 million viewers on it's original broadcast on Tuesday 10th May 1983 (ITV, 7:30 p.m.).
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ALLUSIONS (0)
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