In a show driven by preposterous plots, this one seems too silly. Nora Clavicle is a friend of Mayor Linseed's wife, and in furtherance of women's rights, Mrs. Linseed pressures her husband into firing Commissioner Gordon and appointing Nora to the post. She then fires Chief O'Hara and appoints Mrs. Linseed as chief of police and together they tell Batman and Robin that their crimefighting services are no longer needed, and fire all the policemen and appoint policewomen. Why, you may ask? Because women are afraid of mice and mechanical mice are key to Clavicle's plot to destroy Gotham City and collect on an insurance policy she has taken out on the whole city. After escaping from a potentially fatal Siamese Human Knot, Batman finds one of the mice and devises a plan to foil Clavicle's plot. He gets some toy flutes, and he, Robin, and Batgirl become the Pied Pipers of Gotham City, leading all of the mechanical mice to their demise in Gotham harbour in one of the most annoying sequences ever committed to video. It is clear that by this point the series is in irreversible decline.

I have not been impressed by Gilmore Girls this season, and I was not impressed by the first 30 minutes of this episode, but then something happened. Sure, a lot of things have happened this season but not much has been logical. Probably the best thing about this episode is that we got back to Stars Hollow- no Michel but everybody else was involved. Despite what Chrisopher said about being a likable guy, he really isn't, and by donating all the money for the bridge (and prematurely ending the knit-a-thon) he just proved how crass and money oriented he is- it's easy to see why Lorelai's parents are glad they got married and why they were excited they were planning on getting married three seasons ago- he's one of them. I was also impressed with Luke, both in holding Liz and TJ's baby, and refusal to lose his daughter April. Rory's episodes with Marty were also interesting. Despite their avowal of love, you just get the feeling that Lorelai and Chris will not be together when the series ends next spring. Whether or not Lorelai and Luke will be together is another story- Luke is everything that Lorelai likes, Chris is everything she doesn't- i.e. her parents. The show is called the Gilmore Girls and it seems to be all Lorelai this season- Rory has a couple of new unlikeable freinds, and Emily is a bit player now. This is probably the last season so let's hope the promise shown in the second half of this episode plays out and the last 12 episodes make us treasure this series forever rather than be anticlimactic- I want a final episode that says The End, not one that just continues the trend of the last year and a half.

This is another great episode, helped tremendously by the casting of Victor Buono (King Tut of Batman) as the deranged genius. One of the biggest complaints about this show is that the episodes start out great but run out of gas and ideas by the third act. Regardless of whether or not you agree with that assessment, this episode is great all the way through. The acting is great from top to bottom. The writing is brilliant- one would expect the 'grunts' to blindly follow orders but they realize the gravity of what they have been ordered to do- some cry, another freaks out. Strip away the plot and you have a drama with a group of men trying to deal with the unfathomable prospect of world destruction, and it is handled very well. There is an episode near the end in which Nelson is doing something that seems to make no sense at all- needless to say, when you discover what he's doing you are going to wonder how you missed it and just say to yourself, brilliant. The set at Buono's lab is great too- no walls, everything is in a black void. And Buono's scooter is sort of like a Roman chariot with a Lay-Z-Boy™. This is a prescient episode which I'm sure plays better today that it did 40 years ago because we know so much more now. Watch it, you'll know what I mean.

NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD

Season two curtain-raiser 'Jonah and the Whale' is one of the best episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I vividly remember it from when it first aired in 1965 and I was a lad of eight years- my family had just purchased a color TV for the fall season and this was the first episode of VTTBOTS shot in color, with a vivid palette of colors. More so than a typical sitcom or drama of the day, this was a show that needed to be in color, especially as in the second season the stories tended towards the fantastic whereas the first season was heavy on espionage and intrigue. The science in the science fiction episode was of course preposterous but the fiction was compelling. A US-Soviet co-venture saw the Seaview lower a diving bell to a destroyed underwater research station to collect information before it was completely destroyed by migrating whales- really! Of course a giant sperm whale viewed the diving bell as bait at the end of a line and proceeded to swallow it whole along with its passengers, Admiral Nelson and Soviet scientist Katya. On board the Seaview the only possible solution was decided upon instantly- knock out the whale with giant hypodermic needles and send three divers inside the whale's mouth to attach a line to the diving bell and reel it in. The inside of the whale has to be seen to be believed- not as realistic or terrifying as it seemed to me 41 years ago, it's still pretty cool and no doubt inspired some of the 'interiors' from the following year's movie Fantastic Voyage.
Even the biblical aspect of the story was well handled- it would have been easy to moralize, especially with a 'godless' communist on-board (remember, the cold war was in full swing in 1965), but the story of Jonah was treated as a myth.
If there is a flaw in this episode it is that the rescue was relatively easy, but the pacing was good and the tension was always palpable, so it's a small flaw and barely worth mentioning (I only mentioned it to explain why I only rate the episode as a 9.9 rather than a perfect 10).
Kudos to Fox for continuing to release this show on DVD- better by far than the other Irwin Allen sci-fi shows of the 60's (Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, Lost in Space), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is one of the best sci-fi series ever on television, and this episode ranks with the best of the Outer Limits or Star Trek OTS.