The opening shows our heroes and the Chief at a missile launch site with 3 other people in the room, moments before a large rocket is launched. One of the 3 is Wally Cox as a TV repairman who wants to take their monitor back to the shop. The Chief dismisses him by telling him to just leave and send his bill to "the government." It would seem a more specific address would be necessary.
Right after hearing about how the missile can be blown up by pressing one specific button at the control center and that only the general in charge there, and a scientist-the only people in the room-are the only two people who know where that destruct button is, guess what? The missile that was going so straight starts to turn toward the building everyone is in. When the general goes to save them all, the scientist pulls out a gun and tells him to leave the button alone. He shoots the general and Max shoots the scientist and they have only seconds to guess where the button is before they are all killed.
I guess I'm not spoiling anything by revealing that Max saved the day and that he did so in his usual style-totally by pressing the right button by accident.
Suddenly we switch to Max and 99 pulling up near a lake in Max's red car (for Season 3, the beginning credits show him in a blue Karmann Ghia, but all the episodes so far still show him in the red one. They somehow know the KAOS machine that is changing the course of our missiles is near this lake and our pair are to find the exact location. They also know it is operated by the evil Dr. Yes, an obvious takeoff on the famous James bond villain.
Almost as soon as they pull up, a truck with a camper on back pulls up and two men get out and try to scare 86 and 99 away with all sorts of tales of alligators and mosquitos and more. Max and 99 think the men are odd but do not suspect, what we learn soon, that they are from KAOS.
We viewers see those two men don Scuba suits and swim to an underwater base where Dr. Yes operates and where his machine is located. We are introduced to the Doctor and his two other assistants, who make him happy by answering his questions with the word "Yes" said in their four different native languages: Jawhohl, Oui, Da, Si. If that delights you, enjoy, because we get to hear it a few times.
When Yes hears about the "vacationers" without even suspecting they are agents of CONTROL, he tells the two men who met them to go kill them.
This leads to the scene that bugged me the most. Max and 99 are searching for clues to the hideout without success when they hear voices asking for help. They immediately think the two men they met are in trouble and rush to the camper, where they both enter. Immediately they see a tape recorder on the floor and learn the voices are coming from the recorder.
Smart agents they are, recognizing it is a trap, they then stupidly stand there talking about the matter instead of stepping back out of the camper. I wouldn't really be a good detective, but if I walk into a room of any sort and see something that convinces me I am in a trap, I would get out of that room pronto.
Instead, the two men climb down a hill and close the door to the camper, locking Max and 99 inside. Then with the press of a button, the side wall of the camper starts closing in. Waiting almost until it is too late, Max finally tells 99 to get his oversize pen out of his pocket. She does and hands it to him, and he sticks it so it stops the wall from closing in any further. Their space is so narrow that Smart can't even swing his shoulders around, he can only stand on an angle between the two walls.
99 comes up with a way to get out-using a diamond she has in her pocket. But instead of her just cutting with it, she has to hand it to Max so he can do it, even though she is closest to the door. This leads to stupid scene # 2. Max actually asks her to squeeze to the side so he can get past her. When they figure out there isn't nearly enough space for this, she crouches down and he leans over her and gets the door open.
They then see the swim fin footprints leading to the lake and they don scuba suits and have no problem finding and entering Dr. Yes's headquarters. Now they have every reason to believe the two men whose tracks they just followed are in there, along with the doctor and perhaps others. Instead of finding the place and swimming back to shore to alert the Chief and orchestrate a raid, they go in and somehow think they can prowl around and not be found and captured. Of course they are, and would have been shortly even if Smart hadn't fallen against the Chinese gong and made enough noise to wake the dead.
They learn that Dr. Yes is about to unleash his machine to ruin another space launching setting it to destroy an important base in Nebraska. But first, he has to set up an elaborate way to kill our heroes.
Max is locked in a phone-booth sized box and 99 tied to a board beneath a large spinning saw. Dr. Yes explains how water will fill Max's booth drowning him and lifting the weight in with him, and that will lower the saw to take care of 99. He presses the button and leaves the room. Had he simply asked how they got out of the trailer, he would have probably gotten an honest answer and then he could have taken away the very tool used then, which of course was used to cut the glass booth saving them here. I couldn't get too excited, remembering that Smart did the same thing outside the psychiatrist's office in a phone booth many episodes ago. Elaborate ways of killing someone are better if the setup isn't repeated.
I didn't mention that Dr. Yes has ridiculously long fingernails. Each one is about 9 inches long and while they seemed to be super strong nails from what we saw, they certainly would have made almost every task awkward for him. Smart defends against those nails with a pair of scissors, grabbing the doctor's wrist and cutting them. But his two cuts only took away about half the nails. This seems to have acted like Kryptonite on the doctor, as though nails 4 inches long made him powerless. Smart stops the Doctor and the mission is accomplished.
One other thing bugged me. In the opening scene, as the missile's course changed and the Chief and Max were frantically looking for the right button, 99 looks out and screams, "It's coming right toward us!" Then we see the missile (presumably from 99's viewpoint) going left to right and sharply turning toward the camera. If this happened just after she screamed, then her call was made when it was still NOT going toward them at all. A moment later, she screams the same thing and we see the same clip of the missile making the same sharp turn. For a missile that's turning sharply, she was prematurely hysterical, if you ask me.
Dr. Yes and Max exchange some "it is written..." sayings a la Max and Harry Hoo, but these were all lame and totally unfunny.
One last complaint: The device that changed the missile course was supposed to be some sort of electromagnetic signal. I don't see how it can come from this one underwater location and send the missiles off to anywhere KAOS wants them to go, but that's what they said.
I was in a good mood to laugh, but this episode just was not funny and the rather dumb actions made the whole thing even worse. Just 2 points for one good line about American scientists speaking German.
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