User Reviews

This is a bit off beat even for the Wild Wild West. Ricardo Montoban guests as a Magician who makes Artie disappear from a magic stage show and takes him on a murky trip through time back to the Civil War. The time he takes Artie back to is when he lost his legs.

West has to find his way back through a murky doorway that Artie is taken through. This gives the episode a murky feel as the special effects department has the fog machine working over time here. While Montoban who at near this same time was playing Khan on Star Trek, is not featured quite as much here, he still adds his considerable skills to a pretty imaginative script.

The goal here is to kill US Grant & win the war for the South as well as getting back his legs. Time travel is done in Wild West style.

Arte vanishes during a stage magician's - Abu The Magnificent - act. The only clue is a sabre bearing the initials 'N.B.V.'. In Vicksberg, he locates the sabre's owner. one 'Colonel Noel Bartley Vautrain' ( Ricardo Montalban ). He is a mastery of magic and has a room in his house that is a doorway to the Fourth Dimension, through which one can go back in time. Having used Jim and Arte as guinea pigs, the Colonel wants to go back to the Civil War before he received the injury that caused him to lose both legs. But he has another far more sinister motive - he wants to reverse the outcome of said conflict by killing General Grant...

One of the best 'W.W.W.' episodes, benefiting greatly from Montalban's smooth performance as 'Vautrain'. Like the Kenneth Branagh 'Dr.Loveless', he too is wheelchair-bound but there is none of the crass overacting that characterised Branagh's portrayal. Dianne Foster adds glamour as his niece 'Amanda'. A reviewer has mentioned Montalban's later series 'Fantasy Island' as being possibly inspired by this episode. I think a better example would be 'Time Express', a short-lived 1979 series that starred Vincent Price and Coral Browne and featured people going back in time to change their lives for the better.

Ricardo Montalban in another of his great characters plays a mad Magician seeking to get his legs back,if you see this it wont take long to figure out it could have been the pilot to Fantasy Island,the time travel aspect of going back in time to kill General Grant is quite campy and vague as in most West episodes,but I found it to be a quite interesting episode.

Weird Scene... After the opening scene James West is riding his horse though town stopping at a saloon,if you look closely you'll see an airplane fly over in the distance..OK! it could only have been Dr. Loveless who invented just about everything before anybody.

You can tell this is a memorable episode because it has so many individual episode reviews. It deals with time travel and Ricardo Montalban is the wizard who does the time travel. Pretty cool! I'll wait for my personal animus to this plot because I only thought about it after it was over. I was very entertained. So this aired on Dec 30 of New Years 1966/1967. Mr Montalban would do 4 things listed on IMDb before he would be listed as KAHN! on Star Trek a few months later. One really caught my eye, Code Name: Heraclitus: "A man who dies on an operating table is brought back to life, but he has no memory of anything that happened before he wakes up. A government agent decides that he would make a perfect undercover operative." It looks like he had a bit part there but it has Leslie Nielson in it so that would be worth the look alone. Back to the WWW episode, when you are dealing with magic and time travel, that is a truly formidable opponent. So much so that I think it's unbeatable. The major plot hole here is Mr Montalban's character doesn't save himself to try it again at a later time. Oh well, maybe that was his umpteenth attempt and he got tired? 10 of 10. It was above the some what standard fistacuff WWW fare. Good job at entertaining me!