I know it’s a silly story, and very predictable, but I liked this one – definitely one of the better season five offerings IMO.
[rating=9.0]
While Magnum tracks down a shady investment company that swindled Agatha and her friends out of $100,000, Higgins attempts to make his distant punk rocker cousin into a lady before she marries into a society family. Silly, but one of the season’s better eps…
-----
This review contains spoilers.
‘Professor Jonathan Higgins’ is a very silly episode, especially when compared to some of the clever and high quality stories that the series offered up in previous seasons. Thankfully, it is also a lot of fun, and stands as one of the generally weak fifth season’s better instalments.
Jillie Mack puts in a rather stereotypical but enjoyable performance as Higgins’ distant cousin, punk rocker Sally. Her ‘cockney’ accent is a bit over the top, and she can be slightly irritating at times, but personally, I found it forgivable in an episode that doesn’t take itself too serious.
(Mack, in case you don’t know, had previous appeared as different characters in season four’s ‘Rembrandt’s Girl’ and, uncredited, in ‘Fragments’ earlier this season, and went on to marry Tom Selleck in 1987).
The episode is fully of nice touches – such as Magnum coming fourth in the pizza competition, and his popcorn maker – which have been sadly lacking for much of this season. The whole story just feels more alive, more like the episodes of the previous seasons.
The only bit of the story that I was the wrap up – it just seemed far too coincidental that Sally’s missing husband-to-be was behind the scam that ripped off Agatha and her friends, that Magnum has been investigating all episode. This just seemed to come out of nowhere, and could at least have had a few hints at this before in the story. It is the only element of the episode that doesn’t work for me.
But other than that one gripe, I personally found this a very enjoyable story. It’s certainly not one of the show’s most sophisticated episodes, but it is all good fun, and stands as one of the better episodes from the fifth season – though bearing in mind some of the season’s other offerings, maybe that’s not saying much!
-----
Other notes, bloopers and misc.:
* Rather unusually (but welcome), the opening trailer of this episode doesn’t focus on the Magnum elements of the story, instead featuring Higgins trying to reform Higgins. In other such stories, Magnum is given prominence in the trailers, even when he is barely featured (see season four’s ‘Holmes Is Where the Heart Is’, for example).
* Near the beginning of the story, Magnum goes to collect the mail from the front of the Estate, and as he goes in, the gate closes behind him. A few moments later, Agatha drives in, with no-one buzzing her through the gate! (Maybe as she is such a trusted friend of Higgins’, he gave her a remote for the gate, like the one Magnum has?)
* By the way, regarding Agatha’s car, we also see it in ‘Echoes of the Mind’ Part I. I don’t recognise this car as ever being sold in Britain (though I’m no car expert), but whether it was or not, this particular model is not British, as British cars have the steering wheel on the opposite site,
* The song that Sally sings at the party on the Estate, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, is a famous Cockney song recognised in the UK (I don’t know if it’s known Stateside). Read about it here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambeth_walk.
* There are a lot of “bloody”s and “bleeding”s in this episode, especially from Sally, but (maybe surprisingly), when Five broadcast this episode in 2002, they left them intact – despite editing smaller usage of the words on other occasions.