I’m back from my small holiday (that’s “vacation” in American talk
) and did last week’s batch of reviews on my laptop, so here we go.
This episode… don’t like it that much to be honest.
[Rating=6.0]
As T.C. and Magnum try to prevent the demolition of T.C.’s youth club-house by a slimy land developer, Rick becomes a millionaire after winning the mainland lottery – but gets mixed up with some card shark con artists. Not a very likable episode…
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This review contains spoilers.
This episode, to me, has ‘filler’ written all over it, to meet the season’s required episode count. It just feels like it was thrown together late in the season, and has little to really like about it, in my opinion.
The strangest thing for me about this episode is the appearance of Bruce Forsyth, well known to Brits (such as me) as an entertainer with a career stretching back to the 1950s. We’d already seen several familiar British faces in the England-set ‘Deja Vu’ at the start of the season, but seeing Forsyth here feels really odd.
I don’t really care for the plot of this one much at all. It is very slow in places, and for the most part not very interesting. In fact, for most of the episode, it felt like an episode from the far inferior fifth season.
I think the main thrust of the plot was intended to be that Rick was too busy wrapped up in his new found wealth to help his friends Magnum and T.C. out, but it just comes off as an unfocused mish-mash. I find the idea to not be very well realised, and for the whole it just doesn’t work.
And beyond that, I just didn’t find Rick becoming a millionaire very convincing at all. So much more could have been done with it, even on a limited budget.
The best bit about this shaky episode is the Casablanca-style final scene, with Rick saying goodbye to Jeannie, but sadly it is not as good as it might have been, as the rest of the episode building up to it has been rather sub par.
All-in-all, not a particularly good episode at all. ‘This Island Isn’t Big Enough…’ probably gets my vote for weakest episode of the season, but even so, ‘A Little Bit of Luck…’ is pretty poor.
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Other notes, bloopers and misc.:
* The correct formatting of this episode title, as seen on-screen, is ‘A Little Bit of Luck… A Little Bit of Grief’.
* As mentioned on this episode’s main page, the words ‘Ice Pick’ appear on-screen for the first time. But worth noting is that they appear as two separate words, not ‘Icepick’ as they sometimes appear on other occasions.
* T.C. wears his purple Lakers cap once again. I guess he did wear this often and I’d totally forgotten about it!
* As already mentioned on the episode’s main page, Bruce Forsyth is one of the U.K.’s biggest entertainers, with TV career stretching back to the 1950s. He’s been a compare, game show host, chat show host, sometime actor (as I suppose he is in this episode), and at the age of 81 is still going – today (Saturday 12th September 2009) he begins the new series of the BBC’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, the original U.K. version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’, and which the whole country except me seems to be going mad over!