A Plush Ride
A Plush Ride
Original Air Date: 12-10-1982
I should have included a category in each commentary called "Does the Title Make Any Fucking Sense?" like I did with my VHD things from way, way, way back. Maybe I should start (not that Knight Rider could even hope to approach the sheer awesomesauce wtfitude of VHD). If that category existed, however, my answers thus far would be:
Yes
Yes
Yes
Absolutely
Sort of
In an abstract way
No
Only if you think Michael's bad pun constitutes fucking sense
No
And for this episode, What were you people smoking?
The teaser shows us KITT pwning some other, lesser cars. WIN! Let's start our shadowy flight!
The episode opens with Devon on the phone while he watches bad news on television.
no gnus is good gnus
The newscaster is reporting another terrorist bombing and speculating what effect it will have on "the summit conference" organized by Devon, who hopes to negotiate a treaty amongst three nations suspected of harboring the terrorists.
No, wait, stop. FLAG is an NGO, not a GO ... oh, hell with it. Let's pretend this is a plausible scenario and just move on. Damn, I feel the way lawyers must feel when they watch Law & Order.
Devon chats with an unidentified person on the phone (while narcissistically watching himself interviewed on TV), and declares that this is all just awful and that they need to approach "the mission" with new urgency. He promises that he is taking special steps. Then we get a super-dramatic countdown timer.
just calling it a "summit meeting" makes my eye twitch
Meanwhile, in the semi, Bonnie is pulling crud out of KITT's engine compartment.
not paid enough to put up with this
It turns out to be seaweed. Bonnie demands an explanation, and Michael starts to kind of give one but is interrupted by Devon before he has to (apparently) admit to driving KITT into the ocean.
AM I GLAD TO SEE YOU
Devon needs Michael to drive him somewhere right away. They aren't bringing KITT, but instead are taking another car. He hustles Michael out.
KITT wonders why he's been excluded from this trip. Bonnie doesn't know but advises him not to take it personally. KITT assures her that he can't take anything personally.
So Michael and Devon head out in a land yacht, with Devon in the back seat and Michael playing chauffeur.
Michael is not comfortable with the statement on class and culture being made here
They are soon picked up by a dude in a lipstick-pink coupe.
missing out on KITT's opinion of this car is a tragedy
The pink car does not behave in a friendly manner. Devon tells Michael to lose it, which of course would have been way easier with KITT. Michael is not particularly effective at dealing with the other car. He manages to run it off the road once, but gripes about how non-maneuverable the land yacht is. Then he whips the car around and plays chicken with the coupe, running it off the road a second time, and manages a moonshiner turn with the land yacht to block the coupe from returning to pavement. So, not a very good job losing it, then.
They all get out of their vehicles, and before Michael can start punching anybody it turns out the joke is on him: Devon and the dude in the lipstick car (a guy named Redmond) are actually buddies, and this was a test of Michael's 1337 driving skeelz.
They return to the Foundation mansion, where Devon explains today's plot. The leaders of three "unstable" countries are coming to the US to sign an anti-terrorism treaty, which Devon, in a show of extreme optimism, thinks may well do away with terrorism altogether.
There is a possibility, however, that one of the members of the conference security team is actually an assassin, there to sabotage the treaty. The team is due to spend a few days at Redmond's security-team camp, and Devon wants Michael to check it out and ferret out if there is a plant.
Michael thinks this is a BS assignment. There's no way to know if there is an assassin in the security team at all, and he has zero leads on which one it might be (if one exists). He also has very little time to work this out. There is a possibility that the assassin (if, again, one exists) decides to reveal himself by killing Michael. Devon agrees that these are all problems, but it is what it is.
aww, he has a sad
Michael has little choice. He and KITT hit the road.
that was apparently a 24-hour briefing *twitch*
on the road again
They discuss the plan on the way. Michael is going to try to make the hit man blows his (or her!) cover by making everybody nervous. KITT compliments the plan, being that it draws on a close understanding of Michael's basic nature and inability to be subtle, and concludes that it was Devon's idea.
not flattering Michael today (or ever)
Michael, not amused, tells him to stfu.
are you tired of me capping KITT like this? too bad, I'm going to keep doing it until KITT stops being hot (meaning: never)
They arrive at the camp (creatively named Victory Academy), and we get to hear KITT honk his horn for, I believe, the first time. It sounds delightfully ordinary. The gate opens and they are admitted.
The first person Michael runs into is a woman named Margo Wells.
the woman of the week
she's not impressed by Michael backing his car into a parking spot instead of pulling in straight like everyone else
However, they are not able to do more than exchange greetings before a commotion interrupts them: a couple of guys are fighting, and one has just thrown the other out of one of the buildings and into the yard. While the two of them roll around in the dirt, a small crowd gathers, consisting of Michael, Margo, and two other dudes.
The guys fighting abruptly stop, exchange insults, then laugh and slap each other; hah hah, they are actually friends! This breaks the tension and Michael and Margo exchange friendly introductions. The other four guys soon join in and everybody becomes buddies.
Margo enlists Michael to help carry her suitcase into her room. He jokes that this isn't Club Med, and she gently mocks this by asking if that means she won't need her string bikini and makeup collection.
you mean you brought a change of clothes? how girly!
Michael puts the suitcase down in front of KITT and gets KITT to scan it.
the way to get into a lady's pants suitcase
Inside, KITT discovers a delicious .32 caliber candy surprise.
also six sets of undergarments - KITT counted them
Michael carries the suitcase inside.
Later, Redmond demonstrates that the cars they will be using are bulletproof. He does this by firing a submachine gun at them while everyone stands close by, because bullets never ricochet with deadly results. After the demonstration, he gives the gun to one the dudes, a guy named Jacobs, to put away.
While Redmond continues to explain about the cars (and specifically why they should not rely too heavily on the cars), gunfire strafes the ground next to Michael. He hits the dirt, and Redmond runs to investigate. It is Jacobs, with the gun; while Michael threatens to beat the crap out of him, he protests that the strap caught on the trigger and it was an accident.
Redmond is not impressed and Michael clearly doesn't buy it.
That evening, everyone gathers in the mess hall to have dinner. Jacobs is being antisocial, and when invited to join the rest he instead stalks off. One of the other dudes explains that Jacobs spent three years in solitary in a Cuban prison and since then he's become somewhat moody.
The scene then switches to someone sneaking into Michael's room and hiding what looks like an incendiary device under his bed, and the act ends.
has the same crappy taste in boots as Michael
The next act begins with Michael in bed, asleep. Outside, someone with a remote control pushes a button, and the device under Michael's bed goes off. It turns out to be a smoke bomb. It drives Michael, choking, out of his room.
I reckon it's a good thing he doesn't sleep commando. or maybe that's our loss?
Turns out everyone's rooms are now all smoky and everyone comes staggering outside. Redmond planted the smoke bombs as an object lesson: as bodyguards, they are also targets, and they need to have better situational awareness than this. As everyone goes back to their rooms, Redmond pulls Michael aside and reminds him that this goes double for him.
a mature adult, as you can see
Michael is annoyed with Redmond, but even more annoyed with KITT. He gets into the car to chew KITT out for not warning him when Redmond entered his room. KITT, unfazed, reminds Michael that he specifically instructed KITT that Redmond could be trusted, a prime example of Michael-logic. On that note, when is Michael planning to start making people nervous? Michael explains his plan to start a card game that night, and get drunk and rowdy and indiscreet.
"very well. but when are you planning to do some work?"
That evening, Michael carries through on this plan (such as it is). He seems to be faking drunkenness more than actually being drunk. Margo and Jacobs are absent from the card game. Michael starts asking nosy questions about Jacobs, and intimates that anyone who knows the right buttons to push on the right computers can get info on anyone at the table. This ticks off all of them.
The next morning, they all hop into camo fatigues for combat exercises.
I'm not sure these hours really line up with the times of day when the countdown cards display *twitch*
Michael narrates a voiceover in the form of a message to Devon while the visual cycles through scenes of the team practicing. He likes the group dynamics, and is unsure how to detect an assassin in a group of trained killers. Then he suggests meeting with Devon at the local country-western bar.
That evening at the bar, Michael is noshing some chili and is accosted by Bonnie.
she's put on this big hat just for you, Michael
Devon is at another table and has sent Bonnie to fetch Michael.
she turns it, quite unexpectedly, into an opportunity to flirt
Michael takes his bowl of chili over to the corner to meet up with Devon, who is in the cowboy-style hat again. This is observed by one of the dudes from the security team sitting at the bar.
Devon takes a bite of Michael's chili, passes a negative judgment, and then they chat. Michael reports that he has essentially nothing to report, and they all whine, but then Michael gets an idea. He asks Devon if the security team knows the job; Devon says no, of course not, they will be briefed when it's needed. This means that the only one who knows the job now will be the assassin (again, if there is one).
It's a smart observation, and it's a pity that absolutely nothing comes of it.
Michael returns to camp, and decides to search Margo's room. KITT seems to assume this is code for sex, which it may well be, because Margo catches him in the act, attacks him, and they wind up wrestling around on the edge of the bed.
creepy
At this point, Michael acts like it's Margo who is in the wrong here and that he was doing nothing untoward. She doesn't fold immediately, but demands what he's doing in her room. Michael halfheartedly plays the "lust" card, which Margo rejects. After a few jabs, Margo does fold and asks nicely for him to let her go, and he does. She comments that they're in this together to do a job and not to spy on one another, and then from Michael's non-reaction she seems to conclude that he disagrees.
The next morning (I guess it's the next morning?) they are all in a classroom together and Redmond is assigning an exercise.
these hours definitely make no sense now *twitch twitch*
Michael is playing VIP and another of the guys (Lopez) is going to be his bodyguard. The other four will be hunting Michael and Lopez. Their weapons will be loaded with wax rounds, which are painful but not lethal. The only rule to the exercise is to win.
They all head out to the swamp to start the exercise. Jacobs moves away from the others, using the excuse that he will pull a flanking maneuver, but instead he heads to the truck to swap out his wax bullets for live ammo. Why Redmond thought it would be a smart move to bring live ammo to this exercise is not revealed.
Presently Michael and Lopez split up, and Michael decides to cheat by calling in KITT. It takes a few minutes for KITT to arrive, but once he's on the scene he scans the area and alerts Michael that Jacobs is stalking him. This allows Michael to escape while Jacobs sprays bullets in his direction.
Jacobs bothers Margo in the process of chasing Michael, and Margo runs back to Redmond to report that there is a crisis developing. Redmond and Margo collect some live ammo as well and go to rescue Michael.
With KITT's help in tracking Jacobs, Michael manages to ambush him near a pond and they wrestle for control of the Uzi.
there's a lot of subtext in this that I'm not going to talk about
They eventually separate and Michael tries to liberate the weapon by its strap, but the strap pulls off instead and Jacobs retains the gun. Just as Jacobs is about to kill Michael, he is shot in the chest by Margo and falls into the pond.
Back at the camp, Michael has a call with Devon, in plain view of everyone.
can you guys at least pretend to not be listening to this private conversation I'm having right in front of you?
Devon recalls him home, and Michael bids everyone goodbye. He says thanks to Margo on his way out, and the act ends.
yes, thanks
In the car on the way back to FLAG at the beginning of the final act, KITT notes that Michael seems pretty quiet. Michael has a magazine in his hand, but apparently is not reading it; instead he is thinking, specifically about why Jacobs tried to strafe him back on Day 2. That was long before he had any reason to be suspicious of Michael's motives. KITT suggests that it really was just an accident as Jacobs had claimed at the time.
I've noticed that KITT does a lot of the driving in Season 1. here he is doing it again
Michael doesn't buy the "accident" story, and now that he's thought about it he is suspicious of how well the plan to roust the assassin actually worked. He decides to return to Redmond's camp.
I like how the weight of the vehicle is visible in this cap of KITT turning
KITT can never look bad
do you like your KITT with sun glint?
so do I
here's one with just a hint of glint
When he gets there, the rest of the team is gathered near the armored cars. Michael pulls up and, in a display of smarts the likes of which we have not seen since the pilot, gets out of KITT to confront a very-alive Jacobs, who is holding an Uzi.
yeah, I'd exit the safest location on Earth in order to talk smack to this
They haul Michael into one of the bedrooms and tie him up, and Margo explains that actually they are all assassins and staged Jacobs as "the" plant in order to fool Michael and Devon. Redmond is okay, he went to town and plans to escort the team to the airfield to meet the third-world VIPs when he gets back. Margo & Co. are simply going to leave before he arrives.
Michael lips off and Margo sends Jacobs out, allegedly to move Michael's car so that Redmond won't see it, but really so that he won't do something messy to Michael where it will leave bloodstains. She then proceeds to pet Michael and confess that she actually really liked him.
she has this near-necrophilia thing, where she gets off on doing guys who are about to be killed
Michael toggles his comlink so that KITT can listen in (but so that KITT can't say anything back and give away that the channel is open), and then proceeds to insult her and tick her off.
Meanwhile, Jacobs is trying to get into KITT, and is not having much luck. He breaks a switchblade and bends a combat dagger in the process. You know, if I wanted to get into someone's car and I had that person tied up, I'd just take their keys, but this tactic has apparently not occurred to him. He'd rather use a gun instead.
KITT doesn't have keys, but he doesn't know that
Michael suggests that they can't shoot him, because people will start asking questions if he turns up dead from a bullet. Somehow, KITT concludes from this that Michael wants him to cooperate with whatever the assassins want to do and kindly unlocks his door. By this point, Jacobs is beating on KITT's roof in a frenzy and doesn't notice.
Margo concludes that Michael is right and they're going to have to arrange a highway accident for him. She sends Lopez out to see what's holding up Jacobs. Lopez has to stop Jacobs from dissolving into a puddle of rage and demonstrates that KITT's door opens quite easily.
all you had to do was lift the door handle dude
Apparently there is a container of lighter fluid or something in the drawer, and Margo uses this on a cloth to knock Michael unconscious.
okay, I know this is supposed to be chloroform, but c'mon, who keeps chloroform in their dresser drawer?
It would have been smart of her to keep it on his face until he stopped breathing, but instead they put Michael alive into his car with the intention of rolling him over a cliff.
she's shifting KITT into gear here. I wonder how she managed without stepping on the brake first
Margo and Jacobs give KITT a push toward a turn in the road, and then hop into their own car. They have 30 minutes to get to the airport.
As KITT rolls down the steep incline, he declares, "Michael, you're going to be very proud of me," and relates how he let the assassins drive him here and set up this "accident" without resistance, because that was what Michael wanted.
not the kind of off-roading for which KITT was designed
He's assuming that Michael is just feigning unconsciousness, but it turns out that Michael is genuinely unconscious. KITT takes steps to wake him.
it's nice to see that KITT's gizmos are reusable
Michael does rouse, and KITT has bad news: there is a cliff not far ahead, and the car's brakes are proving to be insufficient on this steep of a gradient. KITT calculates he has a chance of surviving the drop to the canyon floor but Michael does not. Michael's solution is to tell KITT to rotate his turbo booster and then use it.
did you know KITT could rotate his turbo booster? now you do
This successfully counters the vehicle's forward momentum and they stop just short of the brink. They return to the road and move to intercept the assassins.
Devon arrives at a little airport in the middle of frickin' nowhere, which appears to actually be FLAG's private airport, to meet the third-world leaders. The assassins are en route in their armored cars.
A small jet with supposed-to-be-Arabic script on the side lands, and Devon greets his first ethnically-costumed guests.
so our first terrorist-harboring country is located in the Stereotype Middle East
Michael and KITT are also en route. Michael asks KITT to call Devon to warn him, but KITT can't get through: he needs a security code to get through the phone system and nobody gave it to him. It would take too long to break the code, so contacting Devon is out.
random cap of KITT looking pretty
KITT locates the assassins on his scanners, and prints up a helpful graphic for Michael.
not to scale
KITT is concerned by the fact that the assassins are driving heavily armored cars and there are five of them. He'd like his odds one-on-one, but not five-on-one.
not true-to-life in positioning either. so ... pretty useless, actually
Michael decides to divide and conquer. Meanwhile, another third-world leader is landing at the airstrip.
and Devon greets him with a gangster handshake
!!!
KITT catches up to the assassins and Margo notices him. She radios an alert to the rest of the team. Two of them (driving limos) stop and turn sideways to block the road, and haul out submachine guns. KITT leaps this pathetic excuse for a roadblock.
definitely been working on that landing
The third third-world leader arrives, and his ethnic stereotype is unclear to me. He's a balding white-ish guy in a blue suit. Devon greets him with an ordinary-sounding hello.
any guesses?
this mark on his plane doesn't clue me in either
My first impression, tbh, was that this dude is supposed to be Jewish. My second impression was wow, no way, that's too outlandish. Then I had to go back and look at that gang handshake with which Devon greeted Third World Leader Number Two and I came to the conclusion that nothing is "too outlandish" for this sequence. So that's my best guess.
Meanwhile KITT has caught up to the other three cars and Margo has again noticed. The remaining two guys (driving small sedans) tell her to keep going and they will stop Michael. They turn around and head straight for KITT. The two limos that KITT jumped are back underway and are coming up behind.
objects in mirror are closer than they appear
KITT seems concerned, but there's no need: Michael just rams into the smaller sedans and they, I dunno, run up over KITT's fenders or something and flip themselves.
well, KITT is pretty low-to-the-ground, like a mobile ramp I reckon
The wreckage basically stops the limos.
this is how KITT gloats
Michael gives KITT a pat on the dash (!!!) and they speed to catch up with Margo. Considering that KITT has barely slowed down for any of these shenanigans, you wouldn't think this would be a challenge, but somehow Margo has gotten clean out of sight.
Devon is lounging in a tent at the airfield, nervously assuring the foreign leaders that he's sure the cars will arrive any moment. One of them does, and it's driven by Margo. KITT seems to have access to a camera resting on the front passenger seat of Margo's car, and another on her car's hood.
this is not the last time KITT will demonstrate power beyond that of mere mortals
Margo races down the runway. Her plan is unclear to me - she is still a trusted bodyguard as far as Devon is concerned, all she has to do is drive up and say hi and open up with her Uzi. Instead, she is driving erratically (maybe planning to run everyone down?) and Devon tells two security dudes with shotguns to stop her. This fails: the car is armored.
However, KITT and Michael are finally in range.
you didn't seriously think a mere armored limo could stop the king of cars, did you?
In an extremely brief climax, Michael forces Margo's car to slide into a parked truck, and both vehicles randomly explode.
because: why not
The epilogue moves us to the country-western bar, where all the Third-World Stereotypes have been given cowboy-style hats and are drunkenly singing Home on the Range. I once wrote a filk to Home on the Range, back in my BBS days, but sadly I've lost it. :( Apparently Michael has arranged this get-together, and Devon does not approve; they have Serious Business to attend to! Michael thinks that America should be fun! and drags Devon into joining the next round of inebriated singing.
I think I'm meant to find this funny, but in reality I'm appalled
I have to say that I was surprised by Bonnie's sudden flirtiness in the bar. Prior to this, she's given no indication that she more than tolerates Michael, but now suddenly she's giving him this sexy come-hither look and talking to him in this sensual purr. Seriously? I get that she's kidding around, but if she really dislikes Michael this is not the kind of kidding behavior she ought to pull.
The only reasonable conclusion is that she is, by this episode, at least sort of coming around on Michael. It gave me hope that their relationship would evolve in an interesting way. Sadly, that hope proved a vain one.
The real female character here is Margo Wells. I actually really like her, and I'm sad that they made her go 'splodey at the end of the ep.
She seems to be aware of the feminine stereotype, and to be using it against Michael. She appears to peg him immediately as the chivalrous type, and confirms it when she asks him to carry her suitcase into her room. Not only does he not question for an instant why a woman who has been hired to be an armed bodyguard can't carry her own suitcase, he takes the opportunity to crack wise about his assumption that she has brought a lot of frivolous crap. She mocks the assumption, but plays to it.
Of course, what she brought was a handgun.
Michael later describes her as "the brains of the group," which is a different kind of stereotype about women, but still a stereotype.
It's unclear why he decided to search her room instead of, say, the room of his main suspect Jacobs. Michael doesn't say. Maybe he doesn't even know. I suspect that I'm meant to believe that it was her pistol that made him suspicious of her, but he does not say at any point, and KITT seems to think that Michael is just trying to score. I think KITT knows Michael pretty well.
Margo plays to this, too. She attacks Michael when she finds him in her room (but she doesn't win - the script can't possibly allow a woman to beat up Michael Knight) and for a minute or two you see what I think is the Real Margo. She is angry. She is Not Polite. She is physically aggressive until he subdues her, and then verbally aggressive thereafter.
However, when she realizes that she can't escape the arm lock he has her in, she changes tactics, becomes all soft and nonthreatening, and plays to his stereotype of her in order to get him to let her go and resolve the confrontation with no harm to herself.
In the end, it turns out that she is at least nominally the leader of the group of assassins. She is a villain, but not like Tanya. Tanya used her sexuality as a tool to get what she wanted. Margo also uses her sexuality, but in a completely different way: as a diversion, a means of camouflage. She uses the feminine stereotype in order to get the drop on men who are smugly assured that WYSIWYG when it comes to women.
Her tactic would not work if Michael believed that a woman was capable of having more than one identity; it is because he thinks that she can only be one thing that she is able to conceal her real self under a projection that matches his expectations. Margo, in short, hangs a lampshade on the feminine stereotype that, too often, remains an unacknowledged and unexamined foundational assumption.
That's not to say that she is a completely subversive character. She would have been, if not for that little petting episode when she had Michael tied up just before anesthetizing him. There's nothing subversive about the clear impression she gives that she really was flattered by his attention and probably would have slept with him if the circumstances had been different.
Still, overall, I like Margo as a character and I wish we could have kept her.
I don't normally mention the male gender regime of each episode. This is not because male regimes don't exist, or that they are not interesting, but because I am limiting my focus here to examining female stereotyping, and analyzing KITT. There's only so much I can do before I run into LiveJournal's character limit.
I'm going to mention it here, though, as a kind of footnote, because there's an especially interesting demonstration of it when Michael meets the assassin team for the first time at Redmond's. When you watch the ep you'll know what I mean: the hypermasculinity embodied by the two dudes fistfighting. This is how Real Men greet each other; a physical fight doesn't mean they are not friends! One of them extends this hypermasculine paradigm to Michael by punching him in the shoulder, which Michael finds actually painful and not chummy at all. Michael, generally the archetype in the male gender regime of each episode, finds himself lacking in this one.
Of course, such stereotypes about men are pretty damaging, and gender role policing happens to men as well as to women. I don't usually touch on this because men have a much wider selection of stereotypes from which to choose than women, and their stereotypes are typically far less damaging overall than women's. But I thought I'd mention it here because it is so in-your-face in this scene. Male gender regimes exist; I don't bring them up because they are outside my focus, not because I have nothing to say on them.
KITT comes across in this episode, to me anyway, as an extremely intelligent and well-spoken child. "Michael, you're going to be very proud of me!" he says. Who talks like that? Who is it that craves the approval of others and is happiest when making them proud?
This is reinforced when Michael pats KITT's dash, like he is proud.
There's no hint here of what I mentioned in the last commentary, that I think KITT views being driven as something intimate, and being driven by non-Michael people is violative. Obviously someone drove him out to the cliff and it wasn't Michael, and he doesn't say anything about it being disagreeable. Then again, there is no particular opportunity for him to express discomfort with it prior to the end of the ep, and he only did it because Michael wanted him to do it. It's not something he would have ever done by his own choice.
If this seems like a stretch, well, that's fair. The driving-as-sexual-allegory thing is just subtext, after all, and almost certainly unintentional subtext. KITT never comes out and says as much in an unambiguous way. It's just my reading of it. It amuses me, though, that I said that in the last commentary and then come to this ep and HOWDY here's KITT being driven by someone else and he doesn't say anything about it! Hah! This is what I get for doing this on what is, after all, only my second time through the series in 30 years.
Other than his be-proud-of-me moment, KITT demonstrates that he has become Michael's collaborator. He's not just an in-dash entertainment center or a database of information; he's also Michael's sounding board for ideas and problems. Michael is still telling him to stfu semi-regularly, which is fundamentally unfair, but he does it when KITT is cheeky. And KITT is cheeky because he's comfortable being cheeky. He's comfortable with Michael. That says a lot.
I think that's all I have here. I'm at the end of Disc 3, and pretty much at the midpoint of Season 1.