After ramming his car through a roadblock at the gate to COMTRON, Michael calls Devon on the car phone so that he can alert the authorities to arrest Tanya. However we all know that it's really up to Michael to drive to the airport, and somehow stop them in a way that involves more driving, turbo boosting, or ramming the car into something. Whatever he comes up with, it's going to involve driving, because ... well, HE'S FUCKING USELESS on his own. Besides -- What else are you supposed to do in a TV show where a car is the star?
But wait .. There's a few more car stunts the producers are going to toss in before he even gets to the airport. Some COMTRON cronies call up more of their trucker buddies and get them to barricade the road with one of their 18 wheelers. Of course this is no problem for the ingenious driving skillz of Knight, who just fucking plows right through it. The bad guys here are also kind of retarded, because even if Knight was driving a 1981 ford escort, HE COULD'VE JUST STEERED AROUND THE THING. But would that be as spectacular? I think not ...
Ha-ha! I just noticed how there's a giant fake section on the side of the truck that K.I.T.T. flies through! Also, it looks as though that trucker happened to be hauling styrofoam chunks and empty cardboard boxes. Now that I think about it, I can let that one go. After all, maybe COMTRON has a side business selling styrofoam bits to other companies? I guess you gotta get it from somewhere right? Hell, that idea is more plausible than anything else that's happened in this moronic episode so far ...
Next up, the COMTRON dudes offer up 25,000 bucks to the first trucker who steers his rig into a head on collision with K.I.T.T. This time Michael hits the turbo boost and jumps directly over the entire 18 wheeler, in a masterpiece of cheezy editing and phoney Trans Am mock-up shots. Fuck is this show ever dumb ... but in succcch a good way. Check out the quicktime below for a taste of Knight Rider gayness ...
Dumbfounded at Knight's ability to evade their automobile related attempts to stop him, the COMTRON dudes descend in a helicopter and try using a shotgun to blow him away. This is another dumb idea, because the same moron who's wielding the shotgun fired several shots at K.I.T.T. earlier and then yelled out: "The bullets are just bouncing off!!" So guess what happens? The shotgun blast bounces off of K.I.T.T.'s molecular body armor and hits the chopper in the fuel line ... how unpredictable! The helicopter limps back to the airport where Tanya is waiting, and in the distance the bad guys can see K.I.T.T. racing toward them. They all jump in their private jet and head for the runway.
Hmmm ... what ingenious tactic do you think Knight will employ to stop them? Any guesses? Any at all?
Yes, that's right: HE RAMS HIS CAR INTO THE JET. Wow ... he should work for the space program.
So the jet explodes, with the bad guys escaping just in time. Frazzled beyond belief, Tanya runs over to K.I.T.T. and aims her gun right at Michael's head. Mikey pleads with her not to fire, but she's determined to blow his head off so she pulls the trigger. The bullet bounces right off the window and back into her, and she dies on the runway. The authorities finally show up, and Michael takes off to the hospital without even sticking around to make sure the rest of the bad guys don't get away. I guess he read the script and saw that they all got arrested.
There are only a couple of scenes to go here, but the show isn't quite done with being stupid. As Michael recuperates from his standard-issue gunshot-wound-to-the-shoulder, Maggie makes one last appearance. Even though she hasn't been involved in the story for the last hour, she makes a big speech about how she has realized that her son needs a man in his life. This seems as though it's attempting to finish off her character's story arc, but the problem is -- what arc? She had no purpose in this plot at all except to sex up the show, and tell Michael about the demolition derby. Anyway, in this scene she pretty much tells Michael that she wants to nail him, but it's a foregone conclusion that he's gonna be bedding another babe in next week's episode, so they just hug and say goodbye.
The last scene involves Devon and Michael boarding a private jet and talking about what their future holds. Devon offers Michael a job working for the Foundation for Law and Government, for those times when 'direct action' is required. Ya know - this 'Foundation" is a pretty bizarre organization. According to Devon, they spend millions of dollars doing legal research, launching class action lawsuits, and other strictly bureaucratic stuff. But when all of that isn't enough, they pull out their ace in the hole - a zillion dollar trans-am with a moronic cowboy who drives it around smashing into things. Pretty sophistcated approach to justice wouldn't you say? I wish I was Michael Knight.
Looking back, it's easy to understand how this show appealed to kids, and in all honesty, I find it very watchable even though it's 25 years old. I'm not sure that the producers intended for me to laugh in all the places I did, but why does that matter? I'll admit it: Sometimes I just can't help wanting to watch an idiot with a bad belt buckle drive his car into shit. That's just the way I am.
Before finishing off this article, there are a few other groovy KNIGHT RIDER-ish things I think are worth mentioning. Here they are in no particular order:
K.I.T.T's flashing light / voice indicator -- In the first season, K.I.T.T's voice was visually represented by a flashing red rectangle on the dashboard. 13 episodes later it was replaced by a more modern set of LED's. As a child I remember there was one kid at school who was dumb enough to say that he preferred the old flashing rectangle. For making such an obvious mistake, we stole all his stuff, pulled his pants down in front of everyone, and beat the shit out of him. Geez some people are just assholes.
Super old school first season commercial break indicators -- Knight Rider was a show that largely appealed to kids, and as such, they tossed in some stylish bumpers to let everyone know that they were going away for a few minutes to show some commercials. In the first season, they did this via a freeze frame which retracted into the lower right hand corner, revealing an image in the background of K.I.T.T. racing through the night. This may seem like no big deal, but as a kid I loved it. I honestly can't really understand why it was so appealing, but I guarantee that these shots always had me salivating for more things KNIGHT RIDER. In the pilot episode they were particularly enticing, especially since the first time you saw this you hadn't met K.I.T.T. yet, and this revealed that he was waiting in the background somewhere ... his turbine engine revving, headlights glowing, his paint job glistening in the darkness, his red thing pulsating .... throbbing ....back and forth ... back and forth ... Fuck no wonder I couldn't wait for the show to come back on.
BONNIE / APRIL -- Even though Michael was a obviously super-stud who bagged a different 80's hottie every week, the producers felt the need to give him a couple of "babe's in the barn" so to speak. The first of these was Bonnie -- A cute brunette with a hairstyle that couldn't have existed anywhere except the 80's, and probably took half the foundation's annual budget to give her enough hair spray for one day. I haven't revisited all of the season 1 episodes yet, but I seem to recall that the writers hinted at a possible romance between her and Knight on more than one occasion. In season 2, Bonnie was booted from the show and the producers replaced her with APRIL, a cute blonde who didn't seem to get as confrontational with Michael. For unknown reasons, at the start of season 3 Bonnie was brought back to stay till the end of the series.
K.I.T.T's pulsating Cylon light. -- The concept of the pulsing red light which moves back and forth was first introduced in another of Glen Larson's magnificent creations: Battlestar Galactica. Although that series was cancelled after only one season, it lived on in the hearts of fans well into the future, and it also sported some of the funkiest looking robots in all of science fiction. Some fans have even suggested that the Wilton Knight foundation captured one of the Cylon robots from the hideous series "Galactica 1980" and reverse engineered it's technology to build K.I.T.T. In actuality, I'm sure Glen Larson just thought it looked cool. He was right.
COMMENTS? -- EMAIL ME AT GROOMEJ@HOTMAIL.COM
