Oh, I do have some mixed emotions about this one. Jim and Artie are investigating the sinking of a ship off the coast of San Francisco shortly before a visit to the city by Adm. David Farragut. Our heroes suspect his ship will be the next target. Now, I pull for Jim and Artie all the time, but Farragut is the war criminal who starved the men, women, and children of New Orleans into submission during the War Between the States. He, like William Sherman, hopefully has a seat close to the fire in hell.The ship was sunk by what appeared to be a sea serpent guided by a homing device in a woman’s compact which Jim recovered from the wreckage. Tracing the owner leads him to Phillip de la Mer, a kook who has developed dragon-shaped torpedoes to sink the Pacific fleet and take over the ocean for his own country.
Jim does his best Johnny Weismuller by catching up to the torpedo even though it has a head start of over a minute and destroys it with a handy magnet bomb Artie gave him in the first act., ssaving Farragut. Which I suppose is a good thing. Farragut died in August 1870, so e went to hell soon after this events of this episode, anyway. Good riddance.
“The Night of the Watery Death” is an average episode. De la Mer does not make for a particularly compelling villain. His plan to turn the pacific ocean into his own country makes him sound too crazy to be interesting. The plot is similar to the first season’s “The Night of a Thousand Eyes,” but the idea of blackmailing ships rather than destroying an entire ocean’s worth makes far more sense.
The episode is not bad, but it is not great, either.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
