“The Night of the Avaricious actuary’ is quite a spectacle for a number of reasons. Te plot is not one of them. It is a fairly straightforward insurance scam I which a villain has created a super weapon he uses to destroy the mansions of wealthy men who refuse to uy insurance policies with extortion level premiums. Everything else is incredibly odd.First, the weapon is a giant tuning fork. We are talking about something Wile E. Coyote would use in a plot to catch the Roadrunner. The weapon’s power as no basis in science. There is no way one tuning fork can hit the exact frequency to destroy variety of different structures even if a tuning fork as large as a Volkswagon Beetle could work that way at all, which it cannot. The bigger the tuning fork, te lower the pitch and therefore less effective.
Second, our heroes only have one clue to go on--the mastermind villain weighs 285lbs. Jim goes off on his own with stubs from carnie weight guessing machines found I the insurance company office, and Artie--remember, these episode were not aired in the order they were filmed-- tracks down the restaurant which has a Epicurean menu also found. The trick here is that Artie is off on a wild goose chase. Everyone at the restaurant he finds is fat. Jim is on the right track. The villain, played by the recently deceased Harold Gould, was once fat, but lost most of it in prison. There is really no way either jim or Artie could connect the dots for all this, yet they do.
Finally, for the real weirdness. Jim wear his riding chaps backwards the entire episode for no apparent reason. One of the henchmen split’s the seat of his pats during te final fistfight. Ross martin tosses a gun aside, it bounces off the wall back into his path, so he trips over it, breaking his leg. The rest of the scene, which is pt of the pats splitting fight I just mentioned, goes on with a blatantly obvious stuntman. Think of this as extra strange, since they found excuses in two prior episodes to have Artie in a cast to accommodate Martin in episodes prior to this one. Which makes one wonder the logic used in deciding which episode to air when.
I have called the fourth season wonderfully weird. Episodes like this are why I have. The series was attempting to recapture the feel of the very popular second season. Sometimes it hit the mark. Sometimes it did not. When it does not, such as in this episode, it is still so strange, you cannot help but like it anyway. Even the obvious mistakes and misfires are amusing.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
