“Minerva, Mayhem, and Millionaires”
Written by Charles Hoffman
Directed by Oscar Rudolph
Season 3, Episode 26
Production code 1726
Original air date: March 14, 1968
The Bat-signal: Bruce is getting a vigorous massage at Minerva’s Mineral Spa, the masseuse commenting that, for a millionaire who spends all his time counting his money, he’s in pretty good shape. (Ahem.) Bruce chalks it up to falconry and spelunking. He passes up one of Minerva’s famous scalp massages, as he needs to get going.
However, other millionaires take her up on it, thus allowing them to succumb to Minerva’s Deepest Secret Extractor, which reveals to her where they keep their filthy lucre.
As Bruce gets ready to leave and retrieves his personal items from the lockbox, he encounters yet another millionaire, Sam Shubert, who thanks Bruce for the invite to the Wayne Foundation dinner that will include a display of the world’s largest diamonds. While they talk, Minerva lifts Bruce’s watch from the lockbox. Bruce figures he’s misremembering and didn’t wear it today, and heads out.
Minerva meets with her henchmen (Apollo, Adonis, and Atlas) and moll (Aphrodite) and French Freddie the Fence and promises the Wayne Foundation diamonds. She calls Bruce to say she “found” his watch, and can he come pick it up? Right after that, Gordon calls on the bat-phone, reporting that several millionaires have had their secret stashes stolen. Bruce realizes that all the victims are also clients of Minerva’s.
Bruce heads to Minerva’s in his own car to retrieve the watch, while Robin takes the Batmobile and a spare batsuit to the spa separately so they can head to GCPD HQ afterward. However, Bruce decides to accept a free scalp massage. Minerva hits him with the Deepest Secret Extractor (which makes Adam West go delightfully bug-eyed). Luckily, the DSE only provides Minerva with what she actually asks for, and she only thinks to ask for the combination to the Wayne Foundation vault.
However, Bruce knows something is up, so he meets up with Robin and changes into costume. He asks Minerva for the full treatment for him and Robin. They refuse to disrobe, as it would compromise their secret identities. Minerva says they can’t get the full effect of her treatment while clothed, but Batman assures her that their outfits—including even the utility belts—are more permeable than you might imagine. Okay, then.
Minerva thinks something’s up, as she saw Bruce talking to his watch earlier (he was relaying instructions to Robin), so she has her henchmen put the Dynamic Duo in the persimmon pressurizer while she pootles off to the Wayne Foundation to open the vault and steal the diamonds, changing the combination of the vault.
Batman and Robin—wearing towels over their full uniforms—are manhandled and put in the pressurizer. When Minerva returns, the pressurizer is empty. Minerva assumes that they’ve been pressurized into teeny tiny bits, but in fact they escaped and returned to the Batcave. Batman has Gordon bring Minerva in. She denies trying to kill Batman and Robin—she chalks it up to equipment failure.
Lord Easystreet—one of the richest men in the world—has an appointment with Minerva at 4:30, and Minerva heads off to it. Batman wants to send a decoy in Easystreet’s place—Alfred looks a lot like the lord in question—and Barbara (who is once again visiting her dad in his office) says that she actually found a book Easystreet was looking for in the library earlier that day, and can call him and tell him so, thus distracting him from his spa appointment.
The head of security for the Wayne Foundation calls Gordon to report the tampering with the vault. Batman, Robin, Gordon, and O’Hara head to the Wayne Foundation, where Batman gets the vault open, and they learn that the diamonds are all gone.
Batman and Robin head to Minerva’s—as does Batgirl, who wants to make sure that Alfred is safe. This is a legitimate concern, as she arrives just as Minerva realizes that Alfred isn’t Easystreet. He manages to resist providing his real name for several seconds—take that, Sean Pertwee!—and then Batgirl rescues him. However, the henchmen come in and manhandle both of them, tossing them into the pressurizer. Batman and Robin show up, then, and fisticuffs ensue. Robin is able to free Batgirl and Alfred, and then the pair of them join the donnybrook.
Our heroes are triumphant. Minerva almost makes her escape, but then Gordon and O’Hara show up with Freddie the Fence, who was captured and who immediately gave Minerva up. Everyone is trundled off to jail, and Batgirl disappears without anyone noticing. Just like usual.
Fetch the Bat-shark-repellant! Batman and Robin escape the pressurizer by taking Steam-Neutralizing Bat-pellets. Batman has a Three-Seconds-Flat Bat-Vault Combination Unscrambler, which apparently can unscramble a vault combination (bat- or otherwise) in three seconds flat. Good thing he’s on our side…
Holy #@!%$, Batman! Upon being informed that they’d be put in the persimmon pressurizer, Robin on-the-noses, “Holy astringent plum-like fruit!” and then grumbles, “Holy human pressure cookers” when he and Batman are put in the thing. “Holy skull tap!” is Robin’s response to realizing that Minerva extracted the combination from Bruce during his massage.
Gotham City’s finest. O’Hara apparently sprained his ankle playing ping-pong, and limps through the episode aided by a cane. In reality, it was likely that Stafford Repp hurt himself and they just wrote it in, since it plays no role in the plot.
No sex, please, we’re superheroes. Among the many double entendres provided by Minerva, we have her not recognizing Batman by his costume, but remarking that his physique looks familiar, her repeating the “feel like a new man” line from last week’s tag, her haughtily telling Batman that she doesn’t pick up men, men pick her up, etc. Wah-HEY!
Special Guest Villainess. After being considered for the role of Zelda the Great in the first season, and after being hired for the role of Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, but being forced to pull out, in the second season, Zsa Zsa Gabor finally makes it just in the nick of time in the third season. Ironically, given what happened with Marsha, Minerva was intended to be played by Mae West, but she was unavailable due to her filming of Myra Breckinridge, so Gabor was cast.
Na-na na-na na-na na-na na.
“Would Minerva stoop to something like that?”
“It’s hard to believe, Dick. She’s so beautiful—and worth investigating.”
–Dick amazed that the owner of Bruce’s favorite spa might be evil, and Bruce being somewhat creepy in response.
Trivial matters: This episode was discussed on The Batcave Podcast episode 66 by host John S. Drew with special guest chum, independent filmmaker Robert Long, manager of a Facebook group for the series.
This was the final episode of the series. There was talk of trying to move the show to NBC, but that never went anywhere, and also at the very least Adam West was rather burned out on the role—though that was more due to the reduced budget, reduced script editing, and general reduced giving-a-damn of the third season.
West and Ward will return to the roles of Batman and Robin several more times after this: in two Legends of the Superheroes specials in 1979, and in voice form in Filmation’s The New Adventures of Batman in 1977, the “Large Marge” episode of The Simpsons in 2002, 2016’s The Return of the Caped Crusaders, and that film’s forthcoming sequel, Batman vs. Two-Face. West also did Batman (with Casey Kasem as Robin) in Hanna Barbera’s SuperFriends and The Super Powers Team animated series in 1984 and 1985 (replacing Olan Soule, who had voiced Batman in previous incarnations of SuperFriends). West has also done voices in other animated Batman productions, including the Gray Ghost in Batman: The Animated Series, Thomas Wayne in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Mayor Grange in The Batman. They’ve also been making use of his talents on Powerless.
Producers William Dozier and Howie Horwitz make uncredited cameos as two of Minerva’s spa clients, while Jacque Bergerac reprises his role as French Freddie the Fence (last seen in “Batman Displays His Knowledge,” where he was a fence who fenced, a shtick not used this time ’round, as epées probably weren’t in the budget).
Pow! Biff! Zowie! “Darling!” There are moments of this series finale that are fun. Zsa Zsa Gabor is pretty much playing the same role she always played, which was that of Zsa Zsa Gabor. One really doesn’t expect much else, and Gabor is obviously having a grand old time. It’s nice to see Bad-Ass Undercover Alfred in action one final time, it’s good to see Adam West get to actually be Bruce Wayne for a bit, Batman and Robin wearing towels over their uniforms is a hilarious visual, and Batgirl’s impersonation of Minerva at the end is a delight.
(By the way, Alfred himself later says that the Deepest Secret Extractor short circuited before he could reveal his secrets, but I chalk that up to the butler’s modesty.)
Having said that, it’s obvious that pretty much everyone involved was fresh out of fucks to give. There’s a miasma of perfunctoriness that hangs over this episode even more than the other dreary episodes in this slog of a season. The DSE functions in an inconsistent manner—why did it jump immediately to revealing Alfred’s secret, when for everyone else it required a specific question?—the Dynamic Duo’s escape from the pressurizer happens off camera. It’s difficult to enjoy the cameos by William Dozier and Howie Horwitz, as one can’t help but wonder if they’re there, not to appear in front of the camera before the lights go out for the final time, but because it saved them money on two guest star appearances.
There’s an early scene where Minerva walks into the room to talk to her employees and Freddie. She throws the door shut behind her, but it doesn’t latch properly, and it falls back open again. They don’t even bother with a reshoot, just letting it stand and going on with the scene.
That neglect is emblematic of this final season of the show, and the perfect symbol for this rather lame finish to a cultural icon.
Next week, we’ll take a look at Filmation’s 1977 animated Batman series that starred West and Ward’s voices, plus the live-action Legends of the Superheroes specials from 1979, then the week after that will be a general overview of Batman ’66 to conclude the Bat-rewatch.
Bat-rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido is running a Kickstarter for Mermaid Precinct, the long-awaited fifth novel in his series of fantasy police procedurals. Please consider supporting it, as there are only a couple of days left!
I think the purpose of the Dozier and Horwitz cameos was absolutely for them to get their faces in front of the camera — and also to net them a little extra cash from performing speaking roles. Years later, Dozier was still crowing about receiving checks for his Desmond Doomsday voiceovers. And just on an ego level, the two of them always seemed ready, willing and able to make themselves the joke, going all the way back to Fine Finny Fiends in the first season.
The problem is that, in both episodes, the gag doesn’t work unless you’re one of the very few people on Earth who know who Dozier and Horowitz are/were. It’s the worst kind of in-joke: one that only makes sense to the people participating it and leaves everyone else scratching their head. And given the adversarial relationship West claims to have had with the two of them, their intrusion Into the narrative of the series can’t even be excused as good-hearted camaraderie on the part of a creative team that was about to be broken up and wanted to do something fun for one another one last time. More likely, the cast was probably annoyed by having their swan song interrupted by two bosses they felt had been neglecting their work for quite some time. A sad but typical headstone to a series that was hampered to a great degree by its producers’ lack of genuine emotional investment.
New topic: It’s pretty darn stupid of Minerva to swipe Bruce’s watch just to give her a second chance at convincing him to take a treatment he had already turned down once. She’s awfully lucky he assumed he hadn’t worn the watch in the first place, rather than accusing her and her staff of petty theft, which is what just about anyone else would have done.
And so we come to the end of our Bat-journey, and it’s a pretty mediocre finale. I suppose the idea of using a health spa to extract millionaires’ secrets is mildly clever, but it makes for a rather static episode told on just a few sets, without a lot of action, and with some lazy shortcuts like the off-camera “anti-steam pill” escape. And how come Minerva’s “Deepest Secret Extractor” just goes for Bruce’s vault combination? That’s hardly his deepest secret. I’d expected that he’d reveal that he used his extraordinary mental discipline to resist the extractor and feed it a false lead as a trap for Minerva, but apparently he was as susceptible to it as anyone else, so its operation when used on him makes little sense. (I know, Keith, you said it only went for what she asked for, but then it should be called the Requested Secret Extractor, not the Deepest Secret Extractor. In a show where everything is labeled, nomenclatural precision is important!)
I guess Zsa Zsa Gabor was okay as Minerva, but her persona has never done much for me. And it’s hard to care as much about the Bat-villains who are just celebrities playing themselves. It hardly even counts as acting. Notable features include the return of Freddie the Fence (for what little it’s worth) and the modified hair-dryer prop that was used as the Brain Wave Bat-Analyzer in the Black Widow episodes. Plus the cameos at the beginning by producers William Dozier and Howie Horwitz as themselves. Horwitz’s line about succeeding by never listening to network executives was a bit of a Parthian shot as the show ended.
The ending of the actual episode was quite weak, though — no real conclusion of any sort, just a feeble iteration of the tired old “Where did Batgirl go?” beat. That would be understandable if this episode had been shot earlier in the season and just happened to come last in broadcast order, but it was actually the last one shot as well. Given that, it’s surprising that the final moments of the episode are just so damn dull and anticlimactic. They could’ve given the episode a stronger ending while still being within the common ’60s idiom of not having formal finales — say, have a tag scene with all the regulars assembled in Gordon’s office and just sharing some camaraderie, and maybe having Batman give some closing speech about how he and Robin would always be there to protect the good citizens of Gotham City from crime in all its strange and unpredictable forms.
Although it occurs to me to wonder if the “What happened to Batgirl?” line might’ve had a metatextual significance — i.e. why did a character who started out so strong and dynamic end up being just a serial hostage in the last few episodes? Maybe they were pressured by the network to weaken her and this was their protest. But that’s probably reading too much into it.
I admit this episode has a lot of flaws and is awful in terms of a series finale, but I thought it was OK, certainly better than the Cassandra ep, IMO. As Keith said, it’s Zsa Zsa being Zsa Zsa, which is what she always did. I saw her on a Bonanza as a bogus fortune teller in a 1967 ep and it’s much the same performance. The plot has a lot of holes, I admit, but at least they actually spent money on sets and Minerva’s wardrobe, as opposed to Ida Lupino having to wear a hand-me-down costume that two henchmolls had worn during season 2. I thought Minerva’s silver metallic blazer would have looked good on The Siren had Joan Collins made a return appearance.
I agree with Steve that the Dozier/Horwitz cameos probably didn’t go over well with the cast and crew. As a friend of mine once said, when Zsa Zsa asked Dozier how he amassed his fortune, the people who worked on the show probably wanted to say, ‘by not paying us!’ I also suspect the shirtless Adam West beefcake at the beginning was a favor to Adam to prove Batman didn’t have a beer belly.
I also should mention that henchman Adonis was played by William Smith, who later would play the hero in the 1973 ‘Bee-movie’ classic, Invasion of the Bee Girls. That movie featured three other season 3 Batman bit players–Cliff Osmond (Siren henchman Andante) as the sheriff, Victoria Vetri/Angela Dorian (Florence of Arabia, Tut’s moll) as the scientist, and Anitra Ford (uncredited as a model in Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill) as the mad scientist.
@3/JP: That’s hilarious. “By not paying us” would have been the perfect rejoinder.
Also, Horwitz taking the occasion to deride the wisdom of network executives seems rather tone-deaf. If there’s an appropriate time to do so, it probably isn’t in the final episode of a program that went from cultural dominance to cancellation in the span of just 26 months. I’m sure Dozier and Horwitz would have attributed that decline to ABC’s cluelessness and stinginess – – and they may well have had a point – – but it seems pretty clear that many of the factors at play were the fault of the producers. Like emphasizing stunt casting and general crass bombast while attempting to pass off increasingly stale and lazy storytelling as somehow part of the experience.
From almost the moment the series hit big, Dozier et al appeared intent on milking it for every cheap buck it was worth while using it as the template for a cottage industry of similar offerings (The Green Hornet, Dick Tracy, Wonder Woman and God knows what else). Maybe a creative team that regarded their source material with something better than opportunistic contempt would have been more interested in keeping the quality ball higher in the air for a longer period of time. As it is, that first season stands as a rather miraculous case of an adaptation that is much more on-target than it often gets credit for being, and more affectionate-seeming in retrospect than it was meant to be behind the scenes.
@4/Steve
I can’t really disagree with anything you said. I think the downfall started really quickly when Dozier, as you say, started trying to milk the show rather than continuing to nurture it. There was a self-help mantra a few years ago that advised people to ‘keep the main thing the main thing’ and Dozier clearly didn’t do that. Early in the season 2 shoot, there was a dispute between the show and guest star Shelley Winters, who claimed she had hurt herself when she slipped on some water that had overflowed from a sink backstage. I don’t know who was right or wrong, but I do know that Winters said in a letter to Dozier that he wasn’t on-site so she couldn’t talk to him about it at the time it happened.
That goes with your point about Dozier trying to milk the show as a template for other, similar shows. He likely was so busy with the other shows and pilots that he couldn’t be bothered with the one show among them that had been successful. Batman needed the guidance of people such as him and Lorenzo Semple, who both had a vision of how it should be. Instead, it basically was left in the day-to-day hands of journeymen such as Horwitz and Charles Hoffman, who took over for Semple as script editor.
I’d also say the money grab of the movie adversely affected the show. Dozier said in a chutzpah-laden April 1966 interview that he expected it to be a huge success, and he believed he could buck the system by asking people to pay for something they already were getting for free. It didn’t work, and I’ll always wonder if the ‘Big 4’ villains, other than Catwoman, were held out of the first few arcs of the second season because Dozier still was trying to milk more profits out of the movie. (And keep in mind Julie Newmar wasn’t in the movie, so maybe they felt that airing one of her arcs wouldn’t have been ‘competition’ for the movie.) It would have made much more sense to begin season 2 with Penguin than with Archer, a move which certainly helped halt the show’s momentum.
J.P. Pelzman: It wouldn’t be the first or last time that a TV show was doomed creatively by being a success financially.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@6/krad
Good point, Keith, not to mention the successful ones that run into trouble because of jealousy and infighting among the cast members.
Is it just me, or does this episode weirdly foreshadow the show’s kinda-sorta-not-really successor Wonder Woman? I coulda sworn that the mind-reading beauty salon plot was taken straight from a Golden Age WW comic…
In other words – no, I can’t remember a damn thing about this one, either. Nothing except how adorable Zsa Zsa sounded as she repeated “Actually I am…” four times. What a disappointing note to bow out on…
rubberlotus: Heck, this plot is very similar to that of a Green Hornet episode (from the same producers, remember), specifically the “Beautiful Dreamer” two-parter.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hey folks. I’m getting married on Saturday, and the pre-wedding prep has me all in a tizzy, so it’ll be a week before we look at the post-1968 Bat-stuff. Talk to y’all again when I’m a happily married man……………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Holy holy bonds of matrimony, Batman! Congratulations! I’d gotten so used to you guys just being engaged, I almost forgot there was a step after that.
Christopher: To be fair, we got engaged in 2013, so I get that……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Congratulations, Keith! And my best to Wrenn too!
Folks I need another week to finish watching the cartoon and specials. Next week, I promise!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad, do you know when this episode was filmed? And when the cancellation was announced?
I recently learned that in January, 1968, West visited Uruguay, and they were just airing the first season here. He told the press that they should look forward to the next two seasons.
If he was here in mid-January, and this aired in mid-March, it was probably already filmed, but they hadn’t yet cancelled it.
I got newspaper scans from the National Library, with a mustachioed West posing with kids, signing aurtographs, and hanging out with his then-girlfriend, Linda Cristal. She was Argentinian, but was raised in Uruguay, then became an actress and worked in the US.
There is even an urban legend (no evidence in the press) that he partied with our then president, Jorge Pacheco Areco. Given how much West liked to party, I wonder if there are any 50 year old bat-descendants in my country…