Recapping Knight Rider (1982): Episode 1

Knight of the Phoenix (Part 1/2)

My apologies that this first recap is SO delayed. I had every intention of finishing and recapping multiple episodes during Christmas/New Year’s week, but circumstances prevented it. Circumstances being that I hate this show. But I’ll be soldiering through, just maybe slower than I initially intended.

Also, EDITOR’S NOTE: It has been brought to my attention that my description of KITT, the talking car, was grossly incorrect. It is not a “Pontiac Grand Am”, but rather a “Pontiac Firebird, the performance spec version of the Pontiac Trans Am”. I deeply regret this error, as I know you count on this publication for well-researched, properly-sourced information about 1980s pop culture. I will henceforth be working with a fact checker, who will keep a close eye on my writing.

On to the episode.

—

The 70-second intro is set, in its entirety, to a theme song that sounds like a Turkish folk musician discovered the synthesizer and set fire to all his other instruments. We open in a Las Vegas casino that caters exclusively to white people. (This is what all my high school English teachers called foreshadowing.) Something shady centered on one of the gamblers (“Acton”) is afoot, judging by all the men speaking super conspicuously into wrist and lapel mics. But they don’t seem to be working together - ooh, a double agent situation.

Anyway, the first non-white face on our screens, “Muntzy”, is given a heads-up by his double agent partner “Michael” that “Lonnie” is headed his way. She breezes past him, because a Black man in a maintenance uniform is wallpaper to her, and sneaks into Acton’s suite to photograph schematics of a circuit board. They are labeled CLASSIFIED in bright red, which is a great way to conceal secrets that you plan to leave unsecured in a casino hotel room.

Lonnie is ready to head out, and tells her partner “Wilson” that the coast is clear besides the wallpaper electrician in the hallway. This sets off his alarm bells, and things start to go wrong in quick succession. Wilson enlists Acton’s lady friend to distract him — this is a TRIPLE agent situation! — and none of this is interesting except that Muntzy follows Lonnie out of the hotel, Michael rushes after Muntzy, Acton’s lady friend rushes after Michael screaming his name — MY BROS THIS IS NOT SECRET AGENT BEHAVIOUR IN THE SLIGHTEST — and one of Lonnie’s cronies who was hanging out in the parking lot shoots Muntzy. He was alive on our screens for less than four minutes. Instead of calling for help or staying with his body, Michael and Acton’s lady friend (Tanya) leap into Michael’s Pontiac Fiero, which Muntzy thoughtfully died right in front of, to pursue Lonnie to her rendezvous point.

Blah blah blah, industrial espionage blah, Tanya quadruple-crosses Michael at the rendezvous point and shoots him in the FACE. He goes down like he’s falling through Jell-O, right in front of his beloved Pontiac Aztek:

Tense music and a fade to black. But then this old guy who will later prove to be a slightly less megalomaniacal version of Elon Musk helicopters in and retrieves Michael, or Michael’s body (?), and takes him to a massive stone country house in a verdant landscape that doesn’t seem within the flight radius of a 1980s helicopter originating in Las Vegas. Time passes and Michael is alive, swathed in face bandages, with a trach tube not connected to his throat resting on his chest. Grandpa Elon is told by a doctor that Michael “is probably the only human being on the planet who’s in worse condition than you are”. Harsh, considering G.E. looks perfectly healthy besides having to walk with a cane. But Michael isn’t going to die, because a metal plate in his forehead deflected the face-bullet (lol what). He will, however, have a completely different face. The bandages come off and his new face is David Hasselhoff’s extremely dewy face, which, I mean, we don’t even have surgical technology this good now. Also, my man, please share your Korean skincare regimen because your face looks like a glazed donut. As the doctor is removing the bandages, Grandpa Elon’s valet who is named Devon but whom I will be calling Smoky Eyes because of his amazing eyelid situation, comes in to announce that “the Knight 2000” will be ready soon. G.E. shushes him and they all gaze adoringly upon the new Hasselhoff face that will allow Michael “a second chance to live, unless of course [he prefers] to walk around with a face that might get [him] killed all over again”. People stopping in their tracks to fall in love with Michael’s face will prove to be a recurring theme of this show.

Later, as Smoky Eyes and Grandpa Elon are watching workers in cleanroom suits bustle around outside a workshop near the house, Smoky Eyes comments that Michael looks very much like G.E. as a young man. G.E. doesn’t seem to appreciate this despite it being an obvious motivation of his, and they move on to discussing the Knight 2000 which will be ready within the month. Good thing too because Michael is rehabilitating from the bullet-to-the-face situation quite expeditiously by running up the manor steps six at a time. He is hellbent on getting revenge on Tanya and the other triple-crossers (for himself AND Muntzy, I would hope) but so is G.E., who the show FINALLY tells you is named Mr. Knight. However, Michael wants to work alone. He also wants to be a snoop, so he sneaks into the darkened workshop one night and is confronted by his own car, which now has Cylon headlights. The workshop lights go on and he learns that Mr. Knight and Smoky Eyes have transformed his Pontiac Sunfire into some sort of, shall we say, “smart car” named the KNIGHT 2000. He has an unnecessary amount of attitude with these people who upgraded both his car and his face, but Mr. Knight brushes all that off because he wants Michael to carry on his work, since he’s obviously dying of Cane-Use Disease.

I know this writeup is pretty long already and we haven’t even gotten to the Knight Rider part of it, but it’s just that there’s SO, SO much pointless dialogue in all this setup. To be honest, at this point I was so bored that I switched over to Youtube and watched an entire PBS Frontline documentary on the opioid crisis. Which, by the way, did you know all of the PBS Frontline documentaries are on Youtube? What a gift. Thank you public broadcasting. Okay, anyway, Michael is rude some more, Mr. Knight goes off to bed all sad, and Smoky Eyes walks Michael through all of the Knight 2000 upgrades that Michael describes as looking “like Darth Vader’s bathroom”. Smoky Eyes retorts that the Knight 2000 “is operated entirely by microprocessors which make it virtually impossible for it to be involved in any kind of mishap or collision”. First of all, the real Elon Musk needs to send his entire Autopilot division to intern in this workshop, and second of all, I predict that Michael will do everything possible to test this feature every time he drives this car. Which will be quite soon! Like, immediately, as he goes for a test drive with Devon and tries to crash into a semi. The car doesn’t let him though, and Smoky Eyes explains that the car is truly autonomous, with the “primary function [of the] preservation of human life”, and more specifically, Michael Arthur Long’s life.

This sounds oddly specific but there’s no time for clarification, because Mr. Knight’s Cane-Use Disease has reached its terminus. After telling Michael that he was “spared to lead a great fight”, Mr. Knight shuffles off to the great automobile workshop in the sky. Michael IMMEDIATELY books it for his car, Smoky Eyes in pursuit. Michael reveals he overheard (eavesdropped on) Smoky Eyes’s phone conversation during which he discovered that Tanya had made it to California, to a place called “Silicon Valley”. (They pronounce “Silicon Valley” so deliberately, strange to the ears of someone in 2021 when it’s as common in our vernacular as “Main Street”.) Smoky Eyes initially tries to stop Michael from leaving to pursue this lead, then changes course almost immediately to provide him with a new identity with which to do so, MICHAEL KNIGHT. “Michael Long is dead, remember that.” Why does everyone on this show deliver their lines like they’re threats? Smoky Eyes hilariously calls Michael “a primitive” and attempts to explain a few last things about this completely new machine that Michael is about to drive away in, but he’s confident he can figure it out and roars out onto the open road.

We are barely halfway through this episode.

We’re treated to some b-roll of Michael driving to “Millston, Silicon Valley” set to that amazing Turkosynth theme song, and then the car speaks to Michael for the first time when he tries to put on some music. Because Michael did not have the patience to sit through Devon’s passive aggressive tutorials, during which he probably would have learned that the Knight 2000’s operating system is named KITT and, yes, can talk, he freaks out. He then immediately starts to argue with KITT and tells him to “clam up”, because he has the worst attitude. KITT tries to offer autonomous driving mode since Michael seems a bit crankypants from fatigue, which he of course rejects. Three easy listening songs later, he is fast asleep at the wheel and KITT has taken over, which catches the attention of some cops. Because KITT is a passive aggressive little b, he attempts to wake Michael by whispering at him. It’s not until the cops pull up alongside him, blaring their horn and thumping on the roof of the car, that he awakes. We’re then treated to a joke that, as my brother said, absolutely would not have held up even when it aired: Michael gets out of trouble by pretending to be deaf and possibly physically disabled, and the cops let him off with a warning screamed at the top of their lungs.

So, ok, moving on to Millston and a company named “Comtron” which shares a parking lot with a tiki bar. All the (white) Comtron employees are headed over to happy hour, so Michael follows them in, leaving KITT in the parking lot. Our second and third non-white faces drive up. If you were hoping they were non-white software engineers (which absolutely existed in Silicon Valley in the ‘80s because my dad is friends with like three of them), you are wrong because this is Knight Rider. They are car thieves. Captions tells me they’re named Brown and Jackson, but the show doesn’t actually give them names at this point. Brown calls KITT “mamacita” and blows kisses at it because that’s how this show thinks Hispanic men talk. They decide to postpone grand theft auto for when the car is not parked in a super popular bar’s parking lot in broad daylight, so be ready for at least one additional scene with these two later.

Inside the bar, Michael asks one of the bikini’ed waitresses, Maggie, about some of the Comtron employees sitting across the room. She warns him off saying that she used to work there and it’s not a place he wants to be asking questions about. He immediately asks another question, regarding his “friend Tanya Walker”; Maggie knocks a drink onto his lap because that’s what she thinks of friends of Tanya Walker. The manager comes over and attempts to fire her, but she quits in a rage. Michael follows her out, one of the Comtron employees on his heels. The Comtron woman tells him Tanya Walker is seeing someone, and he replies “I’m not interested in her body, I’m interested in her money”, a sentence I hope never to hear again as long as I live. (Same goes for its inverse.) He convinces her to pass along a message that he has something valuable to sell to Tanya, and drives away slowly enough for the woman to eye his license plate, KNIGHT. Ugh, of course he has a personalized plate.

At Comtron, Tanya asks security to “handle” the driver of this super low profile car. She then canoodles with the president of the company, saying she called security because she “doesn’t want anything to happen to [him] tomorrow… there are lots of people who would love to get their hands on a rich man like [him]”. The subtext screaming loud enough to be supertext is obviously that she is one of those people. To recap, so far the women in this show are femme fatales, scantily clad waitresses, and gold-diggers; and the Black and Brown men are manual laborers (or posing as them) and criminals. All caught up? Great! Because we’ve got to get back to the Rising Sun, where Michael has been lurking in the parking lot waiting for the recently unemployed Maggie. She doesn’t care about Michael’s intentions with Tanya because Comtron took everything that she had — her husband, her house, her job, her ability to afford clothes for her kid. She asks him to please leave her alone and tries to back her hoopty out of its parking space, but Michael has blocked her in with his car — that’s not an alarming thing to do to a lone woman in a parking lot at night at all! — and her bumper falls off when she hits KITT. Michael offers to help, but she again begs him to leave her alone because she’s lost the last job she’s ever going to get in this town. Maggie, I promise you, I live in the Bay Area and there are ten other towns within an hour’s driving distance of this shitty Palo Alto simulacrum. Anyway, Michael offers to run Tanya and her crew out of Millston in exchange for information and asks Maggie to help him, which honest to God is the first non-terrible sentence out of his mouth this entire episode. He drives her home via Prolonged Exposition Boulevard. Maggie’s husband was head of security at Comtron before Tanya was hired as the president’s new executive assistant and started making wholesale changes. Maggie’s husband couldn’t accept these unexplained wholesale changes, and then he wound up dead in a gully.

They pull up to Maggie’s house, and the nanny (yes, she’s Hispanic! Good guess!) Luz is so worked up about Maggie’s tardiness, until Michael appears in the doorway and her demeanor turns on a dime from worry to lasciviousness. An embarrassed Maggie ushers the horny Luz out the door and tells Michael “it’s important you believe me — I haven’t had a man in my apartment since my husband was killed”. I don’t understand this sentence at all, because sure you’re grieving and haven’t wanted to date but I don’t know why it would matter that this rude stranger who made you quit your job would care about that. Anyway all the commotion wakes up Maggie’s son Buddy, which is a name for a dog. No joke, the first sentence he says to Michael — the very first — is “Hi, are you going to marry my mom?” Maggie sends him back to bed but not before he can respond to Michael asking “if I wanted to talk to Tanya alone, where would I go?” with “Who’s Tanya? Competition?” Why is everyone on this guy’s jock?! The only thing worse than his attitude is his hair.

Maggie returns to tell him that Tanya rarely leaves William Benjamin, Comtron’s president, or the home she shares with him, but that rather fortuitously they will be at a Comtron-sponsored demolition derby charity show the very next day. Because it’s Silicon Valley, “they don’t use junkers. Every plant is putting up a brand new car. People are just eating it up.” I want to call this unrealistically wasteful, until I remember that Jeff Bezos just launched a penis-shaped rocket into space thanks to the manual labour of gig workers who don’t get bathroom breaks, so, carry on. Besides, it’s just a plot point that will allow Michael to enter the race with KITT, and take Maggie and Buddy out for the day. Buddy, who has been listening at the doorway this entire time, bursts in like the Kool-Aid Man:

TO BE CONTINUED splashes across the screen, ending the worst hour of my life in quite some time. Two hours if you count that break for the PBS documentary. More to come.