Leadside debuted on 8 March, 1969. It was written by Lloyd Turner and Gordon Mitchell. Leadside (Ronald Long) is a wheelchair bound mastermind who is working to destroy CONTROL and kill Maxwell Smart (Don Adams).

Max has apparently ruined a number of Leadside’s plans before, and now, Leadside is going to take on CONTROL one final time. Everyone at CONTROL is working to foil Leadside, but they don’t know what his plan is.

While Smart gets out there to investigate, 99 (Barbara Feldon) and the Chief (Edward Platt) use CONTROL’s never-before-seen super-computer ARDVARC to help them figure out Leadside’s plan. Unfortunately, they don’t recognize what he’s saying as part of the plan. Until it’s too late, of course. We’ll probably never see the super-computer again.

And getting rid of Max, that’s the third phase of Leadside’s plan to render CONTROL useless. Of course, Max will win the day, eventually, with some fancy swordwork.

It’s apparently a riff on the series, Ironside. Which means nothing to me. And there’s Paul Carr, who will always be Kelso on Star Trek’s second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before.

It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill episode, nothing overly exciting, and honestly, not knowing what Ironside was in terms of 60s television, I feel I’m missing part of the joke.

Greer Window, this one I get. Written by Chris Hayward and Arne Sulan, it was first broadcast on 15 March, 1969. It’s also the penultimate story of the season.

Max is resting at home due to an injury, he takes a bullet to the ass. Watching the building next door, Max sees secret documents being stolen. While Max watches, 99 has to go into the building.

To help him, he’s got some gadgets hidden in his crutches, but will he be able to help 99 if trouble comes looking for her. She quickly runs afoul of Greeer (Barney Phillips), and he tells Smart he will kill her if he tries anything.

The story moves along as you would expect it to. Greer sets it up so Max and 99 will watch each other die, but a timely distraction provided by the Chief allows for Max to use his gadget-filled crutches.

They’ve done some nice things in the past couple of episodes where they get 99 back out in the field. Sure the pair are married, but that doesn’t mean her life has ended. She’s a competent agent, and as we see in this one, she can handle herself.

The Not-So-Great Escape: Part 1 is the first part of the final story of the season. It was first broadcast on 22 March, 1969. It was written by Sultan and Hayward, and was directed by Adams.

It also has Bernie Kopell back as Siegfried!

It seems CONTROL agents are going missing from an airport, including the Chief. Where are they all? Where else, a POW camp run by KAOS… in New Jersey.

There’s a KAOS controlled phone booth in the airport. The agents are paged, and when they take the phone, they are stolen away. So Max and 99 have their hands full trying to figure out where the missing agents have been taken to.

When Max tries to get kidnapped in the same way, KAOS simply grabs him but he is able to escape and make his own way to the camp. The first episode plays wonderfully goofy, and ends with Max showing up as a commandant, but he doesn’t fool anyone, and instead gets chased down by dogs and thrown in with the rest of the prisoners.

So that means next week, Smart will have to lead the escape.

It ends up riffing on one of my favourite war movies, The Great Escape, and is a lot of fun. Next week we finish Season Four and start the fifth and final season of Get Smart.