I have been sharing my takes on the episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from the late 70s off and on for the last few months.
The show was, of course, based on the separate series of books from the 1930s and switched off between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew each week for most of the first season. Eventually the “teen” sleuths would combine their efforts in joint episodes.
Up this week is a look at the episode called The Flickering Torch Mystery. I have absolutely no idea where the title for this one comes from by the way. There is no flickering torch.
But whatever…let us not focus on semantics.
This episode is certainly full of some weirdness, but not as weird as our next Hardy Boys — The Disappearing Floor, which actually came before this episode. Somehow I mixed up the order, so I am writing about this one first.
Now, when I say weirdness when talking about this show, I don’t mean to be slamming it at all. It’s just, well, a little weird sometimes. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good show or doesn’t have some good episodes/storylines.
This episode does actually feature a fairly engaging storyline and if that doesn’t grab you then maybe looking at former teen heartthrob Rick Nelson all grown up will.
We enter this installment with Rick Nelson (Tony Eagle) on stage “singing”. My husband walked in at that moment and said that the musicians and Nelson were not really playing at first. Later, he says Nelson was, but the other guys still weren’t. Hey, that’s TV for ‘ya. No reason to really do what you can fake doing.
Also, if you really want a sad story, look up how Rick Nelson died. It was not a simple plane crash, like I always thought. What a horrible situation for him and the others who died.
Fenton Hardy is off stage, clapping for Rick’s character, and we wonder why Fenton is there but we soon find out that he is helping security for Tony’s next performance, which will be where the Hardys live – The Tri-City area. Wherever that is.
Fenton says he will be ready with the help of his sons, even though they are “just your normal, average teenage boys.”
We flip right to Joe and Frank Hardy in a small airplane, doing flips. Or at least Frank is. When another plane runs into severe fog and starts to struggle because of an instrument failure, the boys are there to rescue the guy and help him land safely.
That’s when they realize the man, a Mr. Lou Haskel, is exactly who they are looking for because they are investigating a case of a missing man — Richard Johnston — for their dad, who is a private investigator in case you forgot.
The missing man, a sound engineer, left for work one morning and never came home. He was supposed to show up to an appointment with Mr. Haskel, but he never showed. The boys want to know if Mr. Haskel has seen him. He says he hasn’t but gives them a warning that his wife, who hired their dad, is known to “overreact” at times.
Thank you, Mr. Misogyny, the boys will keep that in mind.
Mr. Misogyny works for All Points Airway and the boys want to know why a sound engineer would be working for him. Mr. M says it is because he developed the sound system for the jet in front of them.
Ooh. Ah. Fascinating.
The boys want to see the inside, but Sexist Man says, “Nope..not right now. Have to get on with my day.”
They take that answer pretty easily and head off home to mull over what they’ve learned so far, which is very little.
Their Dad returns home with Tony in tow and they are starstruck because they have all his albums. Breaking all kinds of confidentiality they tell their dad what they’ve found out about Richard Johnston in front of Tony and his manager.
Tony’s shocked. “Richard’s missing? He’s the best sound engineer in the country. He’s supposed to be doing our sound at the stadium. What happened to him?”
The local fire chief, always a source of absolutely the worst take on things offers up this gem: “He probably turned Mom’s photo to the wall and took a plane to a place he’d never been before….” Implying that he simply walked out because he didn’t want to deal with his family.
Everyone promptly ignores that idiot and heads out to the venue to discuss security. Tony says he wants to stay back and “discuss some things” with the boys. Huh…whatever that means. At that moment, though, Fenton’s secretary, Callie, is trying to reach the boys on a CB radio.
She’s found a car over an embankment and wants them to come quick. Tony overhears it and says he’ll join them for more screen time and a bigger check — I mean because he wants to find out what happened to Richard.
They find the car over the embankment and if anyone was in it, they’re dead, Joe declares. For some reason the boys don’t call the cops at this point. Joe just ties a rope to a tree and lowers himself down to the scene. Luckily, Richard isn’t in the car, and they won’t have to tell his wife he’s dead. At least not yet.
Tony suggests they go back to the plane that Haskel didn’t want them to go in and start investigating there to see if there are any clues to where Richard went.
Inside the plane they find Richard’s equipment but only after they are chased by an angry pair of Doberman Pinchers.
Dipsy-Do police chief catches them snooping, by the way. Seems he shows up at just the right, or wrong, times. He scolds them a bit and they decide not to share anything about what they’ve found, probably because they know he will bungle the case.
Fingerprints that Joe pulled from a Tony Eagle tape inside the equipment box prove to the boys that Richard was in the plane, even though Haskel said he wasn’t.
Dun-dun-dun.
Later we are at the stadium, getting ready for the concert with Fenton talking to his staff about security and the boys heading to see Tony, who is in his dressing room arguing with his manager, Carl, about how he hasn’t been shown his finances lately. Tony says he doesn’t know how much money he has. The manager tells him not to worry about it, his finances are fine, so we clearly know something is up there.
Tony starts sleuthing when he asks his manager if he’s seen Richard Johnston. The manager says he hasn’t in a couple of weeks, but Richard said he’d be there that night for the concert.
“Come on, don’t worry…I’m going to go do something totally not suspicious now,” good ole’ Carl says as he leaves the room.
Okay, he doesn’t really say that, but that’s what it sounds like if you listen between the lines.
Meanwhile, Richard’s wife found a piece of paper in the floor of his car after the car was taken to the junkyard. It’s ripped up but the boys can see enough that they know there was something dangerous Richard was trying to warn someone about. The letter is a carbon copy so the boys ask if they can go to Richard’s office and find the original so they can learn what Richard wanted to warn everyone about.
When they get there they can’t find the letter, but they overhear someone talking outside the office and discover that Richard wanted to warn someone that something has been rigged to the sound system to —
Well, I think I’ll leave it right there because you might want to watch the episode yourself and learn what someone was supposed to be warned about.
Ah, who are we kidding? You probably won’t want to watch it or already have so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read past these dots. . . .
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Okay, so while Frank and Joe are snooping for the letter that will tell them what Richard was trying to warn someone about, they overhear someone on the phone saying that the Hardy boys won’t find out that once the sound machine hits a certain frequency Tony will be killed.
Then the person sets the office on fire to cover up the evidence, not knowing that the boys are inside. Eventually the boys are able to break out, just as the fire company shows up (rather quickly I might add, without it being clear who called them), and rush out to try to warn Tony.
The way the boys try to call the police station with their CB totally bewilders me, especially since it works. Can you really call a landline with a CB radio? I should Google this, but I’m ot going to….
What bewilders me more is how they don’t say to the officer, who answers, “Tell my dad or the chief Tony is going to be killed!” Instead, they ask to talk to the chief and the officer puts the phone down to go to look for the chief.
This wastes a ton of time, so Joe tries to call the operator again to patch it through to the police station. Sadly, this is before there were multiple phone lines so the operator can’t get through.
Joe and Frank drive as fast as they can to the stadium, race in and onto the stage and demand that the concert be stopped before Tony is killed. They are certain there is a bomb inside the sound system.
There isn’t, however, and now the chief and everyone who was evacuated from the building and missed out on the concert are extremely angry. The boys look like the boy who cried wolf.
Carl, Tony’s manager, is incredulous. How dare these teenagers ruin the concert and say something was going to happen when it wasn’t! There’s no death threats against Tony, he says and then reminds them that Tony is on his way to London the next day.
The boys are gently scolded by their father for putting themselves in danger and not having all the facts, which makes Frank even more determined to figure out what the letter actually said. The evidence is gone, but surely if he jots some letters down on a blank piece of paper next to the piece of the letter, he will completely figure out what is going on. Somehow, he decides the name that is cut off is actually Haskel.
Richard was trying to warn Haskel that there is a bomb wired into the sound system of the plane that is flying Tony to London Joe summarizes, from very little information provided by Frank.
When the scene shifts to Carl and Haskel bidding Tony farewell and telling him to enjoy his trip to London, but declining to go with him, the viewer can see guilt written all over them.
The boys make it to the airport just as Tony’s private jet is starting down the runway.
Once again, they beg the police chief to listen to them, but they’ve already been wrong once, so they’re told to go cause trouble somewhere else.
The boys won’t be silenced, though, so they take off with their van to follow the jet and force it to stop before they take off. Richard is found inside the airplane, where the extra gas would be stored and the plot by Haskel and Carl unravels.
Carl was taking Tony’s money and investing it in the airplanes owned by Heskel and also charging Tony extra every time he chartered the plane. Their plan was to kill Tony before he found out what they had been doing, especially since Tony kept asking to see his financial records. Richard found out about the plot when he checked out the system for the jet star (the name of the charter plane Tony used) and discovered that a high frequency feature had been added. He knew that was dangerous, so he tried to warn Haskel. Haskel, though, knew since he’d planned the plane to explode with Tony inside so he kidnapped Richard and stowed him in the bottom of the plane.
By the time he was found, it had been almost a week and as far as I know he was in there without food or water. Somehow, though, he was standing and chatting with everyone else like he was totally fine, instead of being in a hospital to be treated.
That’s how television is, of course.
If you want to watch the episode for yourself you can find it here: https://youtu.be/n8S8Ke6e7iU?si=fXxJBXBF0pFDmIoc
I am going to say that the story in this episode is not related to the book with the same title since this is the description of the book: Two unexplainable plane crashes near an airport on the East Coast plunge Frank and Joe Hardy into a bizarre case. From the moment Frank and Joe find a radioactive engine in an airplane junkyard, unexpected dangers strike like lightning. Despite the repeated attempts on their lives, the teenage detectives pursue their investigation, discovering two vital clues and others that provide the solution to one of the most baffling mysteries the boys and Mr. Hardy have ever encountered.
Have you ever seen this one?
