Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - The Wax Men

**/****

Michael Dunn guest stars as a little mastermind in a clown getup orchestrating a takeover of the Seaview through the use of wax dummies in the guise and direct imitation of the sub crew, including Admiral Nelson! Captain Crane's tardiness is the monkey wrench that Dunn doesn't anticipate.

The reason behind why Dunn orchestrated all of this isn’t explained until the final dialogue scene between Nelson and Crane…I busted out in laughter at this. How Dunn could prepare such a takeover (who designed the wax dummies with the exact features of the crew and how could this all be carried out under the disguise of “possible statues from the lost city of Atlantis”?) is never quite explained and probably couldn’t be it is all so preposterous. Dunn is fun as the crazed clown (why is he dressed as a clown and were there clowns in Atlantis?) running about with a remote control device feeding orders to his dummies as they pursue Crane throughout the sub, I must admit, but this whole storyline is just so beyond absurd I tried as I could to not scrutinize it without much success. Crane has done this before—save the sub from a takeover—but how he could continue to be so puzzled by the crew’s behavior despite the obvious signs they weren’t the folks he has worked alongside for years (clue being their waxy hands that weren’t that defined and pale skin) is quite bewildering in and of itself. While I admittedly found Crane trying to outsmart soulless wax automatons designed to look like the Seaview crew entertaining, how he is so evasive despite the numbers against him requires completely cutting off any form of critical thinking. Not good but nonetheless gets by on the question of how Crane would undermine Dunn’s efforts to take control of the Seaview for good. By the way, how does Dunn know how to control the Seaview much less give direct orders to so many crewmembers? Again, logic took the backseat for sure in the fourth season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.