A Little Bit of Luck, A Little Bit of Grief (6.20)

[J.J. Walters]

This is the official MM thread for A Little Bit of Luck, A Little Bit of Grief (6.20). All discussions and reviews for this episode should go here. If you wish to rate the episode, please do so with the poll. The avg. score will be the official 'community rating', which will be used on the episode page (updated monthly).

This thread is also linked in the episode page of the Episode Guide.

Original Air Date: 4/3/1986
World's collide when Rick becomes a millionaire after winning the lottery, and Magnum and T.C. fight to save a clubhouse for underprivileged children.

[J.J. Walters]

Finally, another "Rick-centric" episode. Too bad the story is kind of weak.

Further evidence that Rick is the luckiest guy on earth. The guy wins a million dollar lottery, gets scammed and loses it all, including his job, and then finds himself (and his love interest) in physical danger. What do you do in that situation? You get your best pals Magnum and T.C. over there pronto to dish out some serious hurt, that's what! Great setup to the fight, too. TM and T.C. have been in and out of a jail cell all episode, dealing with other issues, but as soon as they learn Rick is in trouble, they drop everything to help their friend. I love it.

Hey, Rick's favorite song is "As Time Goes By". No surprise there!

[frog480]

Any idea where the game show scene was filmed?, I was surprised to see Bruce Forsyth as the game show host.

[lutherhgillis]

Can you say, "PREDICTABLE"? I saw the end of this episode coming from a mile away! I felt like I had already seen this one before it originally aired. I could have written a better one than this and that's not saying much...

The only thing good about this episode is that Cassie Yates was not in it!

[J.J. Walters]

The only thing good about this episode is that Cassie Yates was not in it!

LOL!!

[golfmobile]

Poor Rick! This episode sure makes him look like a dumb bunny. First he wins $1 million and instantly believes some good-looking blonde lady falls for him just like that. Then, after bringing her back to Hawaii with him, he plays high-stakes poker (surely illegal!!) with virtual strangers and has his fiancee acting as a waitress. She goes for a walk on the beach, and he just lets her go by herself? Yeah, he's really in love. I think I'd run like heck from an inconsiderate jerk like that. And he has IcePick there with him, a known criminal? And he does this on the premises the club he's supposed to be responsibly managing -- he's that stupid? No wonder Higgins and the Board of Directors fired him! After the litany of things Higgins recited that Rick failed to do, I find it hard to believe he was still there running the club in the first place.

I wonder also if Claudia Cron was pregnant when this was filmed. She looks rather thick around the middle, and usually the female guest stars were, well, rather picked for their looks.

I love watching these, but the more you watch them, the more you see how the plots of many of them don't make sense in the long run.

And, oh, yes, Jeannie was part of the con/scam. You can't tell me this was the FIRST time she worked with these guys, and they trusted her, a virtual stranger. No, she had to have done this before with them. And if so, since she ratted them out at the end here, we're expected to believe that they're not going to rat her out for all the other times she worked with them? So, okay, Rick can refuse to press charges for THIS attempt, but still, she doesn't get to just go home to Kansas (or wherever her folks' farm was). She wouldn't "walk" once her partners are caught.

Oddly enough, finding all the "flaws" doesn't negatively affect my pleasure in watching them!!

I liked the ending with Rick and TM walking away at night at the airport. Predictable, yes, but it follows the Casablanca theme that was a running undercurrent for this episode.

Can anyone figure out what Rick is wearing on his necklace around his neck? I thought he usually just wore a thick gold chain. TC also has a necklace with a charm or something on it. Anyone know what each is wearing?

I wonder how many times they had to film the shot of the briefcase (with the money) landing in the back of that produce truck WITHOUT bouncing out??

golf

[DarCA]

I was just watching this episode and was wondering if this could be considered a flub. Magnum is asleep in the guest house bedroom when Rick is calling on the phone. He gets up to answer it, walks into the living room, but misses the call.

Why didn't he just answer the phone on the nightstand?

[Carmen]

Why didn't he just answer the phone on the nightstand?

Maybe just because he is Thomas Magnum, the guy who always has trouble waking up.

[IKnowWhatYoureThinking]

I think Rick always does dumb things with women. This being a prime example!

[J.J. Walters]

I was just watching this episode and was wondering if this could be considered a flub. Magnum is asleep in the guest house bedroom when Rick is calling on the phone. He gets up to answer it, walks into the living room, but misses the call.

Why didn't he just answer the phone on the nightstand?

Hmm, the way they set it up, I don't think it would be a flub. You only hear one phone ringing, the phone/answering machine in the living area. No phone appears to ring in the bedroom (although it's hard to tell for sure). Maybe his bedroom phone is broken? Maybe once the answering machine picks up he can only answer that phone?

[J.J. Walters]

I wonder also if Claudia Cron was pregnant when this was filmed. She looks rather thick around the middle, and usually the female guest stars were, well, rather picked for their looks.

I wondered that, too. She does have three sons. She dropped out of acting in the early '90s and became a really good artist (oil paintings and graphite drawings)!

http://www.claudiacron.com/index.html

I wonder how many times they had to film the shot of the briefcase (with the money) landing in the back of that produce truck WITHOUT bouncing out??

Pineapple trucks are apparently out to get Rick. He loses his money to a pineapple truck in this episode, and in "No Need to Know" he says he once had a dog on the islands that was run over by a pineapple truck!

Doc mentioned somewhere about Icepick "licking his lips like a lizard". Well, it's on full display in this episode during the poker game! 7 or 8 times he does it.



Lastly, you ever see somebody who looks EXACTLY like somebody you used to know? Like, so much so that it's creepy? MacKenzie's secretary, Ms. Debra Lee Worthy, looks EXACTLY like my 10th grade english teacher!



Doppelganger's, they're out there!

[Tom_Magnum]

This episode was interesting, but better than others in Season 6.

[Rutledal]

I don't no if you guys list reused filiming loacations or not, but if you do I would like to metion that the look-out where Rick goes to deliver the money is the same look-out where Magnum has his first meeting with Admiral Hawks in "Blood and Honor".

[Rutledal]

Also noticed a contradiction; in this episode Rick claims that his favorite song is "As Time Goes By", but in "I Witness" he says his favorite song is Morris Albert's "Feelings".

[Jay-Firestorm]

I’m back from my small holiday (that’s “vacation” in American talk ) and did last week’s batch of reviews on my laptop, so here we go.
This episode… don’t like it that much to be honest.

[Rating=6.0]

As T.C. and Magnum try to prevent the demolition of T.C.’s youth club-house by a slimy land developer, Rick becomes a millionaire after winning the mainland lottery – but gets mixed up with some card shark con artists. Not a very likable episode…

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This review contains spoilers.

This episode, to me, has ‘filler’ written all over it, to meet the season’s required episode count. It just feels like it was thrown together late in the season, and has little to really like about it, in my opinion.

The strangest thing for me about this episode is the appearance of Bruce Forsyth, well known to Brits (such as me) as an entertainer with a career stretching back to the 1950s. We’d already seen several familiar British faces in the England-set ‘Deja Vu’ at the start of the season, but seeing Forsyth here feels really odd.

I don’t really care for the plot of this one much at all. It is very slow in places, and for the most part not very interesting. In fact, for most of the episode, it felt like an episode from the far inferior fifth season.

I think the main thrust of the plot was intended to be that Rick was too busy wrapped up in his new found wealth to help his friends Magnum and T.C. out, but it just comes off as an unfocused mish-mash. I find the idea to not be very well realised, and for the whole it just doesn’t work.

And beyond that, I just didn’t find Rick becoming a millionaire very convincing at all. So much more could have been done with it, even on a limited budget.

The best bit about this shaky episode is the Casablanca-style final scene, with Rick saying goodbye to Jeannie, but sadly it is not as good as it might have been, as the rest of the episode building up to it has been rather sub par.

All-in-all, not a particularly good episode at all. ‘This Island Isn’t Big Enough…’ probably gets my vote for weakest episode of the season, but even so, ‘A Little Bit of Luck…’ is pretty poor.

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Other notes, bloopers and misc.:

* The correct formatting of this episode title, as seen on-screen, is ‘A Little Bit of Luck… A Little Bit of Grief’.

* As mentioned on this episode’s main page, the words ‘Ice Pick’ appear on-screen for the first time. But worth noting is that they appear as two separate words, not ‘Icepick’ as they sometimes appear on other occasions.

* T.C. wears his purple Lakers cap once again. I guess he did wear this often and I’d totally forgotten about it!

* As already mentioned on the episode’s main page, Bruce Forsyth is one of the U.K.’s biggest entertainers, with TV career stretching back to the 1950s. He’s been a compare, game show host, chat show host, sometime actor (as I suppose he is in this episode), and at the age of 81 is still going – today (Saturday 12th September 2009) he begins the new series of the BBC’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, the original U.K. version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’, and which the whole country except me seems to be going mad over!