Wonder Woman (1975) episode 6 takes place almost entirely on the rarely seen Paradise Island, and concludes the show’s first two-parter.
“The poor man’s lost his mind. He gave himself up, babbling something about a fifteen year old girl with the strength of ten men.” – General Blankenship
Wonder Woman (1975) episode 6 (“The Feminum Mystique: Part Two”) picks up right where the previous episode left off. Drusilla (Debra Winger), Wonder Woman’s teen sister, has twirled herself into her own Paradise Island hero costume, and gone after a kidnapped General Blankenship (Richard Eastham). Said kidnapping is, however, only a trap to capture Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter), and not being able to tell one super-powered woman from the next, the Nazis nab Drusilla instead.
The group of Nazis in Wonder Woman episode 6 are very keen to gain information on the titular hero’s bullet-deflecting bracelets, hoping that if they do, they’ll be able to use the metal of said bracelets to create some impenetrable armour for their war machines. After being chloroformed and shut away in an abandoned warehouse, Drusilla lets slip that this metal is called ‘feminum’, that it can only be found on Paradise Island, and that Paradise Island itself can be visited by following a certain few constellations.
It’s hard to blame Drusilla for giving all that away, really. This Nazi bloke reckons he got a hold of the information by seducing her, thinking himself all charming and attractive. But Dru’s only met a few dudes so far. She doesn’t know what they’re about. If an alien abducted me and then asked me where the House of Commons was, for example, I’d probably tell ‘em.
And, you know, although I enjoyed it, when I was writing my review of the previous episode, I was slowly preparing a spiel about how the ‘70s Wonder Woman telly show now feels rather divorced from that first, pilot episode. What with Drusilla conjuring up her own Wonder Woman-esque outfit, without first being given a belt to maintain her powers away from Paradise Island, and being subject to all that other ceremony Wonder Woman had to go through.
But, if the upshot of those kinds of continuity errors means we spend more time on Paradise Island, more time watching Dru escape from imprisonment unaided, and more time watching Wonder Woman team up with her sister to save their home from a Nazi incursion, then they’re totally fine by me. I won’t nitpick again, promise. It is still true though that Wonder Woman episode 6 isn’t exactly what I signed on for when I first started watching the show. The slapstick visual comedy is gone, and that novelty of watching the 1970s present 1940s wartime America in a way more quaint, and more quirky, than I have ever seen before, isn’t quite the focus it originally was.
But then maybe the pilot episode is the outlier, rather than the series that followed it. And, airing twelve months after the first episode did, perhaps Wonder Woman episode 6 is the show hitting its stride. The threat to Wonder Woman isn’t just a few Nazi spies anymore, but what the effect of a never-ceasing line of Nazi spies might have on her home, on the country she’s come to love, and on the world at large. Wonder Woman herself isn’t just the anonymous saviour of war department employees anymore either, but a symbol of inspiration for her fellow Amazonian women, a symbol of hope for the Allies, and another hazard for the enemies to consider when plotting out their next evil plan.
The potential of Wonder Woman (1975) might be betrayed by its episodic nature every now and then, but a ~hundred-minute arc like “The Feminum Mystique”, where WW2 espionage, Paradise Island, and family-driven plot-lines are all combined, is a real showcase of the story-telling capabilities a character like Wonder Woman has probably always had, and hopefully always will.
Episode 6 of Wonder Woman (1975) is now available to watch on digital and on demand.
