Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

The Wild Wild West: “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth”

This was the first episode with everyone's favorite half-“Hispanic” villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless (played by the unimitable Michael Dunn). Of course, as played by Mr. Dunn, Dr. Loveless came across as being about as Hispanic as James Joyce but he still made for a compelling villain. And it didn't hurt that he had Richard Kiel playing his tall, childlike henchman Voltaire. (It said something about the subtlety of the show's humor that a big bad henchman like Voltaire had the same name as a famous French intellectual despite being anything but intellectual.) Rounding out the trio was Dr. Loveless's sister Antoinette, a normal-sized woman played by Phoebe Dorin who constantly demonstrated Loveless's human side by singing with him almost every other time we saw her.

Dr. Loveless would prove to be a recurring character on The Wild, Wild West, basically playing yin to James West's yang in a number of episodes. Granted, the character itself -- a short man trying to act big -- had cliché written all over it, but it's a tribute to Mr. Dunn that the role nevertheless came across in a memorable fashion. James West faced other villains in other episodes, of course, but Dr. Loveless, I suspect, was always his most popular foe. He obviously seemed quite popular with the writers.