THE DELPHI BUREAU

ABOUT THE SERIES

       The Delphi Bureau is a mysterious department in the American Intelligence community.
       That is what we are told but if we were to try to verify that, we would hit a major wall of secrecy and deniability. That last word really is the key to the organization as it, according to its leader, Sybil Von Loween, answers only to the President and seems to live on the concept of not admitting anything to anyone. If it has a headquarters, we never learn of it. Another thing we do not know is how many people work for the Delphi Bureau, besides Sybil. Being as secretive as it obviously is, there are probably not many employees but a valid question is whether are any.
       Except for Glenn Garth Gregory, of course. Gregory is a man in his late 30's who has a very alliterative name which he uses regularly in its entirety. Even his boss calls him Glenn Garth.
       Gregory is the one agent we are able to follow, though we will never tail him to the headquarters we mentioned because he never goes there. He meets Sybil in various places and gets his instructions and makes his after-action reports in non-standard ways but the traditional concept of a boss behind a desk or a busy situation room teeming with support staff never happen.
       In fact to even call Gregory an agent is way too broad. He would never see himself as one. He is a researcher who gets what seem like very simple research assignments. The first one we see him sent on is the epitome of tame dotting I's and crossing T's when he is sent to a USAF airplane graveyard in the desert of the U.S. Southwest to verify a fire that destroyed two dozen planes. A simple mission tailor-made for a researcher like Gregory. Then, of course, after taking pictures at the site of a fire that never happened, people start following him or trying to kill him or threatening him or possibly buying him off.
       It seems each one of the nine missions we have of Gregory working for the Delphi Bureau, really bad things occur around him or to him and since he is a researcher and not a trained operative used to dealing with such life-and-death circumstances, Gregory is frequently surprised and seldom happy.
       Which brings us to the key question of how an untrained researcher is able to survive over and over when some pretty impressive bad men and women do their darnedest to eliminate him.
       Gregory has a photographic memory and near instant recall. And he can read really, really fast.
       Gregory has never had training racing a car but when in a car chase, he knows how fast his and the other guy's cars can move and handle curves and the recommended way to take a curve at high speeds. Gregory has never flown a plane but he will have read the flight manual for plane he is on when it falls to him to sit in the cockpit.
       Furthermore, in some of the adventures, Gregory knows that playing a role will aid his research so if he needs, as he done one time, to pretend to be with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he will have read several volumes of data and be able to spout future crop expectations with the big boys.
       Not too shabby for an ordinary guy who works for a department that does not really admit it, or he, exists.

MOVIES

TELEVISION

RELATED LINKS

MY COMMENTS

       Looking at the air dates for this show, I am left with a mystery as to how I saw the pilot, which I definitely did, and several of the episodes, which again I know I did. Maybe as a rerun? It is confusing to me because I saw them and absolutely loved them and was sorry that there were no more than the 9 adventures - and yet when they aired, I was overseas with no television. Oh well, I will figure it out someday - or not.
       Anyways, the key point of the above paragraph is that I loved the show. Now, the fact that it did not survive past the initial run of 8 stories (plus the pilot movie) shows the network executives did not share my adoration. Obviously they were poop-heads (which if it isn't an industry term, it should be).
       Luckinbill's portrayal of a somewhat nerdy guy who gets thrown into lots of crazy situations and has to come up with a solution to stay alive, well, it was brilliant. He was, to me, never a goof but somewhat naive. He was fairly good looking but knew himself well enough to know the ladies would not normally fawn over him so when they did, he was self-aware enough to know they were after something. He was not a man of action but he had read a book or four about such things, and could remember the actual text and drawings on the page and adlib with the best of them.
       He was like me, except a little older at the time and had that photographic memory thing going for him which I didn't, which is a shame, but then again, people were not trying to kill me all the time like they were him.
       If I could, I would gladly watch them all over again.

GRADE

My Grade: B

YOUR OPINIONS

Tell us what you think of the series. Give your grade and comments.

To give your opinion, you must be logged in.