Maverick The Wrecker (1957–1962) Online

This is an episode where we start off with Bret Maverick in the first ten minutes and he suddenly disappears until the last scene. It is kind of annoying. Most probably the script was originally written just for James Garner. Only when Jack Kelly came on-board a few episodes before did they rewrite the episode to give it to him. The splitting of the protagonist in the story in two doesn't make any sense in terms of the story. Both brothers bid at an auction to buy a shipwrecked ship and its cargo. It really doesn't make sense to only have Bart face danger and actually go sailing to the ship.

Another problem was the use of stock footage.If they didn't have the budget to do a real voyage at sea, they should have not done the script. Having the actors play foreground scenes against ocean images on a back-projection screen, we get no real sense of being at sea.

The plot finds Bret trying to solve the mystery of why someone would bid $20,000 on a wreck that only had two or three thousand in cargo on it.

The solution is rather nifty, but the show takes so long getting to it that we don't care much when it comes.

There is one anachronism. Bart Maverick objects when he finds opium aboard the ship and demands it be thrown overboard. In fact opium was perfectly legal in the 1870's when this show takes place. Bart would have been crazy to throw out a fortune in opium he had just found.

There is a nice switch where the sinister ship's mate turns out not to be so bad, and the good ship's captain turns out to be not so wonderful.It is a nice surprise. However, besides this, it is a rather ordinary television Western episode and certainly not a good example of the uniqueness of the series.

"The Wrecker" is based on a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Maverick brothers are in San Francisco, where they purchase a ship called The Flying Scud beached on Midway Island. Bret and Bart are interested in the ship's cargo of Oriental rice and silk until it turns out that there is opium aboard and a log linking Paul Carthew to murder. Carthew is innocent, and Bart throws the opium overboard, proving again that brothers do the right thing on the bottom line. I could not help but notice this episode featured no women. The only female is the one sitting on the sailor's lap. Bret rescues his brother adrift in a small boat on the Pacific Ocean. James Garner and Jack Kelly were perfect in their roles as Bret and Bart. They had the right looks and were the right age. Cigar-smoking Bart is ever bit as clever as his brother.

This Maverick episode has the brothers involved in getting into a consortium known as The Ring which buys wrecked ships for salvage at a public auction. A ship wrecked off Midway gets bidded up all out of proportion and James Garner commits his all to the bidding.

Jack Kelly in the meantime takes an ocean voyage in a ship he charters under the command of Captain Karl Swenson and one of the crew traveling incognito was the man who had agents engage in that bidding war.

I won't say what made finding and claiming that salvage so essential, but it is important and valuable and deadly. In the end Jack Kelly and Patric Knowles who was behind the bidding are adrift at sea like Captain Bligh after the mutiny.

The episode was so closely based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Wrecker that Warner Brothers gave Stevenson credit and acknowledgement. This also shows there are some things the Maverick Brothers will not do for money.

I think Robert Louis Stvenson might have liked this.