Stirling Silliphant's amazing ability to include disparate poetic and more visceral elements in his complex screenplays is evident in this unusual story, as the 'vette convertible takes our heroes to New Orleans, where Maharis can work at the docks and Milner finds a job, with the aid of guest star Zina Bethune, doing menial work hauling fish for the tidy sum of $1 an hour!
Silliphant is unafraid to include outre element in his scripts, with a fascinating array this time. Central MacGuffin of the story is a potential outbreak of parrot fever (!), nipped in the bud by the health department's Murray Hamilton, who carefully uses Contact Tracing, that tried and true method of dealing with epidemics that was muffed by incompetence in the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
An old drunken seafarer, living in his decrepit old riverboat tied to the dock, is involved in lucrative parrot smuggling, the source of the problem. Zina is terrific portraying the vulnerable heroine, who is persecuted more than protected by her hardened mom, played memorably with just limited screen time by veteran Betty Field.
All of Betty's scenes are shot on stylized studio sets, contrasting with the atmospheric location color of New Orleans throughout the rest of the show. Her subplot develops the atmosphere of those Gothic horror movies involving aged leading ladies, that began a couple years later with "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?".
Adult themes and even outbursts of violence punctuate the episode, with the title revealed in a Field monologue as the bed she seems trapped in all these years, where Zina was conceived as a result of Betty's misguided liaison as a teenager with an unreliable man. Her speech about finally escaping her trapped life at episode's end reemphasizes the series' stress on seeking freedom, symbolized by the heroes in their Corvette always hitting the open road.
Her colorful speech dovetails neatly with a similar monologue voiced by Hull using the freedom of birds flying up into the sky and even the legend of the Phoenix, all inserted into Silliphant's fanciful story. There's plenty of adventure provided by Zina as a damsel in distress dealing with the gangster (Louis Zorich) running the parrot smuggling.
Fun is also provided by Maharis ogling on the docks via binoculars a sexy stripper sunbathing in her bikini (played by Elizabeth MacRae)
who turns out to be a girl he once knew, and an unlikely romantic interest who catches parrot fever. Even her oddball role is carefully tied up at show's end, as the cast forms a strange procession, carrying her Striptease act backdrop set to be placed on a bonfire along with other materials exposed to the parrots' disease. And there's even a brief scene of kidnapped Zina and Milner trapped in the ship's hold with a scary bunch of agitated parrots, right out of Hitchcock's "The Birds" three years later!