Wonder Woman 3.18: A Date With Doomsday

Airdate: 3/10/79

A deadly virus is stolen from a lab by a man who looks like an employee there – but turns out to be an imposter, “simulated” to look like the real deal. The scientist who developed the virus has now completed an antidote, but that gets stolen by the little old lady who comes to visit him often – or does it? The common thread linking these identity-stolen individuals is a computer dating service, which turns out to be run by a sinister man and woman team bent on starting a D.C.-wide pandemic as payback for the government’s deadly Doomsday experiments. The final leg of their experiment involves the creation of a helicopter tour guide doppelganger, which will then be used to spread the virus over the White House. Thank God WW manages to safely catch the small glass vial when they toss it out a moving helicopter at 10,000 feet!

Pretty good, suspenseful entry gets mileage from an all-too-credible scenario,even scarier these days when germ warfare and biological terror attacks seem more likely. Also prescient: the computer dating service, ubiquitous now, but still just a novelty then, and used as a last resort when all other approaches failed. Of course, the concept of scanning handprints to create a perfect latex facemask is a bit unrealistic – how is that better than the simpler, and more obvious, method of creating a plaster mold? Well, it definitely looks better. And speaking of, that’s braless Taaffe O'Connell (veteran of so many B-movies in the 70s and 80s) as the dating service receptionist.