Learning Day: The Littlest Hobo: Tempest Probe (Patreon)

There were two premises for episodic television dramas in the 1970s: The Incredible Hulk and Charlie's Angels. The Rockford Files is a Charlie's Angels. Columbo is a Hulk. The Six Million Dollar Man? Seemingly an Incredible Hulk, but actually Charlie's Angels. Canadian series The Littlest Hobo is, of course, a Hulk, only instead of a man tortured by his uncontrollable radiation-induced superpowers, it's about the world's smartest and most moral dog.

The Littlest Hobo franchise began as a 1958 American movie about what if there was a boy Lassie. That flick spawned a 1963 TV series, and the concept of a wandering, ownerless dog proved so compelling that it received a reboot in 1979 that aired for six years. In total, it ran for eight seasons, with 114 episodes. The Littlest Hobo provided dozens of writers, crew, and working actors with a living income for longer than any of your favorite critically-acclaimed series of the streaming era. I guess it probably helped that they could pay the lead in Milk-Bones.

By the later seasons, the staff had run through most of the basic premises you can do with a non-speaking canine protagonist — dog befriends forest ranger, dog helps ballerina defect from Soviet Union, dog witnesses hit-and-run and forces confession from Vic Morrow, dog fights hypnotist, dog prevents botulism outbreak, dog saves D&D players from demons, dog finds undetonated WWII bomb. You know, the usual.

That brings us to "Tempest Probe," a season five episode about a Shakespearean-themed criminal mastermind who attempts to steal the plans for the eponymous space laser from a heavily-defended research facility using a trained German shepherd fitted with a livestreaming camera and a radio transmitter. Oh, and a cyanide needle that kills the dog if it's ever discovered — you can't trust a dog to bite down on a poison tooth under questioning.

Prospero is a faceless crimelord who hosts potential buyers in what seems to be the haunted set of a public access Western Canadian television program. He speaks from the shadows, and is assisted by the aforementioned German shepherd, named Ariel, and his silent manservant, Caliban.

See? It's like, a whole thing! Crime today would be a lot more fun if criminals themed themselves around Shakespearean plays. The guy who leaked GTA VI should have called himself Macbeth and done a bit about how no developer of Scotland born could ever catch him, but then there would be a loophole about how actually Rockstar was founded as a subsidiary of Take-Two in New York, and Sam Houser guts him with a saber live on Netflix.

We're getting off track. "Tempest Probe" is pure '80s excess. When I pitched this episode, Brockway cautioned that it sounded self-aware, that perhaps the show was in on the joke. But this was 1983. Irony had been dormant since the early 1970s, when Tom Lehrer retired from showbiz to teach math.

And so, Prospero lays out his scheme to his three potential buyers, selling them on the plan by having Ariel walk up to a bank guard and rob him in broad daylight. How does a dog do a hold-up? Simple: Prospero speaks through Ariel's radio, saying that there are snipers aiming at the man and telling him to drop the money and hit the concrete. Seems absurd, but if a talking dog approached you in the '80s, you'd just count yourself lucky if it wasn't demanding that you commit a string of murders in New York City.

Hobo follows Ariel and tries to take back the money, because he understands that robbing a bank is not a victimless crime — even if the deposits are insured, it cuts into shareholder value. So dedicated is he to recovering the money that he walks into the open cage in which it's being stored in order to retrieve it. Prospero then makes the classic supervillain mistake of setting a laser to incinerate Hobo in a couple of minutes while he and his pals go off to dinner. In this case, though, I kind of get it. Like, yeah, the apparently sentient dog is a threat to your plans, but still, do you really want to be in the room when that fur ignites?

Of course, Hobo escapes and follows Ariel to his target, and it needs to be said that for a government research facility in Canada, this place sure is guarded by a lot of mooks in jumpsuits with technovisors and machine guns. Like, what is this, the Weapon-X program?

The facility looks like the kind of place Jack Scalia would break into in a made for TV movie about future mutants aired on the Space channel precisely once in the summer of 1996. It's staffed by DEVO if instead of making genre-defining music, they broke exciting new ground in the field of shooting dogs.

Remember, the Littlest Hobo can easily identify Ariel at this point. It would be trivial for him to track the criminal dog down and tear off his collar, killing him instantly. But he doesn't do that for two reasons: one, killing a dog in storytelling is the polar opposite of saving the cat. Even if you're a dog, it's gotta be like an unprovoked attack by several wolves before we as a society are willing to admit that a dog was in the right to use deadly force against its own kind. The second reason Hobo doesn't just stop Ariel is that he has the ability of forethought and is able to come to conclusions by inferring from available data, much like most the clowns in congress don't and aren't. Take that, clowns!

Hobo indeed follows Ariel into the complex, but instead of confronting him in the control room, he slips in after him, only to be trapped by what I think were supposed to be energy beams but are sort of jail cell bars made out of fluorescent light tubes?

I only know this because Hobo activates one of those little golf carts that seem to come stock with high-security weapon facilities and has it smash into the bars to set off the alarm. When the guards and scientists come running, they find Hobo sitting in the control room, pawing at the empty computer slot. "What does he know?" The scientist asks, placing a lot of trust in a strange animal.

"It's gone! Now we have to inform the RCMP," he announces. It's a weird line, read weirdly. I think it's the word "now" I'm getting tripped up on, like it's a big problem for this place that they have to call the feds. It's not like they're doing anything illegal — they're just developing a space death ray. The actor also makes the baffling choice to emphasize the word "have", as if they were on the fence about calling the RCMP before for some unclear reason but their space laser plans going missing tipped the scales.

Ariel returns to Prospero's timelost disco sex dungeon with the Tempest Probe chips. But then, Hobo appears and attacks Prospero, who it turns out was a mannequin all along, and Caliban's always been the real crime boss! I feel nothing, but maybe people were more easily surprised and/or entertained when this first aired. We should evaluate a work in the context in which it was created, and in 1983 they didn't have good video games or omnipresent porno or TikTok videos where people clap to change clothes.

Ah, but the ending of this episode is the best part. Prospero, donning his hat and coat as the RCMP politely escorts him to prison, is a pretty good sport about being caught. The arresting officer says it's a "red letter day" for them, because he's wanted on three continents. "Four," he brags, with the face of a universally-hated child reminding the teacher that they forgot to assign homework.

Prospero's happy that Ariel "won't have to be destroyed," a pretty euphemistic way to describe his plan to deliberately kill the dog to death with poison. Instead, he'll be retrained to work for the RCMP, using his canine instincts to help stop Snidely Whiplash once and for all. Ariel being set free is the only parallel with The Tempest in the entire episode. And fair enough, it's a half-hour early '80s show about dog adventures, it's not exactly the venue for extended Shakespeare bits.

"You know what my mistake was?" Prospero asks the extremely patient federal agent. "I used the wrong dog." See, Hobo is an "individual," which is why he was a worthy opponent. Prospero says, "until we meet again, my friend," so yes, we're doing the gentleman thief/detective mutual respect thing except it's an international crime genius and a German shepherd.

Maybe Prospero is being so chill because he's got some kind of fanciful scheme to break out of prison involving giant playing cards and a gyrocopter. But I think it's more likely that he's just trying to save face. He got got by a fucking dog. When Hobo turns around to give him one last look, he adds, "touché" like he understands meaningful dog glances.

It seems like maybe we're setting up Prospero to be a recurring fun nemesis for Hobo, but he will never again appear in another episode. He's going to be thinking about that dog for the rest of his life — most if not all of which he'll spend in federal prison for not only stealing weapons of mass destruction, but selling them to the highest bidder. And Hobo? He'll never give that son of a bitch that nearly lasered him to death another thought.

For Prospero, the day Hobo graced his theatre kid crime palace was the most important day of his life. For Hobo, it was bright time when big hot ball in sky, different from dark time when hot ball go away little bright dots come out. You got dunked on by an animal that doesn't even have the concept of Tuesday, you fucking clown.This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, still thinking about that dog.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, still thinking about that dog.