An air of wistful nostalgia hung over the set of 007 in early August of 1969 as the show’s cast and crew were putting the finishing touches on what would be their final season premiere. No one needed to say anything about this being the beginning of the end; everyone involved with the series’ production had known for months that this would be their last waltz. For many people on the show’s production team it felt like a death in the family; being part of the 007 phenomenon had been one of the high points of their professional and personal lives, and they were starting to miss it already. Even as they lined up new jobs in the TV industry or on the pre-production staff for the still-embryonic 007 feature film, part of them still wished the series didn’t have to end.

       The fact that the anniversary of Ian Fleming’s death was approaching may have also contributed to the melancholy undertone of the shoot. As creator of the original books from which the TV series evolved, Fleming had been the engine which drove the train of the 007 phenomenon for most of the series’ first five seasons; losing him as a mentor had been a terrible blow to the show’s cast and crew. It hurt that he wouldn’t be around for 007’s grand finale. While the 1969-70 season premiere was in post-production, members of the show’s cast visited the late author’s former Goldeneye estate in Jamaica to pay tribute to his memory.

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        The season premiere episode, titled “Chrysalis”, brought back a number of alumni from the casts of the defunct Felix Leiter series and the still-running Matt Helm franchise. The most surprising cameo was a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy reprising his old role as Chad Palmer; given the contractual obligations he’d been under as a member of the Star Trek cast at the time the 007 writing staff first conceived the idea for “Chrysalis”, nobody had expected him to be available to appear in it. But Trek had been canceled by NBC in the spring of 1969, leaving Nimoy with an unanticipated free space in his personal schedule for the summer. So Quinn Martin Productions decided to strike while the iron was hot and rewrite much of the episode’s shooting script in order to make room for Nimoy to revive his Matt Helm series alter ego. It was a stroke of good fortune not only for Nimoy but also for ABC, which won the ratings battle that week hands down thanks in part to Nimoy’s performance as Palmer in “Chrysalis”.

        “Chrysalis” also marked the introduction of one of the series’ last great villains: Lieutenant Colonel Georg Baumann, a fugitive Nazi war criminal played by James Daly. Baumann, a former SS officer whose hideout was home to a cryogenics laboratory, made many of Bond’s past adversaries look like choirboys. In the backstory established for the character, Baumann had escaped from a NATO military prison and was on the run from just about every law enforcement and intelligence agency on the planet; Bond’s quest to capture the fanatical Col. Baumann and put him back behind bars would serve as one of the recurring themes of 007’s farewell season.

         Another recurring element of the final season of 007 was the myriad plots by former SPECTRE operatives to get revenge on Bond for his part in their boss’ demise. At least five episodes in the 1969-70 season were directly built on that premise, and many of the rest used it as a subplot to the main storyline. And it wasn’t only Bond who was incurring the ex-SPECTRE agents’ wrath-- in the two-part saga “Quantum Leap Backward”, aired right around the time the New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles were facing each other in the 1969 World Series, M (Janet Munro) nearly fell victim to the bullets of a Blofeld bodyguard turned freelance assassin(guest star Hans Gudegast).

        For the show’s annual Christmas episode, the producers decided to lighten things up and have Bond delve into the Santa Claus legend in the episode “A Stranger In These Parts”; the episode’s main story had 007 encountering an eccentric former OSS analyst(played by famed folk singer Burl Ives) who asserted that he was really the jolly old elf and had only joined the OSS because of a passing bout of amnesia right after Pearl Harbor. In the course of his efforts to get to the bottom of the truth regarding the old man’s story, Bond took time to help reunite a separated family and bust a gang of shoplifters. Music lovers got a bonus treat, as the episode featured a singing cameo by the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.

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       While the 007 TV series was in the process of winding down, preparations for making a Bond motion picture were cranking up. A British movie producer by the name of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli had been signed up to help bring 007’s adventures to the silver screen and was in the process of scoping out potential candidates for the director’s job. Finding a man to fill the director’s chair was a bit harder than one might think, because most of the big names in the directing game at that time were already committed to other projects. And some of those who weren’t committed tended to shy away from the Bond feature film script because it seemed a bit frivolous at a time when socially relevant dramas were the most popular kind of motion picture among filmgoers in the 18-45 age group.

       Broccoli’s search finally ended when veteran director Ken Annakin, who seven years earlier had drawn rave reviews for his work as part of the team that assembled Darryl F. Zanuck’s World War II epic The Longest Day, signed on to helm the still-untitled 007 film project. Annakin had nearly a quarter-century’s directorial experience to his credit; furthermore, he was known to be a die-hard fan of the Bond TV series. The project could hardly have been in better hands. The two men met in London for a working lunch in February of 1970 to iron out the critical details of Annakin’s contract for the 007 movie; with that loose end tied up 20th Century Fox, the studio that owned the film rights to the Bond franchise, could now concentrate on the task of assembling a proper supporting cast for Roger Moore.

       While most of the movie would be shot on soundstages in London and Hollywood, a sizable portion of its production budget was reserved for location shooting. Those funds would be the Broccoli-Annakin duo’s most important tool in their quest to bring 007 to the silver screen. For James Bond’s cinematic debut, Annakin and Broccoli wanted to send the character to the most exotic locations that they could find(or at least the most exotic ones that studio financial considerations would permit). Scouts were sent to Monaco, Brazil, Hong Kong, and even Saudi Arabia to pick a suitable venue for the 007 movie’s outdoor sequences. They finally chose Monaco after an intense lobbying campaign by the country’s royal family, who were all devoted fans of the 007 TV series and saw the 007 feature film as a valuable opportunity to boost their country’s tourist industry.

       Pre-production work for the 007 movie-- tentatively titled Dead Reckoning --started in March of 1970, concurrent with the shooting of the first of the final ten episodes of the original Bond TV series for ABC. The actual filming schedule would begin two months later when the Dead Reckoning cast and crew traveled to London to begin shooting the exterior sequences for Roger Moore’s early scenes with Janet Munro and the new Q(played by special guest star Peter Lawford).

       In the meantime, TV viewers throughout America were anxiously waiting to see how Bond’s television saga would end. Would one of the legendary agent’s surviving former adversaries resurface to confront him a final time? Would a new heavy step out of the shadows to inherit the banner of evil from a fallen 007 enemy? Or would he have to defend himself against a nemesis within the ranks of his own secret service? Only the show’s writers and production staff knew for sure, and they weren’t about to give anything away prematurely if they could help it. In fact, the series finale’s script was being guarded under security so tight that the Pentagon would have envied it; nobody even what the episode’s title was until two weeks before its first scenes were shot.

      Around the same time production began on Dead Reckoning another of the 007 TV clones bit the dust; Avery Powers, whose ratings had been steadily declining since December of 1969, was cancelled with a dozen episodes left to go. The series would be briefly revived in the mid-‘80s as a syndicated show, but other than that it would seldom be heard from-- or heard of --for most of the next three decades. Plans for an Avery Powers comic books fell through when the publishing firm which owned the rights to the comic version of Powers and the creators of the TV series had a falling-out over creative control issues.

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       The publicity campaign ABC mounted to convince viewers to turn in to the 007 series finale would have put P.T. Barnum at his best to shame; the network’s advertising department did everything short of giving away gold bullion to persuade the public to watch. In some cases the ads were essentially preaching to the choir-- many people had already circled the air date on their calendars and the U.S. branch of the 007 fan club was organizing parties throughout the country to mark the occasion. In Britain, the hype was even bigger: many of the programs the BBC would normally air in prime time were going to be pre-empted the week of the final episode so that British Bond fans could see some of the series’ classic previous episodes in the run-up to the finale.

       Even behind the Iron Curtain 007 hoopla was making itself felt: East German citizens living on or near the West German border risked the wrath of the Stasi to tune in a German language-dubbed cut of the 007 series climax, while in Hungary the Marxist government in Budapest worked out a deal with Yugoslavia to let the official Hungarian state TV network carry the Yugoslav TV service’s transmission of the final episode. The chief of Poland’s counterintelligence bureau sent three of his field agents in the U.S. on an unusual mission to infiltrate the Quinn Martin studios in Hollywood for the purpose of making some bootleg copies of the episode for the chief’s personal enjoyment. (The agents succeeded only in getting themselves arrested and subsequently deported.)

       On May 28th, 1970 millions of Americans gathered around their TV sets to watch Bond infiltrate, then fight to get out of, the KGB’s headquarters in “Rat’s Maze”, the final original 007 episode. The two- hour-long extravaganza, which was later split into separate one-hour episodes for syndication, handily won the 8:00-10:00 PM time slot for ABC in that week’s Nielsen ratings; in fact, it would be remembered as the second-most watched TV program aired in the U.S. up to that time, surpassed only by the 1967 Fugitive series finale. “Rat’s Maze” would also become the second-most watched program in Great Britain for that year, and in Japan it would set a record for the highest total number of viewers to watch a foreign-made TV show.

       007’s cast and crew gathered on Dead Reckoning’s Monaco set for a banquet to mark the end of what had been a remarkable 11-year run on TV. It wasn’t an actual farewell party-- that would come in November when Reckoning wrapped up shooting in Los Angeles --but in many ways it felt like one. Ian Fleming’s superspy alter ego would no longer be a prime time fixture on ABC, and even those who were ready to call it quits with the series couldn’t help feeling a hole was being left in their hearts....

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