The first post-war story, Treasure of the Peacock's Eye, suggested the show would shift into treasure hunting as Indy and Remy followed a map to a legendary diamond and ran into thieves, pirates, and cannibals during their quest. Unfortunately, the episode ended with Indy giving up and going home to study archeology, leaving Remy to continue the quest alone (a story that remained unresolved). It was the only episode besides Spring Break Adventure (2) in which Indy actively pursued an artifact against competing forces. After this, Indy visited Paris to witness the Treaty of Versailles before retuning home.
Indy's return home was one of the most poignant episodes of the series. Since it was the last episode to deal with the aftermath of the war, the theme was 'change' (yes we can). Indy came home to find that everything he had left behind had changed, except his father. Lloyd Owen returned for the final time to play Henry Sr. and the relationship between the two perfectly set up that in The Last Crusade. The only thing missing was a reference to the Holy Grail. The episode had two B stories about classism and racism, but the important thing was the story ended with Indy preparing to attend the University of Chicago to study archaeology. I don't imagine it was an accident that this story (edited with Travels With Father (2)) was the series finale during the original airing.
The final three episodes each covered a different subject of 1920s culture: music, theater, and movies. The first, The Mystery of the Blues, isn't available on Netflix since it's the famous Harrison Ford episode. For this episode, Ford reprised the role for the bookends and described his adventures as a waiter in a jazz club and an encounter with Al Capone. Scandal of 1920 and Hollywood's Follies were both period puff stories about Indy's shenanigans on Broadway and Hollywood productions. There was very little that advanced the character, though Follies had a nice reference to the truck sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark. An arc could have been made out of his life in 1920s America, but the material just wasn't meaty enough. With these three episodes at the end, it felt as if the series had fizzled out in the final stretch.
Cancellation
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was the first foray by Lucasfilm into live action television and the mistakes were too numerous for the series to survive long. Decisions in the writing weakened the narrative. Shooting in international locations made the production expensive. And airing the episodes out of order reduced the ratings. I'm usually quick to point fingers at the network for this sort of thing, but these odd decisions have the smell of Lucas himself about them.
The central premise of the series was "Indiana Jones experiences history." It worked about half the time. Indy crossed paths with some real historical figure from the era in almost every episode. Sometimes it worked, others it felt shoehorned. When Indy ran into Charles de Gaulle in a POW camp and Hemmingway in Northern Italy, it was a believable meeting that enriched the story. When Sigmund Freud told a ten-year-old Indy that he was sexually repressed, it was just weird. Many of the Cory Carrier and a few of the Flannery episodes were less Indy experiencing history and more observing it. My First Adventure (1), Indy watched Dr. Carter uncover a tomb, but that would have happened whether Indy was there or not. Same thing in Winds of Change (2) when Indy was at the Versailles Conference. He could watch as the political decisions are made, but do little to affect them. To the viewer, there was little difference to watching a reenactment on The History Channel. Stronger episodes had a story about Indy within some historical context. Weaker ones had a historical event and Indy was just there.
With a dominating focus on history, the production of the series traveled to various locations around the world. Regularly shooting on location instead of on built sets is usually more difficult and expensive. Doing it on an international level made it even more so. As with the Star Wars prequels, the budget outreached the material. A good chunk of the episodes just didn't have a strong enough story to warrant traveling to some exotic locale. Now if the show had better ratings, money would be less of an object, but the decisions made in scripting along with the airing order kept the ratings low.
While I reviewed this series by the Netflix order, the original airing put the episodes wildly out of order. My First Adventure (then titled Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal) was first episode but then they jumped to Indy's enlistment in the war. The episodes continued to bounce around wildly through Indy's life, with Carrier's episodes sprinkled throughout the entire run. There wasn't really an opportunity to build a developing story because the viewer was constantly changing time periods. Even the war episodes were split up and rearranged. Lucas and the other producers knew the show was in trouble by the second season and brought in Ford for an episode to boost the ratings. While it was cool to see him on the show, his addition to that story was very sloppy. His B story about hiding a Native American Peace Pipe was completely unrelated to the A story about his confrontation with Capone. It would have been better if his bookend was related to main story. For instance, he could have had a run-in with Soviets or American Communists and told his story about his time in Petrograd. Or, for an archeological story, have him find the Peacock's Eye diamond and then tell the story of his original search. Alas, the opportunity was wasted and Ford's involvement did nothing to save the show.
Legacy
True to form, Lucas made several changes to episodes before releasing them in the final version currently available. Adjusting the order to be chronological was definitely a benefit, but it also made the beginning and end of the series very weak. The most controversial choice was removing all the episode bookends, save Ford's. In the original cuts, a 90-year-old Indy (played by George Hall) related the story of the week to some third party (Flannery bookended some of the Carrier episodes). It was a nice modern day grounding that usually enhanced both the story narrative and historical angle. Unfortunately, all the bookends except for Ford's have been removed from the new cuts. The original opening sequence had to be removed as well, since it had the Hall's name on it. Another change was editing all the episodes into 90 minute features. While several of the original episodes were feature length, most were not. A lot of the current pairings have two stories that are largely unrelated and a few don't even have a decent transition. I can only assume Lucas wanted to release them as a series of 26 Indiana Jones movies (including the trilogy and... that other one) instead of a TV series. Unfortunately it didn't work that well because TV episodes are inherently not movies, but it's all we have now.
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