Twenty-six years ago a man named Hasselhoff rode into television history in a talking car called KITT. Tonight, someone else will ride into television in another car called KITT, though whether he rides into history or quickly is history remains to be seen.
Picking up from February’s pilot-cum-TV movie, the renascent “Knight Rider” finds Mike Traceur (Justin Bruening), the son of the original Michael Knight, working as a secret agent for an agency whose name I frankly did not catch. The FBI is involved, in any case.
Tonight’s episode begins with a James Bond-style cold open at what a superimposed title identifies simply as “Foreign Consulate, USA.” Traceur — trailing a woman called only “Smokin’ Hot Beauty” in the end credits — has gone undercover in evening wear to claim some kind of “package.” Ex-girlfriend and fellow agent Sarah Graiman (Deanna Russo) finds herself detained in the consulate basement, where she is being threatened with a large hypodermic needle.
KITT (voice of Val Kilmer) waits outside, using its artificial intelligence, encyclopedic knowledge, long-range sensors and radio-broadcasting technology not only to help guide Mike through his mission, but to criticize his lifestyle: “Probably you could move faster if you ate a healthy diet, decreased your alcohol intake and reduced the extracurricular activity with your lady friends.” (KITT, who sounds to have shared a vocal coach with Hal 9000, is a bit of a My Mother, the Car. “Please be careful,” it tells Mike when he goes off into a mess of trouble, and “I was worried about you,” when he returns, even though worry, as KITT itself admits, is technically beyond his circuitry.)
What follows is a lot of running around and driving fast, broken up by trips to the secret headquarters. Here we meet the rest of the cast: Yancey Arias (the tough boss); Smith Cho (smokin’ hot office administrator); Paul Campbell (the smart one — there’s always a smart one); Sydney Tamiia Poitier (smokin’ hot FBI agent); and Bruce Davison, wearing Christopher Lloyd’s “Back to the Future” hair, as Sarah’s father and the designer of the original Pontiac-based KITT(2000) and the new Ford rebuild(3000). (The acronym, which first stood for Knight Industries Two Thousand, now stands for Knight Industries Three Thousand.)