Lest We Forget

A man nominated to be a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court asks Magnum to find a woman he last saw on December 6, 1941.

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Release date February 12, 1981

The title is a reoccurring phrase and theme in the 1897 Rudyard Kipling poem “Recessional”. In the opening credits, José Ferrer’s character is written “Robert Kaine”. Later on in the episode, Magnum is reading a newspaper, where the name is written “Robert Caine”. When Thomas is reading the article on Caine, there are random sentences that were copied and pasted. Some end in hyphenated words that don’t continue on the next line, some have no connection to the rest of the sentence that follow.

June Lockhart in Lest We Forget (1981) In an intriguing piece of casting, both June Lockhart and Jose Ferrer play characters in the present day, and their actor offspring – June’s daughter Anne Lockhart, and Jose’s son Miguel Ferrer – play the same characters in 1941. (A similar method is used in the fifth season episode “Let Me Hear The Music”, where Dennis Weaver and his son Rustin play the same character, present day and 45 years previously.)

Tom Selleck and Elizabeth Lindsey in Magnum, P.I. (1981) When young Ensign Bobby Wickes stabs Diane Westmore’s future chauffeur, it is reminiscent of a scene from the movie From Here to Eternity. That scene is behind the ‘New Congress Club’, a brothel on Hotel St. where Robert Prewitt (Montgomery Cliff) stabs Fatso (Ernest Borgnine) for his role in the killing of Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra). The New Congress Club was the ‘movie’ name of a real club that was once down in the seedy part of Honolulu called ‘The Senate Club’.