- In the episode "Sole Survivor", we're presented with opening scenes that — even by '70s TV production standards — are very inaccurate, shoddy representations of emergency & hospital procedures: doctors riding in the ambulance right from the scene of the accident, laughably fake EKG pads & setup, doctors squirting liquids out of needles and using weird hand angles to apparently stick them in Joe's neck, no scrubs, not even an attempt at sanitary procedure or masks, ambulance staff being the ones to assist in the surgery room, rushing Joe into surgery & an operation without any attempt to determine what's wrong with him, etc. When Joe wakes up & is told that he's been in a coma for over a year, he not only wakes to full, coherent consciousness, but looks nothing like anyone who's been in a coma at all, with not a hair out of place...
- ...and it's deliberate. The shoddy, inaccurate representation is actually a tip-off: Joe hasn't been in a coma at all & the doctors aren't doctors. The whole thing is a mind-screw to make Joe think he's been in a coma so that the Communist agents can convince him to spill his guts about the defection. The show is using its own cheesy '70s production values to mess with our heads.
The Hardy Boys side of the series seemed to run on Fridge Logic, for the most part:
- In 1st season episode "Mystery of the Flickering Torch", Frank & Joe go to a sound-engineering/design company to follow up a lead on a missing sound engineer. One of the bad guys comes in, Frank & Joe hide in a nearby supply closet (using keys to unlock it), and end up locked-in and trapped when the bad guy attempts to burn the building down. It's a tense, scary scene, as the brothers struggle to jimmy the electrical equipment and cut their way out...until it dawns on you that the villain didn't know the Hardys were there, so had no reason to lock a closet. How did the door get locked? On top of that, the door and walls prove so flimsy that the brothers kick holes in them to get at the electrical wires to power the jigsaw — the Hardys could've simply kicked the door down.
- In 2nd Season episode "Acapulco Spies", Fenton Hardy has escaped the villain (a wanted traitor accused of selling military secrets) and is on the run from the villain's Mook. Frantic, he stumbles to a phone booth outside of a brightly-lit bar and calls home, telling his sons to bring him a specific file and lockbox and gives them a code-phrase to identify his agent...just as the mook catches Fenton and the line goes dead. Then you realize that Fenton has just escaped the villain & is on the run from that closely-pursuing mook. Fenton hasn't had any time to set up any such code with his people, let alone inform them that his sons are coming down, and is wasting his precious escape time to call his sons — who don't know anything about the situation — and tell them to bring him files.
