Keeping Jeannie a Secret

Which brings up another point - WHY would it have cost them their jobs if the General and others knew they had a genie? Was there a "no genies allowed" clause in the NASA rules and regulations? Tony and Roger knew that they would be seen as crazy - which is ridiculous, because they knew genies existed and it didn't take much to convince them. So, it should have been easy to convince Dr. Bellows and the others that genies really do exist, and can even be helpful to them.
Unless, they would have been suspicious of too much help, being in the middle of a war, etc.
Plus everyone wanting to take advantage of Jeannie's power...

I think my original post switched gears after the first sentence!

I originally meant to indicate frustration for Tony keeping Jeannie's existence as a (human) girl/friend/girlfriend a secret. There should have been no reason why he could not be seen with her out on the town on a regular basis, as long as they could come up with a good, believable backstory that they could stick to, and as long as she behaved.

The rest of it veers off into keeping "Jeannie being a genie" secret, which I agree was the right thing to do!

Sorry for wandering - I must be working way too much! :)

part II

Governments would also be willing to use violence to gain control of Jeannie or any other djinni. Any one of them could take over the world easily with that kind of power. And despite how the show's writers reduced Jeannie's power over the years, in the first season she controlled the weather and the planet when she was granting all of those wasted wishes of Tony's (flooding a desert, making it snow on Jamaica and not melt away, causing Alaska to melt and not revert back to snow and ice).

She can change time and reality, too. Anyone getting control of her could easily change the past to make the present into the form they wish it to be. If the Soviet had gained control of her and weren't out to just be greedy (like Cosmonaut Sonja Tiomkin) they could have her change the past so that they not only won against the Germans in WWII but then swept the rest of the Allied forces out of Europe and took over the rest of the Western world (and maybe the Asian world, too).

Tony probably has thought of all of that, having seen everything she can do. He's traveled in time with her often and seen that he can change the present day by what is done in the past. He has also seen that nothing happens in the future from visits to the past (such as the first time when they went back to Jeannie's time in "My Hero"). He knows people like Dr. Bellows would resign when confronted with the reality of magic due to being a staunch scientist at heart. He probably knows that the generals would immediately want to take her to the heads of the government and again, it would be about taking over the world, even if for western ideals of the time. Nothing humans could do would stand in the way of such powerful force.

So, it's best to keep her a secret, and take his chances with random friends or humans accidentally finding out about her and then wishing her to make them forget it all (as he requested Jeannie do to Suzie).

I don't know. We only have that one dream-sequence to go by for how he might react and realize what to do in his situation. We don't really know if he would resign or not, but he would be shaken by the knowledge that magic is real. That goes against every bit of science he knows, including psychiatry.

Djinn/genies aren't supposed to be real. To his training, that would make anyone believing in them delusional, and if he starts to see real magic, he'd question his own sanity, even with knowing the truth. It would be difficult to break that training and indoctrination from his beliefs. He very likely would have to either resign anyway, or take an extended (as in six months or more) leave of absence just to come to terms with the reality of magic. Expect Jeannie to visit him wherever he went, too, which likely would exacerbate his psychological healing process ;-)

Jeannie has the ability to make people forget.

There are two scenes in the first season from My Hero? and The Richest Astronaut in the Whole Wide World. In "My Hero?" Roger discovers Tony trapped in the concrete of his patio after Jeannie blinked out the swimming pool. When she returns, she freezes Roger, rescues Tony, and he complains he'll never be able to explain what happened. When Jeannie blinks out, Roger has forgotten what happened just as Jeannie had assured Tony.

In "Richest Astronaut" at the end after Tony has gotten Roger in trouble with the general and Dr. Bellows, he agrees to give Jeannie back. She then "changes time" so that everything he had wished up to that moment was erased from existence, including the memories of people who learned about it all. Tony explains it as her ability to "change time".

I think near the end of "Jeannie the Guru" Tony asks her to make Susie forget she ever met Jeannie, but we don't get to see that happen as he's interrupted by Susie arriving with her newest BF, a motorcycle biker.

The show should have had a 'show bible' so that all of these discrepancies never too place. But, that just wasn't a thing back then for any show. That kind of focus on continuity didn't happen until much later, like in the 1980s or so. The IDoJ reunion movies still broke canon, so they certainly weren't worried about continuity even then.