Season 2 episode re-watchings...

Shooting a star:

Originally scheduled for a Friday 24 Oct 1975 airing but delayed to 11 Nov 1975 because, as a strong episode, NBC decided to broadcast "Blaze of Glory" as only the second segment of POLICE WOMAN to air in its new, somewhat unfortunate Tuesday night timeslot.

While trolling the streets of L.A. as, what else?, a United States senator, Pepper is kidnapped from a bank during a hold-up by locally infamous crook, Vern Lightfoot (Don Stroud once again, reminding the modern viewer very much here of Stephen Dorff).


Pepper, under the guise of "Myrtle," immediately charms animally-magnetic Vern and his half-brother, Charlie Joe (Bill Lucking) with gushing praise ("...wait till my friends find out who picked me up!!" Pepper howls to their delight), but has less luck with Vern's sexy, hayseed girlfriend (Nellie Bellflower), jealous that this no-account hooker Vern seems so fond of has tagged along for a ride.


Much of the entertainment of the episode comes from Pepper's and Bellflower's rivalry and petty bickering, once the foursome switch from their getaway car to a van during a carwash, the van crashing thru a police barricade at one point, Pepper "accidentally" falling against Vern and preventing him from shooting a cop at the roadblock.

The action set mostly to a hillbilly music score composed by Billy Strange.

Meanwhile, Crowley and Pete leave an injured Joe at the scene of the original crime, in hot pursuit of hot-pantsed Pepper and her trio of outlaws.


Once he gets Bellflower and the brother he verbally abuses to run into a roadside shop to pick up some junk food, Vern closes the van curtains and puts the move on Pepper, her attempts to slither out of his clutches by re-opening the flesh wound he received during the hold-up successful --- until Vern goes rifling thru Pepper's purse and finds her handcuffs.

No gun accompanying them, I always wonder why Pep never claims the cuffs are for her kinkier customers, because Vern instantly realizes that "this fine hooker lady" is in fact an undercover cop "all dressed up to look like a human being", striking Pepper across the face. Hyperventilating with bravura as Angie always does once her true identity is discovered, she makes the mistake of telling Vern, when he accuses her of laughing at him behind his back, that she actually thought he was "kind of sad."

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/blaze_4.jpg~original

Now realizing that they've got a hostage the police may actually care about, the gang "buys" another vehicle off a pots-and-pans peddler, a station wagon, and heads deeper into the desert, Pepper talking them out of killing her beside the road with the assertion that the police helicopters will swoop in from their present height of 5000 feet and attack if Vern kills her.


Eventually, their car overheats amongst the yucca and, Pete and Bill right behind them, the two brothers and Pepper head away from the road on foot, leaving Vern's girlfriend -- in Pepper's hulahoop earrings -- with the defunct and steaming station wagon.


But as Crowley and Royster show up and start questioning the passive-aggressive Bellflower who has only jelly beans to offer them, a shot rings out nearby: Pepper has fallen, is being taunted by a rattle snake under a rock, and Vern and his brother get into a fight over who's a "dummy" and Vern's magical-thinking Dillingeresque fantasy of going out "like a shooting star." In response to the gunshot, Crowley quickly shows up, shoots the snake, is in turn shot by that snake Vern Lightfoot, and then Vern -- aiming for Pepper -- is blown away unexpectedly by his cuddlier half-brother Charlie Joe, Charlie Joe picking up Vern's not-entirely lifeless body and carrying him into the sunset, a country-and-western ballad composed for the episode warbling plaintively in the background in a most mid-'70s kind of way.



Aptly-named (because I think of this as the before-and-after episode of the series, the line in the literal sand for the "real" POLICE WOMAN" of Season 1 and early-S2, and what emerged once the show moved to Tuesday in the States, just two months into the second year), "Blaze of Glory" is perhaps the Season 2 entry most reminiscent of Season 1 in tone because, since Pepper is undercover as a call girl for the entire segment, they actually allow Angie to infuse all her dialogue with her usual, focusing charisma throughout.

It's just a very taut, likeably playful chapter.

And the show would never be quite the same again.


________________________

Glenna Burns, an angular blonde in the form of Joanna Pettet, gets off the plane at LAX and takes a cab to her brother in law, Julian Lord's (Robert Webber's) house. She's looking for her sister, Beth, missing six weeks.

In his study, there's the woman's portrait, looking suspiciously like a brunette version of Pettet --- they are sisters after all.

Mute from a childhood growth and resulting surgery, the sister can only communicate thru sign-language which just makes her creepier (No Offense, Anybody). Her brother-in-law's secretary, his lover, makes their relationship obvious by her unsuspecting, "Darling!", as she enters the study (this was written by DYNASTY's darling Ed DeBlasio, remember), and Beth's sister leaves in a huff.

While in the middle of another fur-heist investigation (a glamorous crime) Pepper gets drawn into the case of the missing sister as Pepper, mistress of all trades, can read signing. After jiggling down a corridor enthusiastically at the LAPD.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/silence_2b.jpg~original

When the blonde sister, Glenna, winds up stabbed in the shoulder in her hotel room and found by a maid, she claims her brother-in-law is responsible. In interrogation by Pepper and Crowley, the brother-in-law irks the pair by calling the mute sister "pathetic" (which offends Pepper's sense of political correctness), and questions Crowley's authority and competence (which offends Crowley's ego, always a mistake). The brother-in-law denies responsibility for the stabbing.


Glenna leaves the hotel (a stabbing can really ruin your visit) to stay in Pepper's apartment. Despite having a couch that pulled out into a bed for Ruby Dee months earlier, it wont for Miss Pettet, even though it appears to be the same piece of furniture. But before they can escape the hotel lobby, a cute, tiny ginger boy with a dubbed voice and a collie stops both women to inform them how pretty they both are; structurally, the scene occurs so Pepper can wind up with Glenna's phone bill haphazardly, but the moment is so quease-inducing, it threatens to undermine the mood of the story (the scene was cut for time for ages in syndication, and I'd forgotten about it, so it's a shock to see it sandwiched between the interrogation of her brother-in-law and the next scene at Pep's apartment).

On Pepper's all-purpose, morphable terrace, Glenna reveals letters that sister Beth wrote her seeming to implicate the brother-in-law in something unwholesome. These lead the squad to find a decomposed, decapitated body buried in Northern California they think may be the sister, Beth.


During an inquest, Lord's secretary admits to the "most flagrant love affair" with her boss, lip trembling in excessive shame the entire time; Beth's ladies-who-lunch buddy volunteers private conversations in which Beth confessed wanting to save her marriage yet feared for her life; and the pompous D.A. verifies that Robert Webber sometimes has the opportunity to use lye ("lye", the D.A. repeats, expecting the homonymn/homophone's double-meaning to settle in) in his business, the substance used to speed up the body's decomposition.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/silence_4.jpg


Webber looks pretty guilty, until Pepper, at home with Pettet downstairs on the couch, gets a call from Crowley: the forensic lab has determined the body is that of an elderly woman much older than Beth. That, and the hotel phone bill revealing a call to Glenna's native Nova Scotia, prompts Pepper to dial the number... The fussy Nova Scotian housekeeper in brades is irritated by the late-night call. And when Pepper asks for Glenna, she's informed Glenna died six months ago but that her sister, Beth, is out in California.

Or vice versa. I get confused.

Pepper smells a rat, and goes downstairs to find the sister off the couch doing midnight dish duty. Pepper realizes that the sister is, indeed, Beth herself, and has dyed her hair and adorned contact-lenses and probably had surgery in order to pull the ruse...

Pettet/Beth remains silent to keep the mood going.

Pepper explains everything in a 3-minute monologue, including Beth's jealousy over Julian's secretary and the likelihood that Beth just killed an old woman in northern California who answered an ad for a maid, in order to provide a dead body.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/silence_5.jpg


Unable to coax her to put down the loaded gun she's had stuck in Pepper's face for several minutes, Pep jumps her, they fall behind the couch; the gun goes off, and Pepper gets up --- then promptly collapses in a louder thump than you'd expect skinny Angie to make.

The guys get there and receive an improbable call from the airport revealing that the sister's flight out will be delayed by a few minutes. Everyone recognizes this as the unlikely plot device it is and they rush for LAX, leaving wounded Pepper behind.

Why not have Pepper receive a call that Pettet's flight has been cancelled, or changed? That's unlikely enough, but why try and convince us that people actually get phonecalls at their homes from airlines telling them their flight is a few minutes late?? I mean, it only takes two seconds to think of a better reason to have the call come in.

At the airport, Bill, Pete and Joe spot Joanna Pettet and chase her down, knocking down travelers as they go -- but only black ones, so it must be okay. Upon catching her, Crowley pulls the fake scar from Pettet/Glenna/Beth's throat, thus permitting her to scream.

At the hospital, the gang makes jokes about Shelley Winters, and Sergeant Crowley flirts with a common-looking nurse. In mock-rage, Pepper throws a bouquet, manhandles an oversized bag of popcorn, draws a pistol from her holster, and practices with her drill team baton -- all within a matter of minutes, her right arm showing no limited range of motion whtsoever despite having a bullet removed from it only hours earlier.

But that's why she's Police Woman.

It's a pretty good installment, with a nice, slightly macabre, Poe-like flavor. It seems the producers were going for more of a film noir tone (although the cinematography looked a bit more noiresque in early S1) with a focus on mystery and atmosphere. That's a good idea and can focus a show, and it could have effectively replaced the toned-down sex angle from the previous year. But they didn't seem to quite keep it up, which is unfortunate; after all, "Silence" and "Cold Wind" were two of the better entries from Season 2.


airdate: 24 October 1975 (not December, as it was moved up)


______________________

Farewell Mary Jane/Glitter with a Bullet/The Purge

“Don’t Feed the Pigeons” starts out at the station, a little old lady -– or television’s raging falsetto stereotype of a little old lady -– devastated that bunco artists have swindled her out of her life savings, reports the crime to the squad. Pepper knows that this is likely a death sentence for the old lady, if things follows their usual pattern.


In the Partridge Family’s redressed house, two patrolmen with badly dubbed voices break in on the insistence of a neighbor (Jeanette Nolan, who herself has made a career out of playing ragingly stereotypic little old ladies) only to find the geriatric corpse of another victim lying under her pet parrot.

Pepper, Joe and Pete try to explain to the surviving daughter about how the “pigeon drop” scam works: fake old ladies meet on a park bench, pretend to find a wallet full of money and lottery tickets, and convince a real old lady to empty her bank account in order to match the funds and then collect on a reward... It all sounds pretty stupid, but that’s why they target the vulnerable elderly... The daughter (Arlene DeWitt) points out that her late mother didn’t fall for the crook’s routine, but Pepper informs her that the killers got access to her mother’s bank account anyway, and even stole a brooch off her body.


The gang stake out a local park and monitor several such occurrences while deciding what action to take against the con artists.

The park really does look nice: sunny, green, church bells tolling on the hour ...

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_3.jpg~original


Pepper stops the two female scammers in the park and threatens to scream for a nearby patrolman (Joe, in a uniform) if they don’t hand over the bundle they’ve just looted off another aging patsy. Envelope in hand, Pepper writes her name on the parcel, dumps it in the nearest mailbox, and is taken by the nasty ladies to their leader, hunky Benny Bates (Erik Estrada, pre-CHiPS) in ‘70s gold chains and disco shirts unbuttoned to his navel; Pepper demands entry into their little operation, and when her overtures at partnership are refused, one of the two girls is mysteriously busted on a parole violation and a hole is left in Benny’s team. Dee, the surviving bunco babe (Vonetta McGhee) balks at the idea, but Benny, charmed by Pepper’s moxy and sex-appeal, agrees to take her on.

Suspicion regarding their partner’s recent arrest is present. But not enough.


Pepper allows Benny to drive her to her “adult” motel room, rebuffing at the door Benny’s advances under the pretense that she’s not interested in a man “who nickels and dimes little old ladies” and then suggests something homoerotic about him going home and “rubbing two sticks together” but I’m not sure what it meant. Entering into the motel room once Estrada drives off, Crowley asks Pepper, “Who writes your dialogue?” and she responds “Whoever it is, remind me to send him a check...” which must mean Ed de Blasio brought Angie something nice from New York and compensation keeps slipping her mind so he’s putting it into the script. But then, who knows?

Perched upon a water bed, Crowley suggests he visit The Church of Otto Otterman, run by Otto Otterman (Henry Gibson, post-LAUGH IN, in what seems an unnecessary cameo). And not-so-pious Sister Clara (Joyce Jameson, sitting in for Joan Blondell) is tapped to help the squad scam the scammers.


Sister Clara, unable to hide her relish for a set-up, almost blows her cover repeatedly by going off-script once the pigeon drop goes down. Pepper coughs, Dee looks rightly suspicious, and Pepper calls it off “before Dee does too much heavy thinking” and then cleverly blames Dee for the failure before storming out, demanding that Benny “call me when you know what you’re doing!!” Meanwhile, Crowley soothes Sister Clara’s guilt over her own incompetence with the sympathetic concession that, “It’s difficult for you to go straight, I know that..."

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_6.jpg~original

This time, the Criminal Conspiracy Unit turns to Jeanette Nolan for assistance, the show refusing the impulse to put Angie in support hose and a powdered wig (at least until next year’s “Night of the Full Moon”). A willing victim, dithery Nolan hands over the bank account supplied to her by the cops, and, having collected the tidy sum during their latest pigeon drop, Pepper rips the missing brooch off of Dee’s collar and leaves her in the dust of her big, black luxury car.

Appalled, Dee naturally calls Benny Estrada from a pay phone to inform him of recent events; Benny hops in his vehicle pronto and, en route to the park, passes Pepper. A decent chase ensues through the streets of L.A. as the pair goes canal bridge hopping, ending up with Pep crashing into a parked car and Benny grabbing the loot away from her through the open passenger window, Benny then chased on foot by Pepper’s male choral trio. He falls three stories from a wooden banister for little reason except it’s time to end the scene.


Back at headquarters, facing murder charges, Dee expresses concern only for herself as per her criminal personality. Pepper and Crowley get a freeze frame in the hallway after he informs her that she’s going to turn him “into a basket case” what with her feminine emotional involvement and whatnot.

(For those keeping score, in '70s tradition the “Music by” title card has little to do with who wrote it: Richard Shores gets screen credit, but the only musical cue in the entire episode he composed is the freeze frame. Such practices were outlawed by the guild by 1981).

________________________

"I'm not a broad..."

Roughly midway thru Season 2 is the seemingly blandly-titled “The Hit,” one of those David Moessinger written and directed episodes like S3’s “Bait” which aim for a darker tone (although S1’s “Ice” hardly fits that description).

On a rooftop during a routine surveillance, Pepper and Crowley catch Pete and Joe listening to a local boxing match on the portable radio. Tony Harper knocks out his opponent, but two mobsters –- real life ex-cops Eddie Egan and David Toma –- aren’t pleased as they watch the fight from that same walnut living room where all well-moneyed POLICE WOMAN crooks seem to live (with the usual lack of effort to disguise it). Egan, California bookmaker Jack Ballard, had made a million dollar bet on Tony Harper that Harper would take a fall in the ring, and now that Harper has refused to comply, Ballard calls in rumpled hit man Benny Hummel (Harris Yulin) to knock off the fighter in retribution, Hummel posing as a yard man with a loud lawnmower who shoots an irritated Harper at dawn.

Captain Parks tells the unit they need to investigate and can drop their present case to do so, leading Pepper to chirp in relief, “If I had to climb that ladder one more time, I would have to asked for flight pay!”

It’s a harmless line, but now, in Pepper’s Season 2 mouth, it’s a little too harmless: it’s just dead, the line. One can imagine how engagingly Angie would have delivered the comment the previous year, when she was absolutely mesmerizing in every single scene she was in, on the street or around the squad room; now, however, she almost sucks the life out of many scenes because they've sucked the life out of her, the brass’s insistence that she tone down her inflection at all times (so as not to be perceived as too sexual and, hence, degrading to women) leaving Angie in a neurotic no-man's-land, now unsure of how to play a scene.

She’s officially a secondary character in her own series: apologetic demeanor, nervous glances, deliberately weakened delivery of her lines, the unit mascot who placidly watches the guys around her do very important things.

Pepper and Crowley arrive at County General Hospital and confront Harper’s wife (Conny Van Dyke, who played the doomed women’s prison con the previous year in “Fish”) who is offended at the suggestion that her sweet boxer husband would ever “fix” a fight, despite the fact that he obviously didn’t fix it at all, which is why he’s lying semi-comatose in the next room –- room # 801, Aces and Eights, the dead man’s hand.

Hummel arrives home to his unhappy household, a brittle and embittered wife (Fay Spain, who played the dykeyest of the homicidal lesbians in last year’s ”Flowers of Evil”) and a vulnerable teenaged daughter (Amy Irving, pre-CARRIE and pre-Speilberg) who the mother browbeats. And hits, physically...

Hummel gets a call from mobster Ballard: the boxer is still alive, and needs to be finished off in his hospital bed.

But when the assassin arrives to complete the botched job, he finds his mark a helpless vegetable, unable to walk and talk, and with not even a guard on the door because, as the nurse (Maddie Norman, who played Bette Davis’ maid in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?) points out, “What’s left to guard??”


Pepper and Bill drop in at some dive called The Four Boar to speak with Dave Fisher, Tony Harper’s brother-in-law, to follow up on a lead that the two men, in business together in the failing restaurant, may have taken loans from bookmaker Ballard to keep their enterprise afloat. He denies any such scheme, but the visit isn’t pointless in that Angie looks really stacked in a tight yellow outfit... At any rate, our duo pay another visit to Mrs Harper at home who denies that her husband has been gambling for a year and was into someone, possibly Ballard, for substantial sums of money.


At the station, Crowley gets a call from the brother-in-law (as Pepper watches from the doorway, dithery as if she somehow shouldn’t be there) who’s found the bookie’s phone number Tony used to call when he wanted to place a bet. Turns out the bookie is a fat guy (Cliff Emmich) who cleverly uses a laundrymat to launder money.


Meanwhile, back County General, the hit man returns again intent on finishing off Harper, explaining to the unresponsive former boxer just why exactly he brought about his own shooting by refusing to kowtow to Ballard’s demands. But before Hummel can complete the job, Harper’s wife walks in unexpectedly; Hummel claims to be a doctor just checking her husband’s chart, and then wanders out. The wife senses something is wrong, but is distracted by emotion from the sight of her three-quarters dead husband, eyes twitching in semi-conscousness.


The squad busts “Moby” the fat guy, and promises to protect him from Ballard if he agrees to testify to a grand jury that Harper owed Ballard money. Understandably reluctant, Moby only agrees if Pepper will be his protection, leading to the inevitable scene of sweaty Moby in an undershirt putting the verbal moves on Sergeant Anderson. She rebuffs him promptly, and her only duty for the episode is quickly completed.


Indeed, Hummel is sent out to kill Moby. So, while enjoying a tense Tahitian meal in public with the obese bookie, Pepper is foolishly lured away from the table by the hit man posing as a cop -– Crowley overhears the impending disaster on his car radio and rushes across the street and into the restaurant. Moby is shot, Hummel rushes out the back door of the restaurant, Crowley chases him, and Pepper stands there like a dullard, unable to figure out what’s just happened or how to act on it.

God. Why are they doing this to her?!?

At the hospital, Hummel’s second would-be victim admits to Pepper and Bill about being "grateful" for the first time in his life for being fat (as that was likely the reason the shooting wasn’t fatal). They mention in an aside that the hit man will likely show up again, but that of course he shouldn’t worry about it, despite -- or perhaps because of -- everybody's recent efficiency record.

Upset that another murder has been messed-up, Ballard calls Hummel and tells him to finish off Moby at the hospital or Hummel’s daughter, Amy Irving, may wind up badly off instead.

In one of the better scenes (and the only one with a musical cue from Richard Shores, though Shores receives composer screen credit for the entire installment), Hummel shows up in tearful Irving’s bedroom in the middle of the night, gives her a bundle of cash, and tells her to leave town immediately. Thus getting her away from her abusive mother, and the guns of Jack Ballard.


Undercover as a nurse, Pepper (in a hot pair of ‘70s teardrop sunglasses) and the team await the hit man’s arrival. Pete spots the likely culprit in the lobby, and Pepper monitors the killer’s advancement up the elevator, keeping the gang informed by walkytalky.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_7.jpg~original

Much to their surprise, Hummel ignores Moby’s floor and, as Pepper realizes at the last moment, he heads right for poor Tony Parker’s room. In one of the slightly creepier scenes, Hummel again breaks into a monologue to rationalize his actions, this time to explain to helpless Parker that he is there to put the boxer out of his misery once and for all.

Even some hit men have a moral code.

Two shots ring out from Parker’s room, followed by a ‘thump’ as Crowley bursts in to find Parker shot to death and Hummel, with a bullet thru his brain, in a pool of his own blood, on the floor beside Parker's bed.

Two hits, two kills. “A perfect score,” Crowley surmises.


The episode is solid. But with Angie’s charisma surgically removed, it all seems to have happened in a vacuum.

________________________

I've always found the title to "Angela" interesting -- a story where the innocent woman becomes the ultimate victim of the powermongering amongst the men. (And right on the heels of Crowley's "it's all down hill from here, honey" speech in "Pawns of Power").

In "Angela," Pepper and the team become concerned when they find out the young cop they're working with (Scott Hylands) is dating the daughter (that's "Angela") of a mobster the department is trying to put away for heroin smuggling and distribution -- and the cop rightly comes under suspicion when the evidence, several kilos of smack, disappear from his car on the way to court.

An episode that didn't originally work all that well for me, it's interesting seeing these again. My view then was that the demoralized producers, chastised about the sensational tone of Season 1 and a too-sexy Angie, were now just churning out installments by mid-Season 2, apathetically and lazily. In review, however, and removed from my lasting sense of disappointment regarding the series' dissipation of energy, I can now see that, as was the case with "Above and Beyond" and other episodes from the same period in the show, the bosses are actually trying to compensate for the new restrictions on POLICE WOMAN by making "Angela" deliberately low-key, thoughtful -- even if the effort doesn't entirely work because the reining in of Angie's charisma, previously the psychic glue of the series, has gone too far.

That said, Angie has one of her finer moments during a scene in which she goes to the hospital to convince the mobster's daughter, a nurse, that her father is indeed a mobster -- and one who has just framed her boyfriend for heroin possession by having his goons plant the junk on the young cop's car in order to destroy him... The effectiveness of the scene is from understatement, and Angie is convincing as she gently prods the girl into reluctantly realizing her dad's a heel, elaborating on the kingpin's sordid criminal history. And the writing mostly supports her... This is the focused, intelligent, seasoned Pepper which, if need be, should have replaced the endlessly coquettish one from the previous year. And if they had done this consistently (instead of edge her out of frame, or make her almost dizzy) then the de-glamorized Pepper Anderson might have seemed like a natural evolution in the character and the show.

And the scene's integrity receives an exclamation point when, after Pepper tries to rub the traumatized girl's head to soothe her (as so often happened on TV back in the day) the girl instead slings Pepper's presumptuous hand away and snaps, "Don't touch me!" before exiting. As would any normal person in an identical situation.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/angela_1.jpg~original

The somewhat surprising tragic ending to the episode is also intentionally underplayed -- which, in this case, is a plus; Angela the ultimate victim of the wrangling between cop and crook, Daddy and boyfriend.

Although I always want to cast one of Angie's rat pack pals in the role of the mobster in "Angela." But never mind that.


Actual airedate: Dec. 16, 1975, despite listings which insist it aired in late Jan. '76.

One offering I wound up liking a little better than I'd remembered was "Above and Beyond" the last to air on Friday nights (just before the regrettable yet timely move to Tuesdays against M*A*S*H) guided by Alexander Singer, one of their most atmospheric directors.

After staking-out liquor stores during a robbery spree, Pepper goes under as a new parolee to smoke out the killer of a parole officer who was shot in the head from the back seat of his car... Since Singer is running the show here, I shouldn't be surprised that there are details I didn't catch previously -- subtle, artful elements in an entry Singer and/or the producers clearly intended to be low-key, moody, subdued. But given that the series is now slipping into its own parallel era of paint-by-numbers blandness, those subtle, artful elements are almost lost on the viewer so I also shouldn't be surprised that I mostly missed catch them years ago.

In the end, Crowley and the guys make the bust.

Anyway, the seething teenaged son fresh from 'Nam who did the deed with the intention of stealing from the thieves just because his childhood was scarred from a father too busy with work to pay him any attention feels like a slightly questionable, or at least forced, premise for the murder: I keep wanting him to be a female W.A.C. sergeant whom Daddy molested on their camping trips together.

But no such luck.

In the end, Crowley and the guys make the bust.

____________________

In "Glitter with a Bullet," Pepper poses as a Rolling Stone-style writer doing a piece on a glam-rock musician who is being controlled and exploited by his girlfriend, his manager and everyone around him.

Angie gets a '70s-esque brake-lines-are-cut driving scene but, despite moving at a surprisingly slow speed down a mountain road, turns over anyway.

Oh, my. Not a good sign.

***

"Incident Near a Black and White," about the shooting of a patrol cop during a barrio rumble, is a good idea for an episode. But the script is weak and the guest actors are worse (does a latino accent really disguise a lack of acting ability to the caucasian male executives??)

To be fair, the dead cop's pasty white girlfriend seems to talk -- and moan -- like a small child throughout the entire thing, her dialogue seemingly dubbed all the way... Angie has a potentially good moment when she quotes a Bible passage back to a stuffy police commander, but, with the new restrictions on the way she speaks, Angie can no longer sell it without it sounding like she read it in the script that morning. (Similarly, her attempts to convince John Rubenstein in "Glitter with a Bullet" that she recognizes the classic jazz piece he's playing on the saxophone -- or was it a tuba? -- and that she also knows whose 1948 version the piece he's reprising, the moment just doesn't work --- she could have pulled both off easily in Season 1).

It's not Angie's fault; she's been punked by the brass: the almost idealized, worldly woman she was in the first year has been reduced to a nice, dithery, nervous-in-every-scene lady who occasionally gets to say something if she behaves and promises to say it apologetically.

The best moment of "Incident" comes when Crowley and Pepper in uniform respond to a domestic dispute in the ghetto -- it's so '70s, and it's as comforting as it is kind of funny.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pepper_crowley_uniform. jpg~original


***

Oh, and then there's "The Melting Point of Ice." Not the best script for Shimon Wincelberg (a good writer ordinarily) but it has some nice possibilities which seem sabotaged by the listless direction from .... Robert Vaughn?? Anyway, Pepper and Crowley go undercover as construction site sandwich makers in search of stolen diamonds -- so Pepper gets to flirt for a minute.

But it's by rote, as most of Season 2 has become by this point.

And despite Angie's refusal to drive an 18-wheeler, she accepts the duty of guiding a food van.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/angieonwheels.jpg~origi nal

I'm holding my breath for "Task Force" Parts 1 and 2, a decent closing to a schizoid season.

__________________

"The Han dynasty --- and that tart used it for flowers..."

One episode from latter Season 2 I like slightly more than I originally did is "The Pawn Shop." It's not great-great, but it's watchable enough... Diane Baker plays a high-end art thief who is stern and brittle as only Baker can be, and Joan Collins, sans British accent, the semi-common former movie queen who's Baker's latest victim.


My memory of this episode is that Angie, newly subdued by the Squelch Angie Directive, had bad hair, bad lighting, and was permitted only the most routine delivery of her dialogue... It doesn't hit me so strongly now as it did eons ago, but it's hard to believe they didn't use -- or obtain -- another reading from her of the line, ".... Don't you try and buy back insured items at a fraction of what you're supposed to pay out?" to an insurance executive just before the squad opens the pawn shop designed to draw in Baker and her team of burglars. Dickinson stumbles through the sentence, and they used it anyway.

Was no one minding the store --- as it were?

And then there's the unfortunate subplot of the "cute" little neighborhood kid, Ricky Segall, who's bringing in stolen goods from his house to buy his mother a necklace from the shop Pepper and Pete are now running. In this case, the kid is the son of an executive -- or must be, given how many Columbia TV shows he appeared in during the early-to-mid-'70s; anyway, the boy adds to the endless "you're so pretty!" dialogue the show and its guest stars continue to throw at Pepper every three minutes, despite the simultaneous movement to de-glamorize her... So the show really is at neurotic cross-purposes at this point.

However, there is a nice, almost-stylish scene at an art show between Angie and Diane Baker, the two sizing each other up, the repartee clever; the moment -- and Angie herself -- most reminiscent of early-early-Season One (a period in the show which otherwise feels very far away by now).

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The most amusing thing, needless to say, is Joan Collins. In full early-Alexis mode, a state of mind further enhanced by the fact that future DYNASTY head-writer (and PW story editor) Ed de Blasio is obviously writing her dialogue, she seduces (apparently successfully) Sergeant Crowley and his "lily white body" after he shows unusual vulnerability in his embarrassment that an actress he so reveres is making a shameless play for him... This is strictly the Alexis of DYNASTY's Season 2, full of pretense and flirty affectation and hoity toity cultural references and mysterious past liaisons -- and yet, much like that early-Alexis, infinitely more likeable and charming because she knows she's not presently at the top of the heap.

Few people could seem both so very '70s and yet so very '80s as Joan Collins.

Then Crowley escorts Collins (her name is "Prudence" in this) to a high society Hollywood party where Pepper, still undercover as a fence for stolen property, calls Joan "ugly" and Crowley responds "you get used to it." It's cute. And, truth be told, despite Joan's melodramatic silliness and already-excessive make-up, she is indeed gorgeous.

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An irritation in the episode comes from the fact that the interior for the house used as Collins' mansion is that same stupid studio set with the curving staircase they've used in every other episode since the series began. Up until now, that was okay -- "old TV" being what it was in the pre-DVD age. But even in 1976, this seemed like one appearance too many. The jig was up. It's the same damned house and we know it. They can't fool us any more! ... What's worse, they use the set for two different scenes set at supposedly different locations: Joan's house and the house hosting the party she later attends with Crowley.

Jeez! For a highly-rated TV show, couldn't they spring for the expense of filming at a real home in Brentwood or something??

Anyway, the final humorous occurrence comes when Diane Baker takes Pepper out on a nighttime burglaring test run, and, to assess the legtimacy of her skills, forces her to pick out "the finest piece" on the shelf of a mansion some rich person lives in but is away on vacation; it's humorous, because Pepper goes right for the tackiest Hummel figurine, and insodoing promptly blows her cover.

Ah, television.

In Season 3's "The Trick Book," Joan comes back to play a sociopathic prostitute named Lorelai Frank. It's the first time I'd ever heard the phrase "sexual dysfunction" and said as only Joan could.

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Coming into the last half dozen shows of Season 2, there is "Wednesday's Child" featuring Paula Kelly reprising her role as Linda Summers, AKA: 'The Black Widow,' (first introduced a year earlier in perhaps the best Pepper-does-the-town installment of them all, "The Company"). In this new one, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes plays, somewhat improbably, a cat burglar who scales up the side of uptown apartment highrises and relieves the spoiled wealthy widows of their expensive jewelry, that jewelry then turned over to Robert Loggia... After Summers sets up Pepper and Kookie, resulting in the early nabbing of the burglar, the team decides to go after Loggia and the top guy buying the hot stones in San Francisco.

Once this is achieved, however, the cat burglar and Linda are targeted for revenge -- and to prevent their testimony, Linda's tiny daughter is kidnapped by the cackling cad who'd sired her. Such an ugly business.

The episode is okay, a little tighter than I'd remembered. But I find myself increasingly irritated with the tired choice of musical cues, that same "DOO daa doo DAA doo" composed by George Romanis the previous season re-used ad nauseum, regardless of who's getting screen credit as composer on these stock score installments.

But there's a lovely scene at the beach with seagulls when Pepper and Linda match stories about their special relationships with their secret children: Pepper's no-longer-seen sister, and Linda's out-of-wedlock daughter.

And at some point, Angie gets to wear a pretty, peek-a-boo frock.


The good guys prevail, but the closing moment with Pepper telling Linda in court to "go get 'em, friend" (or words to that effect) is really anemic.

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A good comparison between Season 1 and Season 2 can be gleened from watching S1's "Blast" with Robert Vaughn as Pepper's dance hall boss alongside S2's "Generation of Evil" with Robert Vaughn as Pepper's Vegas dance hall boss.

That says it all.

But I'll keep typing anyway...

In this new one, David Opatoshu plays an aging gangster whose graying hair keeps getting darker and lighter depending on mood (this is the '70s, remember, era of pet rocks, lava lamps and mood rings). Opatoshu's grandson, Greg Brady, is kindapped in the first scene and the squad moves in to find him, the only choice alloted to them is having Pepper jiggle nearly naked in Nevada on the strip in Vegas -- the Los Angeles hotel ball room we've seen in so many shows and movies doing an adequate job of mimicking a more downmarket Las Vegas casino lobby. (A tad more stock footage of Sin City would have been nice).

While Pepper uses her powers as Most Attractive Woman Ever Born, muted as they may be for Season 2, to woo and weaken casino owner Robert Vaughn (I always re-cast him in my head with John Forsythe, but that's just me) the mobster who they suspect kidnapped Greg Brady, Pete and Bill try and keep tabs on fidgety Opatoshu in California who himself keeps taking phonecalls from the kidnappers at a public phone under a huge clock whose "Bulova" brand name has seen its "L" and "O" turned into "E" and "Q", respectively, in order to avoid giving anybody's product a free plug... Although I don't know anybody who ever bought a watch from "BUEQVA", but whatever.

In Vegas, Pepper joins a revue where the girls wear glittery one-piece outfits and wave colored kerchiefs. Angie Dickinson once complained in a Season 1 audio commentary that her go-go moves in "Blast" were "awful!" compared to the other girls with whom she shared the stage -- girls who really could do it and do it well. But in "Generation of Evil" they apparently decided to avoid this problem by hiring dancers who can't seem to dance almost at all... At the very least, they're dreadfully out of synch.

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Eventually, after getting the stereotypic Italian mother-running-a-bistro to dump spaghetti on Pete's head as a distraction, Opatoshu escapes surveillance and makes his way to Vegas where Joe, acting as bartender, pulls a gun on him and forces casino security to help him remove the hood from public view.

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As Pepper watches their sting operation about to go up in smoke, she uses Vaughn's executive phonebooth to trace the origin of the calls he's been taking there from the kidnappers. Unfortunately, somebody behind the camera thought having a ditz on the other end of the line who's thrilled that "the police want me to run a tracer!" would help sell the plot contrivance they have in store when, against instructions, she calls back and bleats away for "Sergeant Pepper Anderson -- she just used this phone!!" into the ear of none other than Vaughn himself, blowing Pepper's cover immediately... It's a stupid vignette; such a mistake on the part of the phone operator would have been far more believable if she'd simply been a semi-gruff, all-business, been-there-done-that-and-I-don't-care kind of person. But instead, they give us an Aaron Spelling moment.

It's hard to believe this entry was helmed by Corey Allen, who would become one of POLICE WOMAN's better directors; but it's his first episode, and the set politics were weird in Season 2, so we'll just have to forgive him.

What's so odd about what they've done to Pepper this season is that we're denied her seductive purr even when she's playing a hooker or a showgirl! Okay, they toned down her inflection during expository dialogue in the squad house -- but she has to be made to seem less whore-y even when she's playing a whore ?!?


And that trademark purr was important. What the producers and network executives didn't seem to understand about Angie Dickinson (and her detractors no doubt didn't care) was that the sexy thing and the tough thing in Angie comes from the same place in her brain: suppress one and you lose the other... That enigmatic purrrr, so controlled and deliberate and so present in Season One, wasn't merely a "sexy" thing from Angie. It had a consciousness. It had an irony. It was the moral compass of the show. That purr told you everything about what Pepper was thinking, what she wanted the bad guys to think she was thinking, and the inherent contradictions between the two.

That purr provided the dramatic tension, deepened the subtext, guiding and correcting essentially every scene she was in.

That's some purr!

But no more. The purr was gone. Excised from Angie's performance, even when slutting around in a slinky 'screw-me' get-up.

Anyway, the closing scene in "Generation of Evil" is much poorer, weaker than it should be: now that the grandson is safe in a L.A. hospital, Opatoshu can't understand why Greg Brady rebuffs him because "your love almost killed me, Grandpa" and then wanders off down the hall hand-in-hand with his girlfriend. And when Pepper turns to the confused mobster and offers the would-be chastisement, "You lived your life your way -- now your grandson has to live his..." the line falls flat because Angie is now being coached into delivering all such dialogue apologetically, nervously, like she doesn't really mean it.

Then, she and Crowley turn and walk down the hospital corridor together to get their freeze frame.

If she'd delivered the same line in the same scene the previous season, the stinging rebuke would have resonated down the hall after them. But no more.

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Re-watched "Double Image" with Catherine Burns going on about how "ugly" she is, who, along with her girlfriend who looks like Linda Day George (but isn't), is shaking down some mob guy (Dane Clark) over homemade 8mm sex films...

"Double Image" also has the kind of California seaside locations which seem so 1976. They must've done them a lot that year.

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Pete Royster gets some of his best -- and only -- personal scenes he would ever have of the entire series, as he falls for Burns' character, despite her being an extortionist whose partner was murdered via a butcher knife. Their mutual bond is presumably based on being funny-looking but oddly appealing.

Except that she's bat$h!t crazy. Which messes up their scene, baby.

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There is a nicely leisurely flavor to this installment and much of the end of Season 2 which is kind of relaxing, the series' inner conflicts from mid-season having been gotten through (how successfully is a matter of opinion). The show no longer seems to be actively suppressing its star, but it -- and she -- is different than what it once was. Perhaps it's just a sense of resignation.

At any rate, it's easier to watch. Even though Pepper's beach bluff fight scene with a faceless thug results in yet another "saving" via Crowley despite his having been kicked down a dune moments earlier.

Richard Shores is given the "Music by..." screen credit, and yet he didn't write one note of it.


***


Then there's "Mother Love" with guest star Donna Mills, refining the babynapping skills she will have perfected almost a decade later in KNOTS LANDING.

She gave birth to a baby girl 6 months ago, and post-partum denial has been tough. She swipes the baby away from its mother (who foolishly left it with Mills in a mall shoppe) with the intention of reconnecting with her soon-to-be-released-from-prison main dude and the father of the infant...

Nothing wildly dramatic happens in this by-the-book story except for redneck Mills stabbing her trampy housemate and then pushing her equally redneck hubby off a cliff when he attempts to extort 15,000 dollars from the grieving adoptive parents in exchange for the return of the child. Hubby's fall manages to be both shocking and a little funny. Especially when they later find his body aloft in a tree at the base of the cliff.

The squad chase her around a winding mountain road. And then Mills stops running once Pepper and Crowley manage to get in front of her. Which doesn't entirely make sense, but it's time for the episode to end.


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The grand finale to Season 2 is a two-parter entitled "Task Force" (everywhere on the Internet and on the DVDs, the show is listed "Task Force, Cop Killer" but I'd never seen that until a couple of years ago -- perhaps that was the title on the original script, but it never appears on screen).

It's about an italian opera singing morotcycle cop who, predictably, falls for Pepper. James Darren is cast as Rick Matteo, and one wonders if Aaron Spelling was watching this in reruns when he decided to add Darren to cast of impossibly cheesy T J HOOKER in the '80s. Or if NBC came up with the idea of putting some metal between the legs of Erik Estrada after viewing this, the episode so smacks of spin-off intentions (and I think it was indeed considered as such).

Cop-happy Elvis Presley seems like ideal casting, but Colonel Parker would never have allowed it.

As two-parters go, it's really not bad, giving POLICE WOMAN a badly needed jolt of energy just as the hit-and-miss frustrations inherent to the second season grind to a halt. Like many two-part segments in TV during the '60s and '70s, there is only enough plotline to really warrant a single episode, but "Task Force" seems to validate the extra length by having just enough chutzpah, cuddling, biker menace and lots of shots of cycle-cops riding thru the streets of 1976 L.A. accompanied by a partly new score by Morty Stevens which sounds like some military thing an American highschool band would play at Homecoming.

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The plot follows Pepper's inadvertent enlisting in a new female-friendly biker cop unit formed to ward off civil suits after she's duped by the evil feminists on the force into signing a petition. (Crowley, misogynist oinker 'til the end, seems highly amused that one of Pepper's fellow police women has a lawyer who's a woman).

There's a lot of excitement as the new co-ed unit congeals, with many scenes of off-hours group comraderie and "natural" macho rapartee which today seem insufferably trite; it's harmless, if a bit retro-pathetic.

Matteo (Darren) saves Pepper's life from a stupid near-fatal sky-diving plunge in the very first scene! That's how you know they'll be a couple. Indeed, he's soon serenading her by the pool, instructing her on proper chopper etiquette, canoodling by the couch since there's no fireplace in Pepper's apartment.

This once all seemed so nostalgically romantic in a '70s way. (I tended to associate it closely with that episode of STARSKY & HUTCH's Season One in which Starsky finds the girl he'd had a crush on in middle school who'd grown into a famous model before winding up an alky on skid-row and a victim of petty thieves who aim to kill her as a witness to their crimes... The episodes aired weeks apart in Spring 1976 and were both heavy on the romantic Hawaiian-sounding guitar in the musical score).

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Then there's Bobbo Olchin (Don Stroud, in his third and fourth appearance on the show) a Manson-like biker gang leader, one whose black leather jacket sports the logo "Hell's Pussycats," more ominous for its cuteness, and who is assumed to have kidnapped the teen daughter of a California industrialist and either killed her or, worse, turned her into one of his shameless whore-devils.

One has to remember that this aired at the time when HELTER SKELTER (the original, then-shocking TV movie revisiting the 1969 Manson family murders) and Patty Hearst and the Symbianese Liberation Army and other '60s radicals on-the-run were the objects of big, creepy, scandalous media focus post-Vietnam and post-Watergate (and something alluded to again in the top-notch "Tender Soldier" episode of POLICE WOMAN early in Season 3).

And through it all, there are various subplots of the fetishistic sort that POLICE WOMAN liked to toss in back when such stuff was still considered risky television fare, including Charles Haid (pre-HILL STREET BLUES) caught by James Darren whacking outside Pepper sliding glass door (which leads alternately to an apartment walkway, an enclosed patio, or an open woods dependant on story needs). You know Haid is a loser because he's fat, lives with his mother Rebecca Wentworth, he failed to make the cut during the biker unit training quiz, and everybody's nice to him because it's T.V.

And after Officer Matteo is later run down in a sidewalk phone booth (a crash he couldn't possibly survive in real life) by a wildly painted van, the search for a motive leads them to recall Haid's night-spunking of Pepper's window; Pepper enlists the aid of the department psychologist, played with her usual uninentional campiness by Dr. Joyce Brothers in one of several appearance in the series, who informs the beautiful Sergeant Anderson that "... any sexual perversion is that serious!". Armed with this insight, Pepper and Crowley then interrogate a sobbing Haid who comforts them with the assurances that he had been in the bushes masturbating to Pepper and not to James Darren. And everyone is relieved, 'cause that's almost normal.

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Now that puts the suspicion back on the criminal biker gang and Bobbo Olchin's ex-lieutenant, Comet (played Gerald McRaney who displays a smarmy sex appeal soon lost with his youth) as to who may have run down Officer Matteo and also shot to death another cycle cop who went nosing around the gang's hideout at Sugar Ranch (more shades of Manson imagery).

Eventually, Pepper finds the long-lost, kidnapped teenaged heiress who's now drugged-out and homicidal and snickers like a rat very effectively; the girl has become Lady Renfield. There's a good, slightly creepy scene at the ranch when the girl pulls an axe on Pepper, and Our Lady of Bacharach spins around -- weapon drawn -- with some competence before the inevitable slapping down at gunpoint by a man, her immediate penance for showing any ovarian-fortitude at all.

Remember, this is still Season 2.

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Anyway, the weather is gorgeous and feels so very Spring 1976 (okay, technically it was filmed in February... but it's California).

They place Pepper on a motorcycle and the cops chase her and then something blows up, leading to Pepper's bedside rejection of James Darren's various proposals. And there is a nice, light-hearted moment at the hospital elevator when Bill still thinks Pepper is headed to Italy with Matteo which is basically ruined by some pretty dodgy vocal looping.

But it was a good way to close the year.

BTW: "Task Force" won an Emmy for sound-mixing (all those "vrrooom-vrrooomm"s, I guess, because the vocal dubbing is atrocious).

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