The Streets of San Francisco —
Season 1 Episode Reviews

RATINGS:
★★★★ = One of the very best episodes, a must-see.
★★★ = Better than average, worthy of attention.
★★ = Average, perhaps with a few moments of interest.
★ = Below average, an episode to avoid.

S01E01: The Thirty-Year Pin ★★★½
Original air date: September 23, 1972
Director: Bernard L. Kowalski; Writer: Robert Lewin; Music: Patrick Williams
Guest Stars: Edmond O'Brien, Tim O'Connor, David Opatoshu, Eileen Heckart*

Stone's partner from 30 years ago, Gus Charnovski (Edmond O'Brien), is near-fatally shot when investigating the robbery of Joseph's Jewellery at 2944 Columbus Avenue. When the ambulance man says Gus is a goner, Stone tells him "Like hell!" and on the way to the hospital, keeps talking to Gus to keep him alive. After Gus has been taken care of, Stone haranges someone on the phone, then has a nasty run-in with Captain Roy Devitt (Tim O'Connor): "This one's mine, Roy. Don't say that I'm overstepping my authority. And don't say that you've done the best job you could so far, because you did nothing. A rookie cop could have gotten more information than that. If this punk gets away, it's because you blew it." Devitt doesn't take this sitting down, firing back, "Where do you come off anyway? Somebody appoint you commissioner?" Stone tells him, "If you don't like what I'm doing, then you just file a complaint." Devitt is totally bug-eyed at the way Stone is acting. Late that night, Stone and Keller go to the house of the jeweller, Joseph Beemer (David Opatoshu). They take him back to his store and make him walk through the robbery again, which produces more details. Returning to the station, Stone runs into Devitt, and tells him, "I was way out of line. But a policeman's been shot, a brother. And there's some born scum out there who's laughing about it right now, and I wanna see him nailed." Devitt accepts his apology. Returning to the squad room, Stone issues "do this/do that" orders to all of the men there. At the hospital, Gus is conscious. His wife Stella (Ellen Heckart) was brought there earlier by Keller. Gus tells Stone that the robber has to live in the neighborhood adding "This was a seat-of-the-pants operation." Gus thinks that he may have been a junkie as well. Keller is getting frustrated. He tells Stone, "I gotta know what you're doing, and, what's more important, you gotta know what you're doing." Stone tells him to stay out of his way and goes off on his own. In the morning, Stone talks to Eddie Suslow (Leo Gordon), a hustler for a blue movie theater who is an informer. He says "I want the name of that punk who pulled that trigger." Then he goes to the apartment of Harry Jarvis (Rex Holman), a doper. Stone hassles him and Jarvis flees the building just as Keller is coming up the stairway. Keller gives pursuit and Jarvis is caught. Jarvis says when Gus was shot he was throwing dice in the back room of a bar. Stone returns to the hospital where Gus tells him "I'm not gonna make it." There is an emotional scene between the two men. Keller calls to say that Jarvis's alibi checks out, but one of the other players in the crap game left and came back half an hour later with $400 in cash. His name is Cal Fisher (Frank Orsatti), and Stone busted him once on an assault with a deadly weapon. As this conversation is going on, Gus dies. Stone comforts Stella. Keller gave Stone Fisher's address, so he and Devitt head in that direction. Keller and the other cops arrive just as Stone is chasing Fisher, who fired several shots at him through the door of his apartment. Stone and Keller pursue Fisher into a BART station which is still under construction, where Fisher is eventually nabbed. Stone resists shooting Fisher on the spot.

EPILOG:

Stone leaves Stella's place where he been visiting. He and Keller head to lunch. Stone says he ought to make Keller pay after the con job he pulled about how Gus was asking for him. Stone tells Keller, "You didn't lose your head. It's a good thing too. I guess I wasn't using mine much, was I? … I was way off base. Don't ever let me catch you off base that far. That's no way to operate. You know... there's one thing you've always gotta remember…" Keller interrupts: "Mike, if I let you buy me lunch, can I skip the lecture?" Stone replies, "Well, how are you ever gonna learn anything?"

REVIEW:

A very good show, but I agree with someone at IMDb who says that for a first episode, Mike comes on very strong with his "leave no stone unturned" (no pun intended) approach to solving the crime, so this is really not a good introduction to the show and the lead characters (assuming that you have not seen the pilot, of course). The acting of both O'Brien, who spends most of the episode on a stretcher or a hospital bed, and Eileen Heckart, who plays his wife Stella, is very good. Great music, great non-process shots.

MORE TRIVIA:

• There is some interesting photography at the beginning of the show where the camera turns upside-down.
• A classical music trio of oboe, flute and cello is seen playing in the opening scene.
• Ed Lauter plays Doctor Joseph Ford.
• Jarvis lives at 103 Andrews Street.
• At around 42:20, Keller is standing in front of a chain-link fence; this shot appears in the main credits where Michael Douglas's character is shown in all of the first four season episodes. Stone is very athletic when he is chasing Fisher.

S01E02: The First Day of Forever ★★★½
Original air date: September 30, 1972
Director: Walter Grauman; Writer: Robert W. Lenski ; Music: Tom Scott
Guest Stars: Janice Rule, James Olson
"Buddy boy" count: 4

Beverly Landau (Janice Rule), a hooker, leaves a bar with a salesman (Phillip Pine) who tells her "It's a little tough to handle your kind of action on the size of my expense account." Going home then on her own, she finds herself being stalked by a man who slashes her arm. She runs across the street, pursued by this guy. He is hit by a delivery truck and limps away. Landau is taken to hospital and patched up. After this, Stone and Keller drive her to her ritzy apartment, but she gets a threatening phone call while they are there, saying "You must die. You will die." They decide to take her to a safer location which turns out to be the run-down Kennedy Hotel. Landau is not too crazy about this place, or the fact that Keller has been assigned to stay with and guard her. The stalker tries to enter their room late at night, but Keller is on the ball, and notices that a window by a fire escape in the hall is open (but the stalker went up the fire escape instead of down). Stone has already investigated one of the clients in Landau's "trick book," which were cross-checked with those of three other hookers who were stabbed to death in the last five weeks. Howard Joslin (the gravelly-voiced Ken Lynch), has a good alibi since he was in a plane east of Denver when Landau was attacked. The next morning, Stone goes to see Loren Graham (James Olson). Stone is intrigued by a crucifix on Graham's desk. Graham tells him that this is "a reminder of humility. I started out in the basement with a business college course in accounting, a suit with two pairs of pants, and a pair of shoes that didn't go with either pair of pants. I've been given a lot through the years. I don't wanna forget what others have given." Graham doesn't initially recognize the names of two of the women on Stone's list -- Landau and Elinor Palmer -- but he eventually does, acting shocked and assuring Stone that he was not the one who attacked or murdered them. When Stone leaves, Graham limps back to his desk, where he turns over the crucifix. In its wooden base he has carved the names of four women -- Landau, Palmer, Dorothy King and Rose Miles. Stone goes to the Kennedy Hotel, bringing along Sonny Lane, who is another suspect from the book, but it turns out that Lane is Landau's pimp. Landau and Keller decide to get some fresh air. They go to the Ghiardelli Square area and hang out for the rest of the day and talk. When Graham's prints match those found on the open window at the hotel, Stone gets a search warrant for Graham's office. He sees the names on the base of the crucifix and puts two and two together. Later in the evening, having tipped off Stone where he is with Landau, Keller leaves her alone for a few minutes and Graham, who has been stalking them there for hours, attempts to attack her. Keller pursues Graham on to the roof of a nearby building where Graham threatens to jump while screaming abuse -- "Dirty, filthy harlot! Lying, vicious harlot!" -- at Landau, who is on the street below. When Stone shows up, he manages to calm Graham down before he is taken into custody.

EPILOG:

Some time later, Stone and Keller pull up outside a restaurant where Landau has a new job as a waitress. Keller asks Stone if she got the job because of him, and Stone replies, "No, you did." The two of them head off to a baseball game at Candlestick Park.

REVIEW:

This is a very good episode, though we can sort of figure out early on that because James Olson is a guest star, he is most likely the stalker. It is interesting that when Stone comes to Graham's office, Graham never specifically says that he patronized Landau, though his name was obviously in her book. As far as the book is concerned, I was surprised that Landau gave this up to the two cops pretty quickly when she is at the station looking through mug books. But Stone comes across as "the cop who cares," not someone who is being judgmental about Landau's profession. On the other hand, I can't understand why Keller is indifferent to watching over her. Is this because he doesn't see babysitting hookers as part of his job description, or does he have some kind of moral issue dealing with her? After the scare with the stalker, he returns to the room where Landau is having a bad dream, and he comforts her, but this doesn't stop him making from a couple of foot-in-mouth type comments later. They become pals when they leave the hotel. Landau tells Keller, "The hooker and the cop. The whole world spits on us, but they can't get along without us. You know that we work the same lousy hours, see the same lousy people, and we get the same lousy stares if anybody happens to know what we do. Somebody's gotta do it, so here we are." Olson's transition from a psycho to a normal person who even shakes Keller's hand when Stone starts talking about Graham's secretary Miss Winters (Rebecca Sand) -- "a good woman" -- is pretty creepy, as is the whole unanswered question of why Graham wanted to kill prostitutes in the first place.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The title of the episode comes from the conversation Keller and Landau have when they are out for some fresh air -- she tells him that she can't change her lifestyle, it has been that way "forever." Keller tells her, "Forever can start whenever you say so. You look at me. Just look. Can you see it? That's you. That's what I see. So don't do any numbers about dignity and self-respect, all right? Let's just let forever start today."
• Graham's office desk contains newspaper clippings about the killings with the word "SAVED" written on them in pen.
• At the beginning of the show, Landau is shown near the Orphanage Club at 807 Montgomery Street, where a lot of famous musicians and rock groups played.
• Landau lives at 813 Shay Towers. Graham's office is at 1413 Pine Street, 21st floor.
• The pay phone number at the Kennedy Hotel on the fourth floor where their room (408) is located is 362-9296.
• Keller tells Landau he is 28 years old.

S01E03: 45 Minutes from Home ★★★½
Original air date: October 7, 1972
Director: Walter Grauman; Writer: Robert I. Holt; Music: Billy Byers
Guest Stars: William Windom, Jacqueline Scott, Jo Ann Harris, Stephen Oliver
"Buddy boy" count: 2

Lita Brewer (Jo Ann Harris), a free-spirited young woman, hitches a ride with Russell Rankin (William Windom) to take her across the Golden Gate Bridge to a houseboat in Sausalito owned by her potter boyfriend Brett Wilson (Stephen Oliver). There is no indication whether Rankin really intended to go over the bridge. He is in San Francisco attending the Unified Pharmaceutical Annual Convention being held at Del Webb's Town House Hotel. Rankin tells Lita his name is Tom Garver. When they arrive at the boat, Lita invites Rankin inside. She attempts to seduce him and make him smoke some pot, but when she starts yelling at him that he is a hypocrite, he pushes her away and she strikes her head on the floor just as Wilson comes home. Rankin leaves around the other side of the boat in a big hurry, but not before Wilson sees him departing. Relations between Wilson and Lita are not good; he is fed up with her bringing men home and taking advantage of his generosity in letting her stay there. As Lita complains that her head is bleeding, Wilson picks up a pot and kills her with it. He calls the cops and makes up a story that it was Rankin who killed Lita. Stone and Keller are called by the Marin County police to help out because they "need assistance" with this crime, and there is a San Francisco connection because a matchbook from the convention hotel, which Rankin used to light Lita's joint, is found at the scene. The two cops go to the hotel and interview Tom Garver (Robert Hogan), another one of the salesmen attending the convention, whose name Rankin was borrowing. He has not only an alibi for the time Lita was killed, but Wilson is also brought there to ID him, and says that this Garver is not the man he saw. Wilson recognizes Rankin among the other people in the hotel and finds out his real name, then goes to Rankin's room and tells him he wants $1,000 to keep his mouth shut. Rankin tries to borrow a grand from some of his fellow conventioneers, but has no luck. Instead, he steals a gun from John Collins (Dick Van Patten). Keller goes and talks to some people in the San Francisco craft market near the corner of Powell and Hyde Streets. He finds out that Lita, who made macrame, was "a tease" who was "cold" and Wilson and she were not in love; in fact, Wilson wasn't "as equipped as he looked." In other words, he was impotent. Rankin, who is from Los Angeles, gets a big surprise when his wife Emily (Jacqueline Scott) shows up at the hotel. He tells his wife everything that happened with Lita and Wilson so far, and rushes out to take care of matters with the stolen gun. Stone and Keller show up soon, and Emily tells them everything her husband told her, because she is afraid he will do something stupid. The two cops pursue Rankin over the bridge and arrive at the houseboat just as he is about to shoot Wilson. Wilson escapes, but is soon nabbed and arrested.

EPILOG:

At the beginning of the show, Stone, to get Keller -- who was off duty -- to drop everything and come back to work, pulled his partner away from some Chinese babe he was asking about types of tea in a store by talking to the woman in Chinese, saying that Keller's wife and kids are at home getting tired waiting for the wonton. They go back to the same store. Keller tells Stone to tell the woman in English that he is "single with Sunday night off" in English, calling him "Confucius."

REVIEW:

Although Rankin told his wife what really happened, this is hearsay and I think he might have difficulty trying to prove his innocence in court, especially if Wilson keeps his mouth shut. What evidence do the cops have that Wilson killed Lita? It is not explained why Stone and Keller are talking to people in the San Francisco craft market about Lita and Wilson, even though the people there have plenty of dirt to dish on them. After all, it is said that Wilson's houseboat is "in the artists' colony marina known as the floating city near Sausalito" -- wouldn't they have their own craft market? Still, this is a good episode, especially considering it stars the very sexy Jo Ann Harris. What a pity she gets knocked off so early ... but she will be back in season two, where she plays one of Keller's girl friends.

MORE TRIVIA:

• There is an incredible tracking shot with Stone and Keller during the craft market which goes on for three minutes and 17 seconds (director of photography is Jacques R. Marquette). It starts when Keller has his picture taken by some blonde babe, then the two of them walk through the market with lots of activity behind them. The two cops then get into their car and drive away up a nearby street. There are also some interesting shots at the beginning of the show when Rankin and Lita are driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in his rental car. In one shot, the camera is attached to the passenger side door, shooting the two in the front seat, and a car pulls up on the other side of them containing a family which briefly starts gawking at the filming.
• Rankin has been married for 22 years and a salesman for 25.
• There are 267 attendees at the convention. They are all checked out and all have clean records.
• As Collins takes a shower, he is singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."
• In the area of the craft market, the same trio (flute/oboe/cello) as was seen in the show's first episode after the pilot is playing music.

S01E04: Whose Little Boy Are You? ★★½
Original air date: October 14, 1972
Director: Walter Grauman; Writers: Cliff Gould & Donn Mullally
Guest Stars: James Stacy, Linda Marsh, Nancy Wickwire, Richard O'Brien
"Buddy boy" count: 1

US Army sergeant and Vietnam veteran Peter J. Forrest (James Stacy) has been AWOL for almost a month. He breaks into the house of Barney and Martha Reardon (Richard O'Brien and Nancy Wickwire) with the intention of abducting their 5-year-old son Sean (Stephen Manley). Sean is actually Forrest's own son. He was given up for adoption by Forrest's ex-wife Joan (Linda Marsh), who became pregnant two months before Forrest enlisted for a lengthy tour of duty. Forrest is just about to take Sean out of the house when he is interrupted by Reardon who attempts to tackle him, but Forrest escapes out the window through which he entered the place. When Stone and Keller investigate, Reardon tells them in his opinion this was a burglary, not an attempted molestation, which to the cops doesn't make sense, because burglars don't normally enter "hot houses" where there are people present. There is other evidence relating to the abduction which the two cops find fishy. As they leave, Stone asks Keller, "What's in a kid's room that would interest an intruder? A kid maybe." Forrest goes to visit his wife Joan, who he has been checking up on. He knows about her job and her new boy friend, and tells her that he wants to have her divorce against him overturned. Then they will get their son back and "It's going to be the way it should have been a long time ago." The two of them stalk Martha Reardon and Sean in a supermarket, where Forrest talks to the kid, which is creepy. When the Reardons go to Stone's office to report this incident, Stone chats them up and gets them to finally talk about the fact that they adopted Sean in a manner which was "illegal or questionable" because Martha is a brittle diabetic, a medical condition which normally would not allow an adoption. Stone and Keller go to visit Dr. Kemp (Douglas Henderson), who arranged the adoption. Kemp, who shows signs of having been beaten up (which he was, by Forrest) throws the usual doctor/patient confidentiality at them, but soon gives them the information they need. When the Reardons go home, they find that Forrest has returned to their house and removed all of Sean's clothes from his closet. Meanwhile, Forrest is talking to Joan about an idea to go in his camping van with the kid to "somewhere around Banff, Lake Louise, anywhere in Canada." Joan tells him that this is not right, and she doesn't understand why he suddenly has this grand plan. She tells him that during his time in Vietnam, she had almost no communication from him, which is why she gave Sean up for adoption. Forrest gives her a line about how in Vietnam he was too preoccupied with daily life which involved being in a firebase which was getting hit 60 times a day. After he returned to the States, he was supposed to go back to Vietnam, and he said he couldn't deal with the responsiblity of looking after "a whole platoon." He tells Joan, "Now, I can only look after you, and me, and little Pete." Forrest phones the Reardons, pretending to be someone from the "Bureau of Adoptions," saying there were irregularities with Sean's adoption procedure. Martha takes Sean away from the house, and Forrest, anticipating this, follows them. Soon after this, Forrest grabs Sean from an amusement park where the kid has been taken by Martha and her sister (Louise Fitch). Keller has gone to Joan's apartment, where she tells him "Anybody who gets in Pete's way now is gonna have to kill him to stop him." Keller phones in an APB. At the same time, Stone tracks down Reardon at the butcher shop where he works. Forrest is driving with Sean, talking to the kid like he is back in Vietnam, saying that "Charlie [the VietCong] set us up." Stone, Keller, Joan and the Reardons follow them to an old military bunker and Stone enters the bunker tunnel, eventually encountering Forrest and Sean. Stone tells Forrest that Kemp falsified Martha Reardon's health certificate and there is a chance that Joan could go to court and get their son back. But Stone lays on a heavy speech about how the Reardons have been Sean's parents since he was born, and that if Forrest spills the beans about Sean's history to him now, the kid will be traumatized. Stone asks Sean "Whose little boy are you?" and Sean replies, "Mr. and Mrs. Barney Reardon." This knocks some sense into Forrest, and after Forrest surrenders his rifle to Stone, the three of them leave the bunker.

EPILOG:

Stone, Forrest and Sean emerge from the tunnel and Forrest is taken into custody by a couple of military policemen. The Reardons and Sean leave, driven home by a cop; Joan joins her husband in the MP's car. Keller tells Stone, "I think that's [meaning the resolution to the story] very nice." Stone tells him, "You're a cop, buddy boy. You're not paid to think." The two of them leave.

REVIEW:

This show is topical and sort of interesting, but there are some questions. For example, considering that Forrest is AWOL, where did he get the camping car from? When he grabs Sean from the carousel at an amusement park where Martha and her sister have taken him, how can he pull this off, considering it is rotating about once every 15 seconds? Forrest is seen watching the merry-go-round from outside the building, so he would have to enter the building, somehow jump on to the quickly-moving ride, grab the kid and then jump off without injuring the two of them. While Martha's sister is temporarily distracted by a rock in her shoe and does not look up for maybe one or two rotations of the ride, there is no way that Forrest could have predicted this would happen. At the end of the show, the bunker where Forrest takes Sean has a sign above its entrance: "Battery Davis." This is actually located in Fort Funston, which is in the southwest corner of San Francisco within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This has no special significance, because it could just suggest that Forrest was getting desperate to avoid the cops.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The horse that Sean is riding on the carousel is not on the outer edge, it is one horse in towards the center. When the sister tries to see where Sean went after he disappears, the horse that the camera focuses on is a totally different horse.
• It is pretty funny that when Stone tells Reardon that the "Bureau of Adoptions" phone call that he received was "baloney," they are in the butcher shop.
• Forrest tells Joan that he gave the Army "seven years" of his life, but considering he joined two months after she got pregnant, has been AWOL for a month, and Sean is 5 years old, it is more like 5 years and 8 months.
• Joan's maiden name is Genetti. Her old address is 440 East Glendon; current address is 255 Greenwich, apartment 4. Her phone number is 555-2870.
• There are a couple of brief musical cues which sound like similar cues from The Outer Limits.
• The licence number on Forrest's camper is 658DOU.
• Forrest tells Stone to "duck squat," a term used in a later episode starring Martin Sheen.

S01E05: Tower Beyond Tragedy ★★
Original air date: October 28, 1972
Director: Walter Grauman; Writer: Morton S. Fine; Music: Patrick Williams
Guest Stars: Edward Mulhare, Stefanie Powers
"Buddy boy" count: 1

Amory Gilliam (Edward Mulhare) is having a mid-life crisis. 52 years old, the manufacturer's representative for a top tool-and-dye firm, married 30 years and father of three grown children, he "develop[ed] an almost overnight obsession with dying." Gilliam divorced his wife a year ago (the wife says they are just "separated") and is now dating women from escort services (real escort services, not fronts for prostitution) with the idea of refashioning them as ideal females and murdering them when they don't want to co-operate with his scheme. His latest girl friend is Kim Ahern (Stefanie Powers), who has a disturbing resemblance to the last one, Toni Craig, who was found dead under a pile of rocks in Golden Gate Park 10 days ago (both these roles, plus that of another deceased woman who was murdered in Seattle March 6, 1972, are all played by Powers). Gilliam follows Ahern home after their first date and stalks her at places like a park where she is painting with some guy named David (Mark Rasmussen). Gilliam tells David "Get lost, sonny," when he tries to intervene. Ahern is the recipient of clothes, recordings, art prints and more from Gilliam, but she tries to keep her distance from him and maintains her escort lifestyle, with the result that one of her other "customers" is badly beaten up by him. Stone and Keller go to visit a woman named Robin Short (Anne Randall) who was a friend of Toni Craig's. She tells them that Craig was "frightened" of Gilliam. Taking Ahern to a location under the Golden Gate Bridge reminiscent of Hitchcock's Vertigo, which has other parallels with the show, Gilliam tells her "We belong together," and that he is inspired by poet Robinson Jeffers, who constructed a tower down the coast near Big Sur. Gilliam says that Jeffers writes about "the sea, nature, man's failure, violence, wildness, the power of passion, love." Ahern replies, "I'm free ... until I choose not to be. And that's something nobody can change, not even you." This is actually a bad thing to say, because Gilliam looks very annoyed. Stone gets Gilliam's name from the escort agency which handled Craig and goes to see him. When Stone comments on the frames around art prints at his place, Gilliam asks him "Are you planning on having someone framed?" which Stone thinks is amusing. Gilliam tells Stone that he dated Toni three times, and wanted her to "see his etchings," which did not work out. Meanwhile, Gilliam is putting more pressure on Ahern, buying her luggage and telling her he wants to take her to "our own private tower" which is on a point at Crystal Cove (a bogus city) near Monterey. When Stone and Keller hear about Ahern's recent date who a guy answering Gilliam's description beat up, they call Ahern's service, who say that she has gone out of town, specifically to "Crystal Cove Point." Gilliam and Ahern are on their way to this location, and when they arrive, Gilliam says "There is no going back, this is where we stay, this is where we belong, you and I together." Ahern freaks out, telling him, "Wait a minute. I think I missed a chapter somewhere. Do you want to fill me in? Amory, is this somewhere you've been before with someone else? Am I supposed to be that someone else? Is that it? Amory, that's weird. That's sick. I don't want any part of it. Not the hair, not the clothes, not the list of poets, none of it. It's over, Amory. It's over." Gilliam starts slobbering away: "I gave it all up for you, Cara [his pet name for her]. We can have more than anyone has ever had before, ever. Believe me. Trust me." She flees to the edge of a nearby cliff, just as Stone and Keller show up and convince Gilliam to surrender to them.

EPILOG:

Gilliam is driven away by the local cops. Ahern tells them, "He said this was gonna be our private tower, just like the one the poet built in Big Sur." Stone doesn't understand, so Keller clues him in: "Robinson Jeffers. He built his own place out of rocks, called it a 'tower beyond tragedy'." Stone says, "I'd call him a dreamer. Man hasn't come up with a place that safe yet." As she gets into their car, Ahern says, "Some men keep trying."

REVIEW:

I reviewed this episode for IMDb in 2007. Like then, during my current viewing, I found the ending of this show to be really improbable. Ahern and Gilliam are already on their way to his "love nest" when Stone and Keller jump into their car and pursue them at top speed. It is 90 to 120 minutes to get to that place which is near Monterey (depending on where you figure it is), yet the two cops seem to get there in about 10 minutes. And how do they know exactly where it is located? As well, would Ahern's service really give specific details about where she had gone ("Crystal Cove Point")? Keller doesn't say that he is calling from the police when he talks to them. Also, the similarity of the three most recent women Gilliam is interested in is kind of hard to take. Both Mulhare and Powers give very good performances; with his obsession, Mulhare becomes more and more annoying until you want to scream! There is a very good score by Patrick Williams. And there are those great non-process shots while people are driving!

MORE TRIVIA:

• When Stone and Keller go to see Robin Short, her place is in the same block as where Keller lives in other shows.
• Although Gilliam makes a big deal about how his place near Monterey has a "tower," there is no tower to be seen.
• At the end of the show, Gilliam's Mercedes convertible is left at the "scene of the crime," so to speak.
• Stone and Keller call on resident shrink Lenny Murchison (Fred Sadoff) for his opinion on the case. They leave their office with Murchison sitting there, saying to himself of Gilliam, "He could be a real psycho."
• Ahern is seen taking a Veterans Taxi, the phone number for which is 552-1300.
• There is a funny scene where Keller goes to an old folks' home where Tony Craig was the second prize in a raffle run by the place. Some geezer named Conroy (Nolan Leary) got to go to dinner and have a date with her. The first prize consisted of letting someone take total control of the TV in the place with the remote control and they could not be disturbed by anyone else.

S01E06: Hall of Mirrors ★★
Original air date: November 4, 1972
Director: Arthur H. Nadel; Writer: Walter Black; Music: Robert Prince
Guest Stars: David Soul, A Martinez
"Buddy boy" count: 1

When Stone is called to investigate a robbery and murder at a produce wholesaler, Keller is unavailable, so Stone drags Inspector Jim Martin (David Soul), who has been in the department for only five days, along with him. Stone is surprised that Martin can speak Spanish very well to the people at the scene, most of whom are Mexicans. Martin says "I had a couple of years in high school." They go to check out 18-year-old Rafael Diaz (A Martinez), a suspect in the robbery who quit the company a couple of months ago, and has a lengthy criminal rap sheet. One of the people at the scene who is questioned suggests that Diaz "came back and took what he never earned in his life." At Diaz' place, his sister Juanita (Priscilla Garcia) says her brother is not there, but he is, and after Martin gets heavy-handed with him, he escapes from the place. Stone and Martin pursue Diaz, but Stone falls and breaks his ankle. Confined to home, Stone gets Keller to partner up with Martin and continue the investigation. When the two of them go to the Market Grill across from the wholesaler where Diaz was known to hang out, Martin starts to strong-arm Emilio Loza (Val De Vargas), the owner of the place, because of his reluctance to help them. Keller is embarrassed by Martin's attitude, especially his comment that "They're all alike. They all look out for each other." Keller tells Martin "if you've got personal feelings about something, maybe you don't belong on this job." Later, Keller and Martin go to a pool hall Diaz was known to frequent where Martin throws his weight around again. They arrest one of the guys from the place named Campos (Victor Campos) and the owner Candoni (Al Checco). Stone, who is micro-managing things from home, gets curious about the fact that Martin seems to have a problem with people who have Spanish names. He takes the bus and a cab to visit Martin's mother, who lives in Salinas. There he finds out that Martin's real name is Jaime Martinez. His mother (Carmen Zapata), who was identified on Martin's police application as Mary F. Martin, is really Maria Pomposa Fuentes Martinez and his late father Henry was Enrique. Martin's mother tells Stone that her husband and son suffered years of abuse from people in their community, enduring names like wetback, picker, Mex and greaser. When her son went to college in San Jose, she changed his name. Stone tells the mother "A cop's life is like looking down a long hall of mirrors. Every case shows him another part of himself. And if he hates what he's looking at, he can't do his job." The mother tearfully asks Stone to help her son, which he promises to do. Meanwhile, Keller and Martin have tracked down two guys who were likely Diaz' accomplices in the recent robbery. When Stone gets back on the job, he takes Martin off the case, telling him "I'm concerned about some of your attitudes." Martin decides to go after Diaz on his own and arranges to meet him at a church under the guise of Campos who was going to give Diaz money. Diaz shows up at the church, and he and Martin start shooting at each other. Martin is just about going to execute Diaz, calling him a "cobarde Chicano [cowardly Mexican]" and saying "you're dirt, you're nothing but dirt," when Stone and Keller arrive, having been tipped off by Diaz' sister. After Stone mentions his visit to Martin's mother, Martin suddenly looks very sad, and reads Diaz his rights.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller go to see Martin, who has taken a leave of absence from the force to "get his head together." He is what looks like a youth worker at a church, playing basketball with some of the local kids. Stone and Keller join in the game (this is kind of lame).

REVIEW:

The big issue of this episode is trying to accept the blonde-haired David Soul as a Mexican, which is ridiculous, unless you are blind. Soul's acting is kind of one-note. There are also several other problems near the end of the show. From Loza at the restaurant, Keller finds out that Diaz used to hang out with a couple of guys, one of whom drove a tow truck from Central Salvage. When Keller and Martin go to this company, they find these guys (Shelly Novack and Solomon Sturges) working on a car with no plates but an auto dealer's name (Reinhardt Motors) on the license plate frame. Keller checks the history of this car, determining that it was recently sold for an amount which suspiciously matches the $2000 which was stolen from the produce wholesaler. Not only that, there was a 1962 Volkswagen included as a trade-in as part of the deal, and this car matches one used by the robbers, which was a "small, light-colored car" (but there is no mention specifically that it was a Volkswagen at the beginning of the show!). It seems to me that things are really stretched to resolve the plot. As well, there is the whole business about Martin phoning Diaz and leaving a message with his sister that he is Campos who was going to lend him money. What if Campos really wasn't going to do this? If so, why would Diaz show up at the church, because obviously something fishy was going on.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The cab which Stone takes in Salinas after arriving there by bus is a Veterans Cab, with the same phone number used in San Francisco.
• Who is the guy in the room with Diaz' sister near the end of the show when Stone and Keller are grilling her? Is it their father?
• When Martin calls Elena near the end of the show pretending to be Campos, why doesn't he speak Spanish? This question could be asked at several other points in the show as well.

S01E07: Timelock ★★½
Original air date: November 11, 1972
Director: Robert Douglas; Writers: Charles McDaniell, Cliff Gould & John Wilder ; Music: Tom Scott
Guest Stars: Peter Strauss, Bernie Casey, Elaine Giftos
"Buddy boy" count: 3

Peter Strauss is Bobby Jepsen, currently serving a sentence for manslaughter in San Quentin. He is allowed out of jail under the auspices of the California Human Resources Development Work Furlough Program on the condition that he find a job within the space of 32 hours. Because of his lack of skills, Jepsen has little luck getting hired, despite some companies that will go out of their way to give convicts a job. At one place he is refused because he lacks a drivers license for a truck; in another because he doesn't know how to type. Despite the fact he is not supposed to touch booze, Jepsen stops in a bar where he runs into another ex-con who knows him, Herb Shako (Felice Orlandi), who is freaking out because that morning, a professional hit man named Darryl Le Beau (the menacing Scott Walker), who was hired by Mickey McFee (Paul Mann), a boss incarcerated in San Quentin, tried to knock him off. Shako grills Jepsen, asking if he knows who is behind the assassination attempt. Le Beau is also in the bar shadowing Shako, and when Jepsen and Shako go outside and join a crowd of men, Le Beau sneaks up behind Shako and pushes him in front of a large truck coming down the street, and he is run over and killed. Although Jepsen ID's Le Beau as the killer, only one guy from the crowd witnesses all this and he says that Jepson was the killer. After he is busted by the cops soon after, Jepsen contacts Stone, who he knows from way back when. Stone coached Jepsen in the Police Athletic League when Jepsen was a promising athlete whose career was derailed when he broke his leg during a football game. Despite the fact that Stone is supposed to go on a trip to Hawaii that day (something about which Keller keeps ridiculing him, saying that once again he will lose his deposit because he won't make it to the plane), he and Keller go to San Quentin and talk to McFee, who basically tells them to get lost. They do manage to get information which connects McFee and Le Beau from records not only at San Quentin, but also Chino, where the two convicts were pals a few years previously. Stone and Keller hurry back to San Francisco where Le Beau is about to embark on a voyage of his own overseas by boat. They track down Le Beau, whose parole is up, to his current address, but he has just left by taxi for the docks. Fortunately, a kid whose father is the landlord of the building provides details about which taxi company Le Beau was using, and the two cops are able to figure out he is going to be taking a cruise. When Le Beau sees the parking lot on the docks being swarmed with cops, he flees off the ship. Stone and Keller pursue him, and after being shot, Le Beau ends up in San Francisco Bay, as does Keller, who pulls him out of the drink.

EPILOG:

Stone doesn't make the plane to Hawaii, but Jepson, who is sprung from jail, finally gets a job. His case worker from the prison (Bernie Casey), is relieved, because Jepsen was actually over the 32 hour deadline. Stone and Keller spend most of their time arguing about the odds for an upcoming San Francisco 49ers game.

REVIEW:

There are plenty of questions about this show. For one thing, what is the significance of this "work furlough program"? Is this like parole, or does it mean that Jepsen has to work in the day and then every night report somewhere or come back to the prison (sort of like John Rubinstein's character does in S05E18)? Some of the time frames in this show are very compressed. Even Stone is annoyed about the 32 hour limit for Jepsen to get a job, saying "I just don't like putting a time lock [title of the episode alert!] on any man's chance for freedom." Near the end of the show, Stone and Keller leave San Quentin at 4:40 p.m. and Le Beau's boat to Hong Kong is scheduled to leave at 6:00. Although it takes about 30 minutes to drive from San Quentin to San Francisco according to Google Maps, they manage to get back to Le Beau's place, figure out which cab company he was using, talk to the cab company to determine his destination and then go to Pier 33 with time to spare, considering Le Beau himself arrived at the gangplank around 5:40 after first going downtown to pick up a new suit that he was having made at a tailor's. Then there is the business of Jepsen going into Manjo's Bar where he meets Shako. Is this just a coincidence, or is this is Shako's favorite hangout that Jepsen knows about? We see that the one witness to Shako's demise was, as Keller suspected when he interviewed the guy, not watching at the moment the truck ran over him, but then none of the other men in the crowd nearby were watching either, which seems peculiar, along with the fact that not only Jepsen was near Shako before he was killed, but so was Le Beau. Stone and Keller spend a lot of time at San Quentin talking to McFee and investigating records which would prove he is connected to Le Beau, but when they leave, they ask at the "front desk" if McFee had any visitors that morning, and Le Beau was on the list! Why didn't they just ask about this when they arrived at the place, duh! Elaine Giftos has a brief scene as Jepsen's wife Irene. He tells her that she should divorce him, because he is looking at a life sentence with no parole for 12-15 years if the charge against him for Shako's killing sticks. (I think that a D.A. would have a lot of trouble with this case if Le Beau kept his mouth shut and the witness to Shako's death stuck to his guns.) The score is by Tom Scott, which kind of overuses one militaristic theme with snare drums.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Keller tells McFee that he went to Shako's apartment and found Le Beau's bullets in the ceiling, and that "They went through his window about 6:00 this morning." But when did Keller have the time to do this, and how would he know exactly when this happened?
• The shadow of the camera crew is seen twice in the show: the first when Stone and Keller are on their way to the bar after Jensen is arrested, and the second after they arrive at San Quentin and are seen walking to the machine shop where McFee is working.
• Among the companies Jepsen is investigating for a job, as per a list he is carrying, are Bayside Manufacturing, Ace Tool & Die, Kruger's Garage and Herman Brothers Co.
• Le Beau is picked up by a C&C Cab; the phone number for this company is 555-3323, according to Keller.
• Fred Helfing points out: In the epilog, Stone and Keller are talking about the 49ers/Cowboys game. Keller takes Dallas +6. Stone says he could have gotten 12. The episode aired on November 11, a Saturday. The 49ers did play the Cowboys in 1972 in Dallas, on Thursday, November 23, Thanksgiving. 49ers won 31-10. Stone won the bet and would have won giving 12 points. As a side note, the teams met again in the playoffs on December 23 in San Francisco. Dallas won 30-28.

S01E08: In the Midst of Strangers ★★½
Original air date: November 25, 1972
Director: Robert Douglas; Writer: Del Reisman; Music: Patrick Williams
Guest Stars: David Wayne, Louise Latham, Ramon Bieri, Robert Foxworth ("as Dennis Hailey")
"Buddy boy" count: 1

Wally Sensibaugh (David Wayne) is a hyperactive, chatty newspaper vendor in Union Square who talks about "happy" everything as he is hawking his wares ("happy murders, happy riots, happy luncheons, happy teas..."). He sells a paper to Jules Rhinelander (Richard Eastham), a well-dressed city bureaucrat in charge of the Low-Cost Housing Commission. After this, Rhinelander buys a $7,500 necklace or bracelet for his significant other at a store which seems to specialize in Asian art. He is being tailed by Dennis Hailey (Robert Foxworth), who watches him purchase this jewelry. Hailey is the boss of a sophisticated trio of crooks who have recently arrived in San Francisco after plying their trade in other cities. Hailey and his two associates follow Rhinelander and grab him from the street when he gets off a cable car and pull him into their car. Unlike most of their victims, Rhinelander fights back, and he is accidentally shot and killed. His body is dumped in a side street. The mayor's office is disturbed about what they see as a political assassination, because Rhinelander was a polarizing figure who was disliked by both left- and right-wing housing advocates. Skowlownowski (Raymond Bieri), the mayor's assistant, puts Stone and Keller in charge of the investigation and he wants results yesterday. Later, Marlon (David Pritchard), one of Hailey's gang, is getting his shoes shined and overhears Wally at his nearby paper stand in the square talking about withdrawing $3,000 from the bank, money that he intends to use to buy tickets for a trip that he and his wife have been planning for years. Marlon and the third member of the gang (Dennis Redfield), follow Wally to the bank and then to the travel agency's building where they knock him out and steal his money, but Wally gets a glimpse of Marlon's fancy shoes. Wally reports the theft to the cops, but cannot bring himself to tell his wife Harriet (Louise Latham) what happened. Stone and Keller try to build a timetable of Rhinelander's movements before he was killed, including talking to Wally. They also interview crackpots from both sides of the political spectrum who hated Rhinelander. Later, Wally recognizes Marlon's shoes when they are getting shined again, and he tails Marlon to his room in the St. Francis Hotel. Marlon spies Wally and takes a shot at him, wounding him as they run down the hotel's stairs. Wally manages to escape from the building and soon after this as he is being patched up on the street by an ambulance, Stone and Keller arrive. Meanwhile, the trio of crooks realize the jig is up and they leave the hotel without paying their bill. Stone, Keller and Wally pursue them towards the Golden Gate Bridge where the trio are cut off and instead go to the Fort Point area underneath its south end. There the cops engage in a shootout with them. Hailey is wounded, Marlon surrenders, and the third is killed.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller come to the square to see Wally, who will be going to Europe the following day. Stone asks him to send them a postcard. As they leave, Wally is back to peddling his papers.

REVIEW:

A big deal is made of the fact that the crooks used binoculars to look down on Union Square from their hotel room. Stone says, "Three guys sitting up here watching, taking it all in." Keller replies, "It's a whole choreographed scene from here. Everybody's daily pattern." But the two robberies in the show had nothing to do with this. There is no way that Rheinlander's going to the jewelry store could have been predicted; Hailey was likely just hanging around the store waiting for an easy mark. And the theft from Wally was because Marlon overheard him talking loudly about his trip to Europe. If the gang had one guy in the hotel room with binoculars and the other two on the street had walkie-talkies or some kind of radio devices (these days, it would be mobile phones), that would have been more interesting, despite the fact that the majority of people in the square were probably just coming and going. The business about the "political assassination" could have been scaled back and another example or two of how the trio robbed other people could have been shown. Was San Francisco really that dangerous a place for politicians? The show took place several years before Dan White knocked off the mayor and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Robert Foxworth gets special treatment in the opening credits not seen for any other guest star where his character is identified.
• The other two crooks -- Marlon and the second, who is not identified anywhere -- are not even in the first level of stars at the end of the show, but in the "with" section, despite the fact that they have quite a lot of screen time.
• From about 22:12, there is a tracking shot with Stone and Keller in Union Square which goes on for about a minute.
• As Wally is being attended to by the ambulance, there is the usual huge crowd watching the filming in the background. Behind him driving on the street, a Nash Metropolitan car can be seen briefly.
• The yellow Ford LTD driven by the bad guys has the license number 721-ENO.
• At 41:52, the cop who broadcasts information about the chase looks and sounds like Stephen Bradley, later Medical Examiner Bernie.

S01E09: The Takers ★★★★
Original air date: December 2, 1972
Director: Arthur H. Nadel; Writers: Guerdon Trueblood, Cliff Gould & John Wilder
Guest Stars: Harold Gould, Michael Lerner, Heidi Vaughn, Robert Gentry, Barbara Baxley*
"Buddy boy" count: 2

Two roommates who live in an apartment complex at 1410 Stanyan Street which caters to swinging single types (the motto of the place is "Swim 'n Swing") are found murdered. The number of bullets used -- 9 in airline stewardess Stephanie Brown and 4 in nurse Glenda Elliott -- is excessive. Jewelry salesman Arthur Lavery (Harold Gould), who came to California from Indiana with his wife Edna (Barbara Baxley) in search of a better life, but has ended up as a salesman for Jewels by Jacques, a job full of humiliation and drudgery, is seen leaving the women's apartment. When Stone and Keller arrive on the scene, there are plenty of suspects, including the building manager Lou Watkins (Michael Lerner) and Rex Riley (Robert Gentry), a co-pilot from the same airline where Brown used to work. Riley describes Brown, who he dated, as "a taker, somebody who leads you on and tries to get something out of you. Money, a car, anything. That's it. They just take it, and it's, 'Goodbye, Charlie'." Stone is curious about another woman on a picture found in the murdered women's apartment, Lynn Chase (Heidi Vaughn), Brown's former roomate. She is also a stewardess, and Stone goes to the airport to meet her coming off a returning flight. Lynn tells him that she roomed with Stephanie for about 3 years and moved out 6 weeks ago because of the weird hours that they were working. Lynn says that she dated Riley, but doesn't know what has happened to Phil Hewitt, a boyfriend of Stephanie mentioned to Stone earlier by Riley, who Stephanie had "taken" away from Lynn. Stone and Keller are called away because another nurse has been killed by some guy who is taking shots at the cops from Coit Tower. When they go there and arrest the guy, they find he has nothing to do with the two girls' murders. The two cops go back to the apartment building because a new tenant, Nancy Evers (Nancy Marlow) saw a woman outside the girls' room that morning. She was an "average-looking lady. Thirty-eight maybe. Flat shoes. She had on a brown print dress and [had] mousy blond hair." Keller has also seen Lavery hanging around the place, and when he is making inquiries at Lavery's company, is told by Riley that Stephanie and Glenda were always constantly jerking Lavery around, getting him "all worked up." Lavery and his wife have decided to leave California, but Stone and Keller show up at their place. Lavery flees from the scene in his car, pursued by the two cops. Eventually he loses control of his car, which flips over several times, sending him to the hospital. When Lavery's wife shows up there to see her husband, she tells Stone how frustrated her husband was with his job and how the two girls were playing with him. When Stone asks her if she killed the two girls, she tells him no, that they were already dead when she came to the apartment (she is the woman described by Evers). Stone speculates that neither Lavery nor his wife killed the two girls, especially when a key for their apartment which the two girls gave to Lavery does not work in its door. Stone realizes that Lynn is the one who knocked off Stephanie and killed Glenda who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stone goes to the airport to arrest Lynn, who tries to escape. When she is finally busted, she blabs away that she wanted revenge against Stephanie because her former roommate had taken Hewitt {"the beginning of my life") away from her, and then dumped him.

EPILOG:

Lavery is going to recover from injuries, though he will have to pay off the cost of all the jewelry which got destroyed in the car accident. The two of them realize that Lavery's job had a lot in common with that of a cop: "Driving all over town. Knocking on doors. Lousy hours. Taking lip from people who don't wanna be bothered." Keller tells Stone to drive, "It'll break up the monotony."

REVIEW:

This is a very cleverly written episode, because you don't know who did it until the very end. The performances of Gould and Baxley are outstanding.

MORE TRIVIA:

• There is some very screwy math (which does not add up) used to demonstrate that Lynn, who Stone met at the airport around 3:00 and was supposedly working most of the day, could have killed Stephanie and Glenda. According to the West Central Airways operations clerk (Gary Clarke), Lynn was on a flight from San Francisco to Denver which left SFO at 7:20 and got to Denver at 9:02 (1 hour 42 minutes). The plane then went on to Chicago, which would have taken another 2 hours 30 minutes, for a total one-way trip of 4 hours and 12 minutes. Doubling this would produce a return trip of 8 hours and 24 minutes; in other words, the plane would have returned to SFO at 3:44 in the afternoon. (I don't know if these figures are strictly the time the plane spends in the air.) According to the clerk, this particular plane returned to SFO at 3:22. Stone figures that Lynn, having returned at around 3:00, would have switched jobs with someone on another flight, such as the round-trip to San Diego, which left at 11:00 in the morning and returned at 2:55, which totally works, because the flying time to San Diego is an hour and a half. The point of all this is, the actual time Lynn returned from the San Diego flight was almost half an hour before the flight from Chicago where she was supposedly working.
• Avery's home address is 721 Logan.

S01E10: The Year of the Locusts ★★½
Original air date: December 9, 1972
Director: Arthur H. Nadel; Writer: Theodore J. Flicker
Guest Stars: George Voskovec, Michael Ansara, Christopher Stone
"Buddy Boy" count: 5

This is a "gypsy" episode, and compared to two Kojak gypsy shows, one of which is in many people's top ten and the other is kind of lame, this Streets of San Francisco show avoided most of the usual gypsy clichés like playing fiddle music, magic tricks, tea-leaf reading, fortune-telling and pickpocketing. Instead, there was conflict in this show between different generations of gypsies, more like the Mafia, with younger members of the "clan" overriding the wishes and direction of the capo di tutti capi Angus Ferguson, played by George Voskovec. Of course Stone knows Ferguson and his family from when he was a kid. He used to eat cookies made by "Ma" Ferguson (Penny Santon) and went to school with some of their children. Not content these days to do gypsy scams connected with roof and gutter repairs as well as driveway resurfacing, Ferguson's sons and grandsons led by his son Albert (Michael Ansara), arrive in San Francisco as the "advance guard." They decide to rob the Imperial Jade Company of San Francisco, based in the Ghiardelli Square complex, of half a million dollars worth of jewelry. A security guard alerted by lights going off and on in the building encounters the robbers, and he is shot and killed, which is where Stone and Keller come in. A big clue connecting this robbery is a tar-like substance found on a ladder in the basement of the building near the alarm system box which matches that on the shoe of one of the victims of a gypsy driveway resurfacing after the bunco squad at SFPD is swamped with complaints. Stone goes to see Bonnie Lewis (Rita Lewis), Ferguson's daughter, who has had limited contact with her family for years. She arranges a truce-like meeting between Stone and the old man in a public park. When Angus finds out about the killing of the security guard, he is furious, and later strong words are exchanged between him, his son and the other members of the gang. He tells them, "You robbed and you killed. You broke all the rules and you killed!" Albert and Josh Evans (Christopher Stone), Ferguson's son-in-law who killed the guard, are now plotting the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars of bank securities in a "blitzkrieg" on four buildings on Montgomery Street, known as "the street of banks." During a meeting of the clan which includes a presentation with a slide projector, Angus asks Albert to cancel this new operation, denouncing the gang as greedy, but he is rebuffed. As a result, he sends Stone on a scavenger hunt with clues that point to the warehouse located at Beach and Garvey (seen at Pier 18) where the gypsies have their headquarters. At that location, once again Angus pleads with the assembled, "Stop what you're planning and stay with me." When they refuse, Angus washes his hands of them, saying "I give you the business," and leaves. Stone and Keller arrive along with several cop cars, and Angus and his wife watch them arrest everyone from across the street.

EPILOG:

As the gang members are taken away, Stone says, "From the looks of their books, they're out of business for good." Keller says, "But he got away, the old man." Stone says, "Of course he did. He's a wizard, a master of magic." Stone demonstrates some magic with a coin, making it disappear and reappear.

REVIEW:

While one can buy Michael Ansara as Ferguson's son, it's hard to understand the old man's gypsy connection with his blonde-haired son-in-law Josh Evans who addresses him as "Grandpa." (Evans calls Albert "brother" at one point. There are no wives of either of these men seen during the show.) Unlike the usual "con, flimflam [and] hustle," Evans doesn't consider his killing of the security guard to be "murder," but "a freak accident [or] self-preservation." He gives Angus a lot of mouth when the old man starts to question the gang's new direction. As well, the way the robbers override the sophisticated alarm from the jade company would probably require a certain level of geeky expertise, and whether the members of the gang would have this is highly debatable, despite Albert telling his father "We have the ability and the technology to walk into a city and walk out with anything we want." In this regard, it is very strange that in Ferguson's Winnebago-like mobile home there is an elaborate computer system, something which is not explored in the show at all. Because the elder Ferguson represents the "old guard" of the gypsies, it is surprising to see this equipment, especially considering he barely uses it during the show. Angus does have a citizens band-type radio in his vehicle which he uses to communicate with Albert when he arrives in town. He also seems to have a mobile telephone, used by his daughter as sort of a "batphone." Penny Santon as Ferguson's wife, seen driving their motor home, who you would expect to be a "big momma" type, has a relatively insignificant role, acting stereotypically shocked and overwrought by her husband's reaction to their sons' and grandsons' decisions.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The bogus companies that the gang uses when scamming people with home repairs include Presidio Roofing and Resurfacing Corp. of America.
• The score uses militaristic motives composed by Tom Scott for S01E07.
• At the beginning of the show, Stone and Keller are seen sparring at a boxing gym. Keller ridicules Stone, saying "Stick and move, stick and move. That's all you old men know." Stone responds, "I'll give you old man, you backtracking tap dancer, you."
• When Stone sees Ferguson's Winnebago driving down the street, he says to Keller, "They're like locusts. They pick a town, and they pick it clean."

S01E11: The Bullet ★★★
Original air date: December 16, 1972
Director: Walter Grauman; Writers: Barry Trivers, Cliff Gould & John Wilder; Music: John Elizalde
Guest Stars: Carl Betz, Geraldine Brooks, Patrick Conway, Norman Alden, Hari Rhodes
"Buddy Boy" count: 3

Jeff Williams (Carl Betz, of the Donna Reed Show) is a respected university English professor, but has a shady past involving drug addiction, robbery and murder. Jim Dayton (Barney Phillips), a former cop, is blackmailing Williams and several others with information that he took with him when he resigned from the police force a few years ago after an Internal Affairs investigation. Williams is making his payoff at Dayton's place when Victor Coyle (Pat Conway), a hit man hired by Dr. Marvin Borrman (Peter Hobbs), one of the other people Dayton is blackmailing, shows up. Dayton tells Williams to go into the next room and wait until he finishes with Coyle. However, the hit man shoots Dayton dead when Dayton pulls a gun of his own out of his filing cabinet. Williams, behind the kitchen door, is hit in the shoulder by one of Coyle's bullets which goes through Dayton as well as the door. Coyle digs the one bullet of his out of the two he shot out of the wall and Williams escapes through the back door and drives away. Conway also takes the page from Dayton's calendar listing all of his "clients" for that day. Stone and Keller use the impressions on the next page and drops of Williams' blood -- the rare AB type -- on the kitchen floor to figure out that Williams was the most likely person there and was wounded. When they go to Williams' place, he admits the bullet is in his shoulder, but refuses to get it removed because he will have to go court to testify against Coyle and the resulting testimony will likely ruin his career. There is no way for the cops to get out of this dilemma, because according to Williams, "among our other personal guarantees in this country is the guarantee that our bodies are inviolate. Not even the Supreme Court can force a man to submit to a surgical operation. That's the law, gentlemen." Keller later checks with the D.A., who tells him "Williams was right. The rights of homo corpus, man's body, are inviolate." The two cops go to see Borrman, who is a medical doctor, also with a shady past including manslaughter, drunk driving and conspiracy to commit assault and battery when he hired someone to take care of a man who threatened to bring malpractice charges against him. At Borrman's office, the doctor refuses to talk, but Keller grabs a piece of paper he is crumpling up which gives the phone number of the Capri Motel (626-1311) where Coyle is staying. Stone and Keller head there, where they find the gun Coyle used to kill Dayton, but Coyle avoids the place when he returns there and sees the place crawling with cops. Coyle made a long distance call to Kansas City from the motel, and the police use this information to figure out who he is. Meanwhile, Coyle tracks down another one of the men on Dayton's list, Albert Phillips, and also kills him when he resists being questioned. Stone and Keller go to see Williams at the university where he is giving his final class before exams and poses some hypothetical questions to the students, asking how would they feel about him if they knew he had a shady past, sort of like how people's opinions of the poet Ezra Pound were influenced by the fact he was arrested for treasonous activities against the United States after World War II. After the class, Stone and Keller engage in a philosophical discussion with Williams, who tells them he still won't let them take the bullet from his shoulder adding,"[If] I'm the only one who stands to be hurt by [the fact that Coyle is likely after me], that's a risk I'm willing to take." However, after Williams' wife Alice (Geraldine Brooks) is kidnapped outside Petrini's Market, her husband has a change of mind. Williams is sent to the hospital to get the bullet removed, and Stone pretends to be Alice's husband, meeting her and Coyle later that evening. Coyle is taken care of with the help of a helicopter in the air and other cops on the ground.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller are going over to the Williams house where they will "be celebrating a man's new life" because the bosses at the university decided not to take any action after they found out about Williams' past. On the way, Keller stops at a bookstore where he picks up a volume of Ezra Pound's poetry which he gives to Stone. Stone starts reading lines from Pound's Ancient Music: "Raineth drop and staineth slop / Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us," a parody of a 13th century song, Sumer is icumen in, Ludhe sing cucu. (note that Stone omits two lines between these two: And how the wind doth ramm! / Sing, Goddamm!") Stone basically says this poetry is crap, and recites something else to Keller which is more "to the point" and "clear": "You have the right to remain silent," etc.!

REVIEW:

I liked this show, though it has a bit too much "speechifying" towards the end. I was curious about this business about how removing the bullet from Williams' body would violate his rights in some way, so I started snooping around. I couldn't find anything about this by Google searching so I asked an (American) lawyer friend about this, and it turns out this is basically baloney (my expression, not his). He told me: "Made up. Not true. Here’s how it would work: Prosecutor needs a search warrant. The judge will balance the state’s need for the evidence against any physical risk to the subject of the warrant. Suffice it to say in reality the state’s need for evidence must be pretty high and the physical risk of harm very low. There are numerous issues where defendants in criminal matters or 'persons of interest' were required, under subpoena, to submit blood and/or DNA samples. The legal principles are the same but the weighing of the factors somewhat different." Thanks to my friend! As far as Keller grabbing the paper which Borrman was trying to destroy (this was after Borrman asked Stone "If I'm a suspect, I'm entitled to counsel, isn't that the truth?" and Stone replied "That is the truth"), my friend said "That is a clear-cut violation of the Fourth Amendment"!

MORE TRIVIA:

• At his motel, Coyle is using the page he ripped out of the calendar to look up the addresses in the phone book for the three people who were supposed to be seeing Dayton. In the first shot of this page at 12:21, he has written in kind of a scrawl that Albert Phillips' address is 4410 Stanyan Street. But in the next shot of the page at 12:28, Phillips' address is printed much more clearly and that of Williams (720 Washington St.) has been added, both in a different handwriting.
• The page from Dayton's calendar is for Thursday, March 18th. However, if the small calendar in the middle of the page at the top is for March, 1973 (most likely, since the show was broadcast in December, 1972), the 18th would be a Sunday.
• Stone is not very amused by jokes that forensics guy Charlie Johnson (Hari Rhodes) and Sgt. Dan Healy (Norman Alden) are making about Dayton's blackmailing: "Looks like a cop found a way to zap the policeman's pension fund" and "Looks like a cop finally found a way to make a decent living."
• This show used process shots when Alice, Stone and Coyle were driving near the end of the show, unlike previous episodes where the camera was inside the car or attached to its side.
• When Stone and Keller are investigating in the kitchen at the beginning of the show, Stone touches the handle of the back door that Williams went out -- Tsk! Tsk!
• Williams is paying Dayton $185 a month, which has totalled up to over $10,000. In the last year, Dayton made over $40,000 of tax-free money from all his "clients."
• When Stone and Keller talk to Williams outside his classroom, the door is open and they are talking quite loudly, so much so that I'm sure the students inside can hear what they are talking about!
• Borrman's San Francisco PD mug shot number is 166171.
• I thought the way they were going to get Williams to break down was Stone or Keller would themselves surreptitiously shoot at Williams to rattle him, pretending to be Coyle.

S01E12: Bitter Wine ★★★½
Original air date: December 23, 1972
Director: Christian Nyby; Writers: Hal Sitowitz & John Wilder; Music: Patrick Williams
Guest Stars: Nehemiah Persoff, Scott Marlowe, Michael Glaser, Donna Baccala, Michael Margotta
"Buddy Boy" count: 1

In this "Greek" episode, Paul Michael Glaser stars as Jason Kampacalas, who gets released from San Quentin, just like Peter Strauss only a few episodes before, except there is no one there to give him a lift to San Francisco. Jason has been in prison for 12 years on charges of manslaughter and hit and run served consecutively because he ran over two young girls. However, the driver of the car was actually Jason's brother Dimitri (Scott Marlowe), and Jason took the rap so that Dimitri, who graduated from Berkeley with a degree in business could help his father Cadmus open a Greek restaurant and then start a vineyard and a winery. Jason comes to the restaurant, the Greek Taverna, but he gets brushed off by Dimitri, who is trying to work out a deal with this guy to borrow money because the place is failing badly. Dimitri gives Jason the keys to his Jaguar, but when Jason tries to take the car from the parking lot, he gets involved in a fight with the attendant there who thinks he is trying to steal the car, as well as Stone and Keller who appear on the scene. Because Jason punches Stone, he gets arrested, and is only released because his old man shows up at the police station with a lawyer, saying he wants to deal with Jason because what happened is a "family matter." The first thing that Cadmus does is slap Jason in the face. He has never forgiven Jason for the accident with the two girls. Stone gets in hot water with Captain Rudy Olsen (Robert F. Simon) because he let Jason go. Olsen tells Stone that he will have to act like Jason's parole officer, even though Jason served all of his time, to make sure that he doesn't get into trouble and acts "morally responsible." The next day, Jason goes to the family vineyard, where his father berates him more, saying "I cry inside" because of the death of the two girls: "I cry because your birth, your birth brought their death. And I cry because I love you and I don't want to. I don't want to. You've brought me only misery. Dimitri, he made this happen. He made the dream happen. He worked, he struggled, he succeeded. And all this you see here, he made it." Jason confronts Dimitri in the vineyard, asking why he never told their father that it was he who drove the car. Dimitri says "I tried. I tried to tell him. At first I was too busy putting all this together: the restaurant, the vineyard, the land. And after time went by, I just couldn't." Jason leaves and goes to the house where his family lived in San Francisco, which is now condemned. There he meets his sister Thalia (Donna Baccala, who is gorgeous) and brother Thanos (Michael Margotta). They go for breakfast at a nearby diner where they run into Stone and Keller. Stone wants to talk about Jason's "future." Later, Jason goes to see Dimitri. He asks him for $5,000 ("For 12 years. Something like 400 per.") Dimitri has no money, because he is in hock up to his eyebrows, having made some very bad investments. He asks Jason if he knows someone who could torch the place for the insurance money. Jason tells him, "You're crazy." Soon after this, Dimitri sets the place on fire himself which kills a waiter who has passed out drunk in the wine cellar, a friend of his father for 50 years. Then Dimitri tries to pin the arson on Jason. Stone is suspicious of Jason now, saying he can't trust him. He and Keller see Jason at the old house, but when Keller pursues him, he escapes. After a conversation he has with Thalia, who visited Jason at the prison regularly and never believed that he was responsible for the girls' death, and reading over Jason's arrest report, Stone formulates a different theory about what happened as far as the accident is concerned, i.e., that it was not Jason who was driving the car and he took the rap "for family." Jason goes to the vineyard to confront Dimitri once and for all. Inside a barn-like structure, the two of them fight, and Jason gets a huge wooden hammer. Rather than kill Dimitri, he smashes one of the vats of wine just as Stone, Keller, Thalia and their father show up. Stone yells at the old man to tell what really happened. Cadmus says, "Jason was always the strongest … and you [Dimitri] were always the weakest; from the day you were born, I had to work with you, and help you and be with you all the time. I was so proud. I thought you were better than I thought you would be." Despite all that has happened, Jason tells his father to "love" Dimitri and that he also loves him. Dimitri is busted and taken away.

EPILOG:

Jason is working in the vineyard, and he and his father is now pals with his formerly estranged son. Their whole family is going to go and visit Dimitri in jail, and Keller offers to drive them. When Stone asks if Olsen is going to freak out about this, Keller tells him "If that was my first mistake, I'd worry," echoing something which Stone told him earlier in the show after Keller criticized him for freeing Jason.

REVIEW:

Another show with outstanding and intense acting, as well as an above-average script (with one exception, see below). When Paul Michael Glaser gets out of jail and goes to the restaurant for the first time, his eyes well up with tears! He plays a man who wants to clear his name and no matter what happens, he still loves his father and brother. Stone has a touching scene where he starts to tell Keller how he can understand "family matters," such as is happening with the Kamapacalases, saying that "the chips were on Dimitri" just like on Stone's brother Alex, who was going to make his family all rich after he came home from the war, but he never came back. Stone goes on about how his father then died, but he cannot finish his train of thought. The only part of the show which is dumb and keeps it from getting four stars (yet it is what gets the whole plot in motion!) is the beginning where Jason gets into a fight over his brother's car. Why do Stone and Keller suddenly appear out of nowhere? This makes no sense at all, unless they were coming to the five-year anniversary celebration at the restaurant, which I sort of doubt. It's not like the old man acknowledges them when he comes to the station later with his lawyer to get Jason out of jail. The episode also has an excellent score by Pat Williams. I would have been very interested to see the resulting trial of Dimitri!

MORE TRIVIA:

• Jason's arrest and booking report from the time of the accident shows his address was 2113 De Muro or De Marco. Jason was 20 years old, which is different than what was said in the show, that he was 18 when he went to jail and spent 12 years in prison; now he is 30. He is 5'6" (Paul Michael Glaser is 5'10"), and weighs 150 pounds.

S01E13: A Trout in the Milk ★★
Original air date: January 6, 1973
Director: Lawrence Dobkin; Writer: Robert Malcolm Young
Guest Stars: Roscoe Lee Browne, Brenda Sykes, Carol Lawson, Allen Emerson
"Buddy Boy" count: 3

28-year-old painter Rob Evanhauer (Rod Arrants) flies out of his third-story apartment window and falls through the awning of the Napoli Market below into the outdoor vegetable section. Stone and Keller are soon on the scene. There are questions as to whether this was a suicide or something else. Clutched n Evanhauer's hand is what looks like an earring with a distinctive design. When the two cops go to check out his apartment above, they find a painting of a black woman wearing the same kind of earrings. They then go to see Omar, a meditating hippie type who sells earrings and other jewelry at a craft fair where artists hang out. When Stone shows him a photo of the painting, he says he hasn't seen the woman. Next to be questioned is another hippie type at the fair, a painter named Rembrandt Van Saveneau (Allen Emerson). He seems pleased about Evanhauer's predicament, saying that if he dies, "it'll be the greatest contribution to art since the invention of the frame." Saveneau identifies the woman in the painting as Jenaea, last name Dancy. Keller recognizes this last name as that of Yale Courtland Dancy, an eccentric poet who gives readings at the Balladeer, a beatnik-style coffee house. We have already met him and his daughter (Brenda Sykes) at the beginning of the show when he was criticizing her for her choice in boyfriends (Evanhauer) and she told him to take a hike. Stone and Keller go to the Balladeer, where Keller tells Dancy he hitchhiked from Berkeley in 1964 to see him perform there. When Stone asks Dancy where Jenaea is, he replies "1440 Fremont." As they leave, Keller mentions that Dancy was smoking a joint during their conversation. Stone replies that he couldn't bust him for "possession of oregano." When they get to 1440 Fremont, they discover that it is a Chinese hand laundry. When they return to the club, Dancy has left, so they go to his apartment, where Dancy is meditating and wearing a blue dashiki. He tells them he doesn't think they will find Jenaea "until she sorts things out for her own satisfaction," but he points them to City of Paris, a fashion house where his daughter works as a model. Keller goes there, and he and Jenaea get kind of chummy for a few minutes (Keller later: "She psyched me out"), but she escapes from him under the pretext of changing from her modelling clothes. Meanwhile, Stone goes to the hospital where Evanhauer was admitted in a coma. Dr. Joe Ford (Ed Lauter) tells some woman (who we find out later is Cassandra 'Cassey' Lauritsen (Carol Locatell)) that Evanhauer has died. Stone tries to talk to this woman, who says she is just "a friend" of Evanhauer, but she runs away from him too and leaves in a white Mercedes. After Stone gives Keller hell for letting Jenaea slip away from him, Keller says he doesn't see her as a suspect, because "Evanhauer was a hotheaded, lousy artist [who] owed a lot of people money. Big in the ladies' department, a brawler when he drank ... half the phone directory was out to get him." Stone and Keller go to Jenaea's apartment, where they find nothing. As they leave, Stone notices that Laurisen's Mercedes is parked outside. The two meet Dancy in a park in front of a church where Stone tells him to find Jenaea before they do. Saveneau is summoned to Stone's office, where Stone reads details from his extensive police record to him, the implication being that he might have been the one who pushed Evanhauer out of the window. Saveneau has an alibi for the time of Evanhauer's "accident" (now a murder), and he tells them "He was the type who put a notch in his easel every time he scored." He rattles off the names of some of Evanhauer's "conquests," and leaves a present for Stone and Keller, a picture of a pig. Dancy meets his daughter at a Japanese garden where he used to meet his wife whenever he gave her "a hard time." The two of them talk about their relationship, but they are still far apart. Dancy brings up the fact that Evanhauer died, and the cops have been hassling him since they think she did it. He pulls out what appears to be the other earring. Stone and Keller suddenly appear, asking where he got this. Dancy says "I saw it in Evanhauer's studio, just after I launched him through his window into the gutter where he belonged," then he throws the earring into a nearby pond where it stays on top of some algae before it sinks to the bottom. Dancy is arrested and grilled back at headquarters after the usual Miranda warning. He describes his occupation as "Writer. Poet. Two-bit philosopher. And former father." He describes Evanhauer as "My enemy. As a man, as an artist, as a suitor to my daughter." He describes the fight he had with Evanhauer, which started when he saw the earrings (which he had bought for his daughter) on a table. Stone tells Dancy that he is making up this story because he wants to protect his daughter who is the killer. In a huge twist, Dancy says "Evanhauer was a dichotomous man, parading his passions on both sides of the street ... Evanhauer and I had a homosexual relationship [!]. And I swear by all the fiber in my being that if Jenaea learns of this, I'll dedicate the rest of my life to killing you both." When Keller asks, "What about the earring?", Dancy replies, "Certain things should be obvious, my friends, like a trout in the milk," adding that he gave the earrings to Evanhauer [!!]. Stone and Keller look very disturbed, but Stone tells one of the officers to book Dancy. When his daughter asks him "Why," he is mute. Hassejian (Vic Tayback) has been tracking down the personalized license plate on Lauritsen's Mercedes -- CASSEY. She is the "child bride" of a judge, "a very plain lady, married to a guy old enough to be her grandfather." Stone does some checking on Dancy, which reveals "Thirty-eight bookings on D&D. Thirty-three of those bookings were with women and the other five he was alone. Now does that spell 'queen' to you? Yale Dancy is a Don Juan, a Lothario, a Romeo, and one gosh darn good liar." Keller has some ideas about Lauritsen: "Let's say she's into charity work. She goes to one of these benefits, meets a young, good-looking painter. He begins to hustle her." But Stone has been having a brainstorm: "And when she realized she's been hustled and sees Evanhauer with somebody like Jenaea Dancy, she hits him with the first thing she can grab." Stone and Keller follow Lauritsen from the courthouse, where she looks very upset, to a dock where she boards a ferry. She leaves a message taped to the steering wheel of her car (some excerpts: "I can't excuse what I did and neither… But he blackmailed me, forgive…"). Stone and Keller leap on to the ferry just as it is leaving. They keep her from jumping into the harbor. Stone crumples up her suicide note and throws it into the water.

EPILOG:

Dancy is released from his jail cell, but he is upset, telling Keller "Do you have any idea what you've accomplished with this dreary and dogged detection? Do you? Well, you've stripped me of the one decent thing I could do for my daughter. You have erased the noble gesture, nullified the act. You put her in here and so help me…" But Stone shows up with Jenaea, telling Dancy to relax: "You didn't do it. She didn't do it." Jenaea says to her father, "You hackneyed old ham. You phony. You flagrant fraud. I cried my eyes out thinking you'd be spending the rest of your life behind bars. Now I find out you'll only be leaning on them." The two of them leave together, smiling. Stone and Keller discuss Dancy's line which contained the title of the episode, Stone pointing out that Dancy stole the line from Thoreau. He tells Keller, "You gotta keep yourself free, easy for cultural pursuits, you know? That's right. Good reading, good music. Bowling. But you, that's all you think of is women."

REVIEW:

Of course, the big question about this show is WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN? This phrase is taken from a quote by Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." According one WWW page, "The meaning is that although you did not see the dairy farmer do it, he most probably dipped the milk pail in the stream to water down the product. It’s not direct evidence but a very strong circumstantial case." But I didn't get this at all when I first heard the phrase. It is quite possible that whoever put the trout in the milk got this trout from somewhere else, like while they were fishing or the refrigerator or whatever. They didn't have to dip a bucket of milk in a stream. As far as I'm concerned, this episode is really about jerking people around. Dancy jerks around Stone and Keller with his constant lies designed to protect his daughter (don't ask me why, they don't get along well for most of the show) as well as sending them on a wild goose chase to the Chinese laundry, and the viewers are constantly jerked around as well by the convoluted story line. Stone surmises that Dancy had the earring from Jenaea's apartment near the end (the one he threw in the water) because after Stone and Keller were in the place, Lauristen, who had it from when Evanhauer went out the window, came and planted it there, presumably to throw off suspicion from herself (as if any existed) and Dancy came to the apartment and found it later, and then made up his story about the gay relationship. What?!?!? Don't people lock their doors in San Francisco? The other big question is, how could the relatively petite Lauritsen hurl Evanhauer out of his window? If you look at how the window is broken, he was not thrown out through the bottom pane, but instead the middle and upper part of the window, which would suggest someone lifted him up off the floor first. A beat cop tells Stone that one witness said that it looked like "someone loaded him into a .45 and pulled the trigger, the way he came out of that window." Did Evanhauer commit suicide or something or was he threatening to do this and slipped?

MORE TRIVIA:

• Keller seems to be somewhat clueless that Jenaea is Dancy's daughter after he meets her at the fashion show. Is he so mesmerized by her? Didn't Dancy already drop enough information about her when they spoke to him previously?
• On the door of The Balladeer club, there is a poster advertising what are presumably coming attractions: John Handy, Shankar Ghosh, Kifaru and Musica Nova.
• Jenaea's address is 410 Filbert, Apartment 960. She is 22 years old.
• When Stone and Keller start trailing Lauritsen near the end of the show, you can see the shadow of the camera crew briefly on the street.
• Near the beginning of the show, there is a forensics cop named "Zaculovich" (that's the way the subtitles spell it). He is a short guy, not Art Passarella, who played the uniformed officer Sergeant Sekulovich in other episodes.
• I'm surprised that a big deal wasn't made out of the earring that was thrown in the pond, that it was never recovered -- after all, it is evidence!
• Stone and Keller are both pretty athletic the way they jump on to the ferry which has already left the dock.
• Brenda Sykes' character's name is spelled "Jenaea" at IMDb, "Genea" in the DVD subtitles.

S01E14: Deathwatch ★★★½
Original air date: January 13, 1973
Director: Walter Grauman; Writers: Harry Kronman, John Groves & Cliff Gould
Guest Stars: Nicholas Colasanto, Victor French, Anthony Caruso, Hari Rhodes
"Buddy Boy" count: 2

The Friendship, a fishing boat, is returning to San Francisco because its voltage regulator is not working. The boat is co-owned by Joe Patruro (Nicholas Colasanto) and Lou Rosselli (Anthony Caruso), who have been partners for 27 years. They come across a smuggling operation run by Reggie Norris (Victor French) transferring aliens from Central and South America and shots are fired. The Friendship continues to port, where the smugglers confront Rosselli while Patruro is away at a repair shop dealing with the regulator. Words are exchanged along the lines of "while you say you won't tell what you saw, you still saw it," and Rosselli is shot after he attacks the two men with a gaff hook. He falls off the boat and drowns. Patruro sees all this when he is returning. Norris and his henchman (Tony Epper) tell him to keep his mouth shut. When Stone and Keller arrive on the scene the next morning in a downpour, they sense that something is wrong with Patruro's story, but Joe has to deal with helping Rosselli's wife Ruth (Ruth Storey) with her husband's funeral among other things. The two cops talk to Nick Lamotta (Lou Krugman), owner of a dockside restaurant, who says that Patruro and Rosselli were like brothers, and Paco Esquivel (Rodolfo Hoyos), who was repairing the regulator; his story is not on the up-and-up because, as Stone suspects, he doesn't like dealing with cops. Charlie Johnson (Hari Rhodes) from the SFPD forensics team figures that the bullets lodged in The Friendship from the confrontation came from an AR-15, an Army automatic rifle, and they lodged in the boat's cabin somewhere between the Farallon Islands and the wharf. Norris confronts Patruro, saying that he needs The Friendship for another smuggling run, telling Joe they are counting on his co-operation if he wants to make sure that Lou's family stays alive. After Stone and Keller figure out Joe and Lou ran across some illegal activity like alien or drug smuggling, they get some unexpected help from Pete Delgado (Carlos Romero) from the immigration department, who have nabbed Eugenia Rodriquez (Maria Elena Cordero), an illegal who has found a job with a local family as a maid while kicking back parts of her wages to a "fly-by-night domestic service." With clues that Rodriquez provides them, they track down a warehouse used by the smugglers. This operation, which employs Norris and others, is headed by Victor Snyder (Mort Mills), who is also connected to Bayside Domestic Services, the company which placed Rodriquez. At the docks, Stone talks to Joe after he has come from church, saying "I'm a cop, Joe, and I say you're scared. I see it. I sense it. I smell it." Joe does confirms details about what Stone thinks happened, but he says, "I just told you the worst thing one man can tell another. That I'm a coward and I let my best friend die. There's nothing more I can tell you." The warehouse where Snider's operation is located is tracked down to 5303 Kingman Street and the place is raided. Snider wants a lawyer, but one of his associates (Bob Hoy) starts blabbing after Stone gets a call from Paco that Patruro is headed towards the Farillons with 50 gallons of gasoline (The Friendship is powered by diesel) to ram his boat into the bad guys. Sixteen more women are about to be transferred near there by Norris. Stone and Keller hurry to the local Coast Guard base where they board an ACV (Air Cushion Vehicle or hovercraft) which speeds in Patruro's direction. Joe is ignoring Stone's radio calls, but they catch up to him and manage to prevent him from turning his boat "into a Roman candle." Norris is busted and his henchman is killed.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller come to the dockside restaurant for an 89 cent breakfast. They meet Joe, who has a new partner named Enrico. They learn that Rosselli's son Angelo (Eugene Mazzola), who earlier wanted to abandon his studies to take his father's place on The Friendship, has gone back to university to become a lawyer. When Keller says that he will pay for the breakfast, Stone suddenly says he wants a better meal, and the two leave the place, arguing.

REVIEW:

This is a good solid episode. The only thing that makes me scratch my head is how do Norris and his associate beat The Friendship back to the docks, considering they had to deal with taking care of their load of aliens? The on-location shooting, which captures the world of the docks very well, and the exciting chase with the hovercraft both add a lot. Keller is really soaked when he takes care of Norris and the other guy at the end of the show!

MORE TRIVIA:

• The two boats involved in the smuggling operation at the beginning of the show are the Miss Jody and Seraph.
• Some of the action involving Stone and Keller at the end of the show involving the hovercraft is obviously done by stuntmen.
• Although Joe has 10 plastic containers of gasoline on his boat, he is smoking!

S01E15: Act of Duty ★★★½
Original air date: January 18, 1973
Director: Lawrence Dobkin; Writer: Robert Malcolm Young; Music: Patrick Williams
Guest Stars: Michael Burns, Brenda Vaccaro*
"Buddy Boy" count: 3

The cops are staking out the S7 Market to catch a serial rapist/killer and Officer Evelyn Hennick (Judith McConnell) is acting as bait. Although army specialist Oren "O.P." Prentiss (Michael Burns), the person they are looking for, is in the place, they have no luck catching him because Stone's identity is compromised by a store cashier. Everyone goes home for the evening, but Prentiss follows Hennick to her apartment and insinuates his way in on the pretext of helping her with her groceries; he presumably rapes and then kills her. At her funeral, both Stone and Keller have flashbacks about Evelyn, Stone when she thanked him for giving her the assignment, and Keller -- who was romantically involved with her -- telling Evelyn she didn't have to do this dangerous job. Evelyn's good friend, 27-year-old rookie Officer Sherry Reese (Brenda Vaccaro) wants to help the investigation, but Stone says no, there will be "no overtime" and Keller says that she is "too involved." Psychiatrist Lenny Murchison (Fred Sadoff) is on hand to dispense advice, saying that the killer displays a "hatred toward women, a twisted view of sex," and is "turned on by violence, by danger, the chance of being caught." He says "this is a man who's both psychotic and schizoid. [T]he rapist's [childhood] must have been a bummer. A domineering mother, maybe even seductive toward him. Weak father, if any. So he builds up a whole push-pull thing about sex and authority. He wants them both, but he can't handle either one of them. He has normal physical needs, but he wants to be punished for the worst act he can imagine. So there's a violent reaction in here. And it has to find a violent means of expression." Although Stone told Sherry her help was not required, she goes and talks to one of the rapist's previous victims who survived her attack, Nancy Connors (Anne Collings). Sherry gets some clues that suggest their suspect has some connection with the military. Stone and Keller to go to the Presidio and talk to Army Colonel Frawley (Keith Andes), who digs up information on Prentiss. Army shrink Major Frank Kramer (James Sikking), adds to Murchison's analysis, confirming that Prentiss is a man with a bad upbringing. Stone wants to do another stakeout, and Sherry is very annoyed that he doesn't want her participation. Stone yells at her when she accuses him of not being fair, saying, "What's fair? Sometimes even justice isn't fair." Prentiss comes to Reese's apartment building where he hassles her for a date in a creepy manner in the laundry room. She is only saved because an elderly neighbor interrupts their conversation where Sherry was rebuffing everything Prentiss said. Later, Sherry decides to take matters into her own hands, and goes to the market where Stone, Keller and other cops are present. Stone is furious that she has come there, and reads her the riot act, getting Keller to take her home. Prentiss is inside her apartment, but hides when they arrive. Keller leaves after checking out most of the rooms, but Prentiss emerges from the bathroom and attacks Sherry. As Keller leaves the parking lot of the building, he spies Prentiss's car which they were watching for earlier that evening. Unable to get in through the door because Sherry has wedged a chair behind it, Keller sees Prentiss through the window and shoots him dead when he acts as if he is going for a gun in his pocket. Keller is upset that he had to resolve things in this manner.

EPILOG:

Sherry wonders if her career is over, but Stone assures her that what she did will be mentioned positively to future rookies. When they recommend she stay in a hotel that evening, Sherry says she would prefer not to. Stone and Keller offer to help her clean up the place. Keller looks sadly at a picture of Evelyn on the dresser as he plugs in the vacuum cleaner.

REVIEW:

An above-average episode, even though the past relationship between Sherry and Evelyn is not gone into in any detail. It sounds like Evelyn, who doesn't seem to be much older than Sherry, helped Sherry out of a jam of some kind involving lifestyle choices when Evelyn was a rookie working juvenile. Sherry says that Evelyn told her "You hang around here and keep dropping pills and you're on your way." Sherry says that "Evelyn changed my life," suggesting she was responsible for her becoming a policewoman. It is never specifically explained if the two recently were roommates, though Sherry has Evelyn's certificate from SFPD on her wall, along with her own. The episode has an outstanding score by Patrick Williams. Burns also played a wacked-out military type in Hawaii Five-O where he was a sniper shooting at people from a bunker on a hillside.

MORE TRIVIA:

• In the supermarket at the beginning of the show, Evelyn walks past a display of Cock o' the Walk fruit cocktail as she is being followed by some creep who interests the police who are there (not Prentiss). There is a sign in the store advertising holiday turkeys.
• There are several lines in the show which would not go over well today. After the first stakeout, Stone says, "I guess I'm old-fashioned. I don't know. I just don't think this is woman's work." Commenting on the fact that there was no sign of forced entry at Evelyn's place, Murchison says, "That's why women don't like to report rape. They don't like admitting they got halfway there on their own." When Stone sends Sherry home after she tries to stake out Prentiss on her own, calling her "rookie" and grounding her, he says "[You parked] right in the darkest corner of the parking lot. [A]ll you needed was a free-love poster and a neon light in your navel."
• The license number of Prentiss's car is 298 BZE.
• Statistic from Stone: Only 1 in 20 women report a rape.

S01E16: The Set-Up ★★★★
Original air date: January 25, 1973
Director: George McCowan; Writer: Douglas Roberts; Music: John Parker
Guest Stars: Stuart Whitman, Jason Evers, Claudine Longet, Jack Albertson*

Nick Carl (Stuart Whitman), a former hitman, is lured back to the States from his new life as a family man in France to do a job for his old friend Johnny Harmon (Jason Evers), a crime kingpin involved in tax fraud, narcotics, prostitution and gambling, who murdered a guy named Abe Wallick several years before. Carl himself was a witness to this killing, and the only other person who is still around that also was a witness is Fred Barber (George D. Wallace), who is the object of Carl's employment. Barber was almost stabbed to death recently in San Quentin, and has been put up in the Cloverleaf Rest Home by D.A. Gerald O'Brien (John Kerr) as a protected witness with a 24-hour guard because Barber wants to testify against Harmon. A customs officer who works at the airport and who was a former police officer recognized Carl shortly after he got off the plane and immediately notified Stone. Stone and Keller go to see Tim Murphy (Jack Albertson), a blind guy who runs a bar, and pick his brains for information about where Carl is, but he plays dumb. Meanwhile, Carl rents a $12-a-day room in Chinatown and phones Harmon to let him know he has arrived. Soon after this, two thugs in Harmon's employ, Bobby and Bernie Sangster (Don Pulford and Glenn Wilder), drop in to see Carl in the hotel, but find the room empty. Carl goes to Tim's bar, where Tim tells him "A lot of people would like to knock you off." Tim was the one Harmon asked to contact Carl. Tim tells Carl "You gotta trust Johnny." Stone and Keller show up at the bar and ask Carl some questions, hoping that Carl will also testify against Harmon, but he is evasive. Carl and Tim later go to the Palace of Fine Arts where they are supposed to meet Harmon. Carl is not happy to find out that Tim has set him up. The Sangster brothers are waiting at the Palace and a gun battle ensues where Tim is shot dead and Carl escapes, though he is seriously wounded. Stone and Keller have also shown up at the palace; Bernie Sangster is killed and his brother is shot. Carl takes the $10,000 payment from Harmon for his "services" that Tim had passed along to him in the bar earlier and places it in an envelope addressed to his wife Michelle (Claudine Longet) in France. Knowing he is not going to live long, Carl phones his wife and two sons Paul and Brad (Randy Faustino and Brad Savage). Cave then phones Harmon and says that they should get together and talk. He says that he will meet Harmon at the end of the pier in Aquatic Park, but this is a scam and the police are seriously distracted, but they pick up more of Harmon's thugs. Carl goes to Johnny's place instead where he confronts his former "friend." In a near-operatic death scene, Carl tells Harmon he knows he was the one who was set up ... by Harmon. Stone and Keller arrive but not before Carl tells Stone that in the inside pocket of his jacket, there is a deathbed confession -- his "insurance policy" -- where he admits to seeing Harmon kill Wallick, plus the envelope containing the $10,000.

EPILOG:

Stone is about to mail the envelope with the money to Carl's wife. Keller wonders if he looked at what is inside, and Stone berates him about being so hidebound in terms of following procedures, adding that it is a federal offense to do so. When Keller tells Stone that it is not illegal if you see the contents before you mail the envelope, but Stone dumps it in the mailbox anyway, saying "Son of a gun, now you tell me, huh?" Keller asks Stone, "That was the money Johnny Harmon paid Nick Karl, wasn't it?" Stone replies, "For a job he didn't do." Keller tells him, "Son of a gun."

REVIEW:

An above-average episode, with fantastic acting (one exception), outstanding photography (D.O.P. as usual is Jacques R. Marquette, who loves tracking shots) and score by John Parker. Stuart Whitman is perfect as the world-weary Nick. The scene with Longet playing Carl's wife is probably necessary to the plot, but it would have been just as effective if Carl had spoken to her on the phone either hearing her or not on the other end of the line without seeing her and the two kids.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The shot as Stone and Keller are driving down the street starting at about 8:32 with a camera mounted on the front of their car goes on for a minute.
• Stone remembers that Carl killed his senior partner Rogers 12 years before. "He went to talk to a witness one night and caught a bullet in the throat."
• When Carl arrives in Chinatown, the music sounds "Chinese."
• Harmon's phone number is 555-3781.
• After he is shot, Carl takes the #19 Polk bus.

S01E17: A Collection of Eagles ★★
Original air date: February 1, 1973
Director: Walter Grauman; Writer: Robert I. Holt; Music: Michel Mention
Guest Stars: John Saxon, Belinda J. Montgomery, Hari Rhodes, Joseph Cotten*
"Buddy Boy" count: 4

Coin dealer Vincent Hagopian Junior (John Saxon) wants to create duplicates of rare U.S. Double Eagle $20 gold coins and substitute these for the real thing in the collection of rich guy John R. James (Joseph Cotten). He hires low-level crook Ernie Walker (Jamie Farr) to pick up blank gold planchets used to make these counterfeits in Mexico. However, when Walker returns to San Francisco, Hagopian sends his employee Tommy Hendriksen (William Gray Espy) to pay Walker a visit in his fleabag hotel room. Hendricksen steals the blanks and murders Walker by smothering him and then setting his room on fire to make it look like he died from smoking a cigarette in bed. Stone and Keller find one planchet in the room and the SFPD forensics people including lab technician Charlie Johnson (Hari Rhodes) are quick to figure out what really happened. Hagopian has an "inside woman" in the form of Karen Pearson (Belinda Montgomery) helping him, a university student who is living at James' place, helping him write his colorful autobiography. Hagopian has hot pants for Karen, who leaves the case containing James' Double Eagle collection worth half a million dollars open (as well as a nearby door) so Hagopian can sneak in to James' place and make the switch. Hagopian's closeness to Karen including him telling her on the phone "I love you, baby" does not go unnoticed by Tommy, who has an interest in Hagopian himself (this is the show's "gay subtext"). Hagopian seems to be the only person who can give Tommy injections of insulin and he just happens to double the dose when he figures Tommy is of no more use to him, telling Tommy this is "just business" as Tommy expires. As the show goes on, Karen becomes more and more attached to James, who is a kindly old soul whose other hobbies include cultivating roses, including creating new species of same. Ironically, when Stone and Keller need the services of an expert coin dealer, they contact the Numismatic Society (Stone needles Keller about this big word, used in crossword puzzles) and they refer them to Hagopian himself as the local resident expert in these coins! When Hagopian leaves James out of a list of local coin collectors who own Double Eagles, the two cops get suspicious. Hagopian has been promising Karen that he would take her to live on the Costa del Sol in Spain after his caper was finished as a reward for her services, but, like Tommy, he begins to find her to be a liability to his scheme, and is about to her inject her with an overdose of insulin near the end of the show when Stone and Keller show up at his place. After a brief gun skirmish, Hagopian is wounded and taken into custody.

EPILOG:

Karen has turned evidence against Hagopian, including identifying Tommy, whose body was found in the harbor after he was knocked off. Stone doesn't know if this will reduce her sentence, though. James sends both Stone and Keller a present of an uncirculated 1881 silver dollar in thanks. They scramble to look this up in a catalog, only to discover that they are only worth four dollars.

REVIEW:

Some of the relationships, motivations and mechanics of this episode are not well developed. How does Hagopian meet Tommy and Karen, for example? Tommy is hardly some hardened criminal and neither is Karen, who was introduced to the coin dealer briefly by James himself several months before the show. Hagopian, in addition to buying and selling coins, is also an expert in counterfeiting and engraving, having a coin press to make the duplicates, which he doesn't do very well, because after the switch is made, James is able to easily see that the replacements Hagopian left at his place are flawed. Hagopian is revealed to be a very bitter individual when he rants about customers like James which his father, from whom he inherited the business, also had to endure: "I've watched people like that all my life. I watched while my father pandered to them. I swept up a crummy shop where they walked out with more than he made all year, sealed in one lousy little bit of plastic. What do they do with it? Take it home and put it in a glass case. Well, fine. Let John R. James sit and stare at his Eagles. I want to see the world." Saxon, in addition to having a very peculiar accent, gives a very slimy performance as Hagopian and Joseph Cotton, whose résumé includes classic films like Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt and The Third Man, is excellent in his grandfatherly role. On the other hand, while Montgomery is very attractive, her part is kind of clueless, and you are left wondering what does the university have to do with job placement for the kind of role she has. Is she a student, a graduate student, is this a summer job, or what? Stone is far too clever the way he figures out Walker's participation in the case, inasmuch as he was from San Diego, which is close to Mexico, which is a big gold producer and where he picked up the planchets after sneaking across the border, and then returned to San Francisco either by stowing away on a freighter or "bribing a nice cozy berth in steerage." All of which prompts Keller to tell Stone, "You work long enough as a cop, you start thinking like a crook." The score by Michael Mention has some interesting jazz-like passages, but also draws on stock tracks.

MORE TRIVIA:

• As Stone and Keller come out of Mama's Restaurant on Washington Square at 1701 Stocktone Street at 27:36, the camera angle from above shows a huge shadow across the intersection. However, in the next shot from ground level, the shadow has moved several feet into the intersection, the two cops are walking in sunshine, and the car going through the intersection is totally different from the one seen in the previous shot. They walk down Filbert Street, past Saints Peter and Paul Church, arguing about who will pay for lunch, among other things, in a tracking shot which goes on for 2 minutes and 19 seconds.
• Walker's hotel's address is 207 Front Street. He is staying in room 25. After the fire, the doctor from the coroner's department tells Stone, "He was pretty well done." The serial number of a gun found in Walker's room is H12987.
• It is said that the price of gold (the raw gold, not the collectible value of the coins) is $65-$70 an ounce.

S01E18: A Room with a View ★★★★
Original air date: February 8, 1973
Director: Walter Grauman; Writer: Del Reisman
Guest Stars: Steve Forrest, Michael Strong, Richard Anderson, Shirley Knight Hopkins*
"Buddy Boy" count: 2

Acting on orders from gambling boss Hoyt Llewellyn (Richard Anderson), hitman Art Styles (Steve Forrest) knocks off Frankie Chaffee (Eddie Ryder), to freak out Frankie's brother Roy (Sandy Kenyon), who is in hiding waiting to testify against Llewellyn. Styles wired some gizmo under the steering wheel of Frankie's car which contained a shotgun shell that was activated when Frankie turned on the ignition. Styles then meets with Llewellyn, who offers him a trip to Buenos Aires, but only if he kills Roy as well. Given the address where Roy is hiding by Llewellyn (933 Church Street), Styles scopes out the place, but finds Roy's door locked. Stone goes to see Llewellyn on his yacht where he also finds his right-hand man Abby Groat (Michael Strong), who used to be close to the Chaffee brothers, but is now in Llewellyn's pocket. Their conversation is quite delightful. Stone tries to plant a bug in Groat's ear that things may not go well for him in his new job, but Llewellyn says that Stone is a "sower of discontent," and tells him to get lost. Stone gives it right back to him, and tells Groat when he leaves, "Anybody that has you as a friend doesn't need an enemy." Meanwhile, Styles charms himself into the apartment of Mary Rae Dortmunder, a 31-year-old English teacher at Everett Junior High School who lives across the street from Roy's hideout. Keller is doing a stakeout on Styles, unaware that he is only a few feet away from where Roy is hiding. (In a weird coincidence, Dortmunder was the last person to see Frankie alive.) Dortmunder doesn't make any attempt to get rid of Styles. He keeps his eye on Roy's place from her window which looks down on the street below. Dortmunder talks to Styles about various authors like Saint-Exupéry, Byron and the Brontës which prompts Styles to ask her, "Where do you live, anyway? All that fairyland thing. I mean, you live out here somewhere, where the wallpaper never warps and the toilets don't back up." He asks her if she has "a guy," and she says no. He tells her "I'm not going back to my place. I like it here." Styles talks to Llewellyn, who is concerned about Dortmunder's presence. Styles tells him "I'll handle it." Later that evening, Llewellyn and Groat go to cement a business deal with another gambling kingpin named Mason. When they arrive at the docks, Llewellyn finds that he can't undo his seat belt to get out of his Morgan sports car. Mason pushes the car with Llewellyn in it into the drink. The next day, Stone and Keller go to talk to Dortmunder at her school. Keller knows that Styles is staying at her place from his surveillance, and even when they show her an information sheet about Styles which lists the various crimes he has been charged with, she cannot believe what she is reading. Now that the jig is up, Dortmunder goes home and confronts Styles, slapping him on the face in a very hesitating way. Styles points his gun and threatens to kill her, but Dortmunder gets philosophical, asking Styles when will the killing all end, and talks to him about Hemingway's short story The Killers. Styles has been trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with Llewellyn. When he finally hears that Llewellyn is dead, he is disturbed. Dortmunder is also disturbed, because she thinks Styles will probably kill her when his work is finished, though he denies this. Roy Chaffee's wife Angela (Betty Anne Rees) is hugely pregnant and senses that it is time to go to the hospital. She calls her husband at his secret location and asks if he will come with her. He says yes, despite the possible danger to himself. She leaves her house, tailed by Stone and Keller to Roy's hideout. Styles, acting out of a sense of commitment to finish his job, has his gun aimed across the street and shoots Roy when Angela shows up, but immediately splits with Dortmunder to leave town for Los Angeles. He is trailed to the airport by Groat and some thug as well as Stone and Keller. Styles leaves Dortmunder in her car and flees into the terminal building where he is shot dead by Groat in the baggage area. His body falls on a conveyor belt and ends up on a carousel back in the terminal. Stone corners Groat and his accomplice; Groat is wounded, and the other guy is arrested.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller take Dortmunder to her school. Stone shows her a picture of his daughter Jeannie who was supposed to be coming home for Christmas, but instead will celebrate it with her boyfriend and his parents. Stone tells Dortmunder that in anticipation of Jeannie's return, he made reservations for The Island House, a restaurant in Sausalito, which will go unused. He suggests that she join him and Keller for dinner there, and she accepts.

REVIEW:

This is an episode that I should not like. The whole business about how Styles insinuates himself into Dortmunder's life is highly improbable and kind of creepy, though he does have a certain William Smith-like vibe about him which means that arguing with him would be very dangerous. Dortmunder seems to be a romantic mousy virginal type which perhaps explains why she just doesn't tell Styles to get lost or contact the cops. The acting by all concerned in this episode is of a very high caliber, and those non-process shots of people driving are so great! What I really enjoyed was the confrontation between Stone, Groat and Llewellyn on the yacht. It is unusual in the show to see Stone carrying on a machine-gun like conversation with crooks like this at such length.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Styles' rap sheet shows that he is 6'2" and weighs 205 pounds. He has been arrested several times: Assault (1959); Attempted Murder (1960); Assault with a Deadly Weapon (1960); Murder (1962), Assault (1968); and Attempted Murder (1969).
• The way Styles tapes the pipe bomb-like device under Frankie's steering wheel seems to me to be really obvious.
• A phone book left open at Dortmunder's place suggests Styles was going to use Aria Romana Airways (phone numbers 555-8431 and 555-6000) or Atlantic International Airways.
• Dortmunder's car is a blue Maverick, license number PCE-616.
• Stone and Keller tail Angela in a really obvious way, double-parking on the street when she is making a phone call to Roy to let her know she is near his place. After Roy is shot, Keller grabs the pregnant Angela and pulls her to the sidewalk!
• After Dortmunder finds out what kind of a person Styles is from Stone and Keller, he tells her, "Look, Mary Rae, I didn't come up here to get in...", meaning what? Her pants? It is highly unlikely to me that they "did it."
• This episode has some Christmas references. At the beginning, two people dressed as Santa and a Christmas tree are seen on the street. When Keller goes to talk to Angela, she is decorating the Christmas tree in her living room.

S01E19: Deadline ★★½
Original air date: February 15, 1973
Director: Seymour Robbie; Writer: David Friedkin
Guest Stars: Barry Sullivan, Geoffrey Deuel, Greg Mullavey
"Buddy Boy" count: 1

Chris Bane (Barry Sullivan), San Francisco Telegraph newspaper columnist for 28 years, meets his young mistress Maggie Ames (Terrence O'Connor) near the Belvedere apartment she is renting. He argues with her about the man who ferried her to the place by boat and who he does not see close up. Bane accidentally knocks her off the dock, which kills her when her head strikes the ground. All this is witnessed by Roger (Greg Mullavey), who is watching through a telescope nearby. Bane tries to one-up the cops' investigation, always being ahead of them. After Stone and Keller get information about the tides which could have affected where Maggie's body was found floating in the Bay, Bane tells them, quite correctly, that she was killed in Belvedere and gives them the specific address where she was living (412 Bay View). Bane also makes up a story about how two kids in a skiff off Belvedere witnessed her arriving by speedboat (not mentioning that she was coming to see him), specifically "a 20-, 22-foot custom inboard. White with blue lightning bolts down each side of the bow." This boat is traced to one Roland Claridge (Thomas Kirk), who says he lent it to his friend Peter Anthony, an actor with the ACT workshop. Maggie, who was also a columnist at the Telegraph, recently wrote about this acting company. But Bane finds her original draft of this article gushed about Anthony, unlike the version of her column which appeared in the newspaper that barely mentioned him. Bane reveals this to Stone and Keller as well, but their investigation has already shown that there is no such person as Peter Anthony, since this is just the actor's stage name. In a neat twist, it turns out that this actor is Bane's own son Greg (Geoffrey Deuel), whose acting career was secretive because, as he explained to producers and directors, his parents didn't (meaning his father wouldn't) approve of him following such a profession. This is revealed in a big "AHA" moment. Greg is very shocked when his drunken father confesses to him that he was in love with Maggie. Greg is eventually arrested, thanks to his own father's sleuthing, which makes the still-meddling Bane try to place the blame elsewhere, like on Roger, who is attempting to blackmail him. Bane previously found a medallion for Peter Anthony at Maggie's place, and on the pretext of taking Roger somewhere to get him his first $300 per week payment, throws this medallion at Roger and then shoots him, leaving him to die in an alley. There is an emotional scene in Stone's office where Greg and his father try to work out issues relating to how they both loved Maggie. Bane finally admits that he is the killer not only of Maggie but also Roger when he is confronted by Stone and Keller at Maggie's place. He pulls a gun on the two cops, saying he wants to "buy enough time to get lost," but eventually just gives up.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller come out of the ACT production of Shakespeare's Othello which starred Bane's son in the role of Cassio. They argue about whether this play is still relevant today. Stone says an example of a play which "still holds up" is Abie's Irish Rose, a popular comedy, the basic premise of which involves an Irish Catholic girl and a young Jewish man who marry despite the objections of their families. Keller is astounded. Stone offers to buy him a chili dog, "a snack after the theatre." (This is lame.)

REVIEW:

This show would have been more effective if Bane had killed himself at the end and the sucky ending eliminated. The way the coroner rattled off a bunch of mumbo-jumbo relating to the time of Maggie's death considering how long her body was in the harbor (it sounded like this was not taken into consideration) seemed far-fetched. Barry Sullivan, who appeared on the show in four different roles, was OK, but his rat-a-tat delivery sometimes came across like a stereotypical reporter in some 1930s newspaper melodrama. Stone, who once again is very clever in figuring out exactly what really happened, has known Bane for quite a long time, from when Stone had a partner named McIntyre and Bane was working for the college paper in a muckracking capacity similar to the present day.

MORE TRIVIA:

• "Thomas" Kirk, who plays Claridge, is the same Tommy Kirk who appeared in many Walt Disney productions.
• When Stone and Keller come out of the ACT Theatre after first looking for Anthony (he is not there), there is a reverse tracking shot which lasts for almost a minute as they walk down the street.
• The medallion that Bane uses to try and link Roger to Peter Anthony features Saint Genesius, who is the patron saint of actors and acting societies.
• Bane's column in the Telegraph is called "Deadline," thus the title of the episode.

S01E20: Trail of the Serpent ★★★
Original air date: February 22, 1973
Director: John Badham; Writers: Cliff Gould & John Wilder
Guest Stars: Tim O'Connor, Cal Bellini, Brad David

The multi-ethnic Cobras gang headed by Buddy Simms (Cal Bellini) shakes down a corner grocery, smashing the place up and demanding money. A witness to this from outside the store calls the cops, who arrive quickly. As the gang flees, one of the cops named Trikonis is shot and killed and Buddy is wounded and taken to hospital. Stone is teamed up with another cop named Rojak and they scour the neighborhood for clues. Separated from Rojak and led on by Davey Sung (Brian Tochi), brother of Richard (Frank Michael Liu), one of the gang members, Stone pursues the gang on his own, only to be taken hostage by them in the abandoned warehouse building which serves as their headquarters. Under the leadership now of the hyped-up Chick Kramer (Brad David), the Cobras want to exchange Stone for Buddy before 9 a.m. the next morning, or Stone will be killed. Keller, who is becoming more and more concerned about what has happened to his partner, is paired up with Lieutenant Roy Devitt (Tom O'Connor), who has his hands full with a Governor's conference to be held in San Francisco the next day. Stone tries to talk to the gang members in a "nice" way, especially Richard and Davie, but it doesn't get him very far. Richard tells Stone to "Shut up" and says "You talk too much." At one point when he is left alone with Jerry (Doug Chapin), another gang member, Stone throws a cup of coffee in Jerry's face, knocks him out and attempts to escape, but he gets shot by Chick while doing so. The cops are sent purposely in the wrong direction by a newspaper delivery man named Johnny Dolan (Hal Smith) who owed the Cobras a favor, but they return to the neighborhood where Stone was kidnapped. When a call just before the exchange deadline is received at headquarters, Keller and Devitt are alerted, and Keller finds Willard Lu (Keone Young) at a pay phone nearby. He is tackled and convinced to lead the two cops to the place where Stone is being held. Stone was on the verge of walking out of the place after making a big speech to Richard, who was holding a gun on him. When Keller busts the door of the room down, Richard is shot and killed. Keller is upset about this, but Stone tells him, "That kid bought that bullet a long time ago. There was no way to buy it back."

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller are visiting Davie, who has been adopted by a Chinese family; he has a job working at their store in Chinatown. He is going to school and recently completed a biography of Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers," which Stone had talked to him about when he was being held captive, trying to win his confidence and that of his brother. As Stone and Keller leave him, Stone says, "Listen, maybe he won't grow up to be a cop, but at least he'll know why we're around."

REVIEW:

The gang members in this show are particularly nasty. A couple of them, including Chick, look like they are strung out on drugs. At the hospital, when Keller asks Buddy for help, he is spat on. Chick spits on Stone's badge when he is being held captive. The way they treat the owner of the grocery store and his wife, George and Angela Barberio (Paul Micale and Shelley Morrison) and smash the place up is particularly unpleasant. Some of the situations in which Stone finds himself and his speechifying are kind of clichéd, but we know that he will be alive at the end of the show, even though Karl Malden looks pretty bad at its conclusion.

MORE TRIVIA:

• This is supposed to be a gang of young punks, but Cal Bellini was 37 years old when the show was broadcast. The other leader of the gang, Brad David, was only 25.
• The title of the episode is mentioned by Stone after he is rescued. He tells Keller, "What little I know about Oriental heritage, I learned from a Chinese scout on lwo. Once he said: 'The trail of the serpent leads to death'."
• Stone's badge number is 897.
• Stephen Bradley is seen as Fred, a cop.

S01E21: The House on Hyde Street ★★½
Original air date: March 1, 1973
Director: Walter Grauman; Writers: John Wilder & Cliff Osmond
Guest Stars: Lew Ayres, Albert Salmi, Clint Howard, Joyce Van Patten*
"Buddy Boy" count: 2

Two young boys, Billy Rudolph (Clint Howard) and Mark Dunham (Michael Morgan), break into an old house owned by eccentric Harlan Edgerton (Lew Ayres) via its skylight to find a fortune in a safe, while a third boy, Tommy Cochran (Kerry MacLane), stands guard on the roof outside. Billy was told about the money by his father Joe (Albert Salmi). Edgerton is regarded by one mother in the neighborhood as "a child molester [and] a murderer still walking the streets." Thirty years before, a 10-year-old girl was found killed in the neighborhood and Edgerton's brother Donald was a suspect, though he was later exonerated. Donald was on the U.S.S. Oklahoma which was sunk at Pearl Harbor. When he returned to the mainland, he became totally reclusive, and has lived in the house ever since, even though he was pronounced dead and buried, thanks to a fake death certificate and a fake military funeral. The boys find the house full of junk hoarded for years. When Edgerton, who has gone to the store, returns, Billy flees through the skylight where he entered, but Mark slips and falls down and is either killed or seriously injured and dies later. When Mark does not come home that evening, his mother notifies the cops and they search. Stone and Keller follow Edgerton, who leaves his house and attempts to bury a body in Golden Gate Park which turns out to be Mark's, stuffed inside what looks like a ventriloquist's dummy. Edgerton is arrested, but doesn't have much to say when he is jailed, but he does reveal that his brother Donald is a suspect in Mark's death and still that of the girl years earlier. Edgerton is sprung temporarily from jail to help Stone and Keller take his brother Donald into custody. Stone finally manages to get the truth out of Billy and Tommy as to what happened to Mark by giving them a big speech about "being afraid." When they return to the house, they find Joe Rudolph and two other men have taken matters into their own hands and have broken in to find Donald, who, unknown to them, is hiding in the pigeon coop on the place's roof. The three men are arrested for breaking and entering and destruction of private property.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller drive past Edgerton's house. He has been released from jail and is back to hoarding as much as ever. The three boys cruise up to his place on their skateboards and give him various items they have found to add to his collection. Stone says "Looks like business is pretty good." Keller replies, "It's nice to know some things never change, isn't it?", to which Stone adds, "Nice to know some things change too."

REVIEW:

This episode is definitely something different, but I didn't particularly like it. The kids are obnoxious and Billy is nasty as kids can be, and Harlan is frustratingly silent, refusing to talk after he is jailed until Stone and Keller threaten to get a warrant to search his house. What happens to Donald is not specified. We only see Donald once, and that is when he is talking with his brother and the shadows of both of them are visible on the wall. It seems to me that even though Harlan and his brother were not connected with Mark getting injured, nothing is said about whether Mark would have survived if Donald had obtained medical attention for him. I'm sure Harlan could also have been charged with something because of trying to bury Mark's body. In any case, it is unlikely that the neighborhood would think everything is peachy after Harlan is released from jail and back at home, considering the past reputation of both brothers. Some commentator is seen on TV after Harlan is arrested, saying ""The coroner's office confirms that this death too [i.e., the same as the girl from 30 years ago], was the result of a broken neck. A coincidence? Or a terrible act committed by a compulsive killer who should have been incarcerated 30 years ago? That is the mystery to be solved by police authorities. And the issue to be weighed by citizens in the Bay Area today as the search continues for Donald Edgerton, the 62-year-old man who was once suspect in the killing of another…." The story is reportedly based on the case of the Collyer brothers in New York City.

MORE TRIVIA:

• When Stone and Keller first encounter what's inside the house, Keller says "This is bananas time."
• Some of the night filming like when Harlan leaves his house and takes the body to bury it in Golden Gate Park uses very bright lights.
• Keller identifies the Edgerton house as an example of Stick architecture.

S01E22: Beyond Vengeance ★★★½
Original air date: March 8, 1973
Director: Virgil W. Vogel; Writer: Robert Malcolm Young
Guest Stars: Joe Don Baker, Darlene Carr, Ken Swofford
"Buddy boy" count: 2

Leonard Collier Cord (Joe Don Baker), who was arrested by Stone and sent to prison 12 years before for a series of brutal rapes and murders, returns on parole to San Francisco to make Stone's life a living hell. Stone's daughter Jeannie (Darleen Carr) is coming home from Phoenix, where she is a university student, to visit her father. After she exits the Southwest Interstate Bus in Oakland where Stone meets her so he can spend a few more minutes with him on the trip back to town, Cord, who is also on the bus, stays there, where he stabs and kills Jeannie's best friend Valerie Mercer (Julie Mannix), who was sitting beside her. Cord plays Amazing Grace on his harmonica in the show, which produces a creepy musical leitmotif sort of like the one associated with the Charles Bronson character in Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West. After he stalks Jeannie on a San Francisco transit bus, Stone gets Cord to participate in a lineup, but neither Jeannie nor Herman Ledeker (Ken Swofford), the bus driver from Phoenix, can identify him positively enough to arrest him. The smirking Cord taunts Stone in his office afterwards, showing pictures of Jeannie he took recently in Phoenix with a telephoto lens. Stone totally loses it, throwing Cord across the room. Cord leaves as the other cops in the squadroom have difficulty restraining Stone from taking further action. After Cord goes to consult with a lawyer, Captain Rudy Olsen (Robert F. Simon) is worried about the bad publicity the department will likely get because of "harassment," but Keller gets a case of "the flu" so he can take time off work to investigate Cord on his own. Unfortunately, he is not too successful at this, because when he follows Cord to the Legion of Honor art museum that evening, he is knocked out and tied up in a phone booth. Stone gets a lucky break when he finds a couple of witnesses also on the bus -- a Mexican woman and her grandson -- who recognize Cord, who claimed he was never on the bus. Stone also goes to meet Cord at the Legion of Honor. After a brief skirmish, he manages to wound Cord, who begs to be killed, saying "I don't wanna go back." Stone is only too happy not to fulfill Cord's request.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller drive Jeannie to the bus station, where she gets on the bus back to Phoenix. She says "Bye-bye, Daddy," and Stone is at a loss for words, saying "The first time she's called me that in..."

REVIEW:

While this show, a fan favorite, is very suspenseful and has some serious scenery-chewing by both Malden and Baker, Cord becoming progressively more and more diabolical and all-powerful as it goes along verges on the ridiculous. The business with Cord setting up a tape recorder at Stone's place which is operated by a timer to play a harmonica rendition of Amazing Grace is hard to believe. Is Cord suddenly an electronics expert? When, at the end of the show, Stone shoots Cord's Mustang car which explodes, this reminded me of a scene from the Terminator movies. Still, we learn some interesting things about Jeannie during this show -- that she wants to become an "environmental architect," and when asked by Valerie if Mike would freak out if she shacked up with some guy, says "He'd be cool about it, once I convinced him it was more than just a sex thing."

MORE TRIVIA:

• This show has an interesting uninterrupted tracking shot which goes on for about a minute and 20 seconds starting around 29:45 as Stone and Keller walk through the police building.
• Valerie's birthday was February 10, 1954, which prompts Keller to say, "An Aquarian."
• Cord's mug shot number is 236435. Stone busted him when he was 18, so now he is 30.
• Jeannie takes the Taraval East Bay Terminal bus in San Francisco. At one point, it goes through a long tunnel (I think the tunnel was on a different line).

S01E23: The Albatross ★★★
Original air date: March 15, 1973
Director: Robert Day; Writers: Cliff Gould & John Wilder
Guest Stars: Ed Nelson, Kaz Garas, Douglas V. Fowley
"Buddy boy" count: 2

Robert Alan Hobbes (Ed Nelson) returns home to find his young son Johnny dead and Artis Pierce (Kaz Garas) robbing the place. The cops are called and give chase, and eventually capture Pierce. He is read his rights by Keller, but when the case comes to a preliminary hearing, it is revealed that Pierce did not confirm that he understood his rights because he has a severe hearing problem and was not wearing his hearing aid when the rights were read to him. As a result, his confession after this that he didn't intend to kill Hobbes' son is not allowed. Very upset, Hobbes takes the stand, hopefully to tell the judge that he witnessed Pierce being at his place, but he says he has never seen him before in his life. His intention is obviously to go after Pierce himself, which Stone picks up on quickly. Hobbes attempts to do this, but as Stone warns him later, he does a pretty bad job compared to the police, who are unsuccessfully combing through Pierce's records trying to find some past crime they can get a conviction for. First, Hobbes tries to buy a gun legally, but is stymied by the 5-day waiting period for the gun registration to be confirmed. Stone finds out about the purchase and quashes this approval, which results in Hobbes coming to the station where the two men engage in a screaming match. Hobbes hangs out at the construction site where Pierce works and also at a bar where he drinks. Outside the bar, Hobbes, denied getting a gun, tries to attack Pierce with a wrench, but Pierce takes it away from him, saying "I'm gonna kill you if I have to." Then Hobbes buys a Magnum from a pawn shop by just putting money on the counter until the clerk named Danny (Roy Applegate) capitulates. He goes to Pierce's hotel and convinces the clerk there to give him the room next to his "buddy" Pierce. When Pierce returns to the hotel, the clerk tips him off that Hobbes is now staying there. Hobbes comes into Pierce's room through the door intentionally left open, but Pierce is ready for him and takes Hobbes' gun away. He is just about ready to deal with Hobbes when Stone and Keller show up. At Hobbes' place, after getting a search warrant and with the help of Nelson's elderly father (Douglas Fowley), they found Pierce's hearing aid which fell out during the struggle he and Hobbes had prior to him escaping, and the serial number of this hearing aid, which the cops got previously from Pierce's otologist Dr. Markman (Alex Henteloff), confirms that Pierce was there.

EPILOG:

As he is coming out of the hotel with Stone and Keller, Hobbes tells the two cops, "I still can't believe you found it." Stone tells Pierce, who is in a police car, "The serial number tied it right to your tail. Did you hear that?" Pierce replies, "I'm saying nothing without my lawyer." Keller reads Pierce his rights ... again.

REVIEW:

The best part of this show is the photography as Pierce is being pursued by the cops at the beginning, which is very cool, not only from the camera on the front of the police cars, but also the one in front of Pierce. (Did Kaz Garas do his own driving of the bike? In The Strange Report, a UK TV show in which he starred, Garas drove a bike, but it was more like a motor scooter.) As well, there is a neat stunt where Pierce falls off his bike at the end of the chase. I don't know if D.A. Gerald O'Brien (John Kerr) is going to have an easy time using the hearing aid to convict Pierce. It might be difficult to establish a trail of evidence considering it was moved from the living room of Hobbes' house to the garage by his father when he was cleaning it up prior to the place being put on the real estate market as per his son's request.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Fred Helfing noticed a goof at the beginning of the show. When Hobbes comes home, he picks up his mail from a mailbox and also picks up a newspaper from the front steps. After he comes in the house and finds his son dead, there is a newspaper on the son's left and some mail and keys on the son's right. As Hobbes kneels down, both the newspaper and mail and keys have disappeared. But then he puts the mail from the mailbox (which seems to be the same mail we just saw a few seconds before) on his son's right (along with the keys he used to let himself into the house) and the newspaper he picked off the porch on his son's left, presumably the same newspaper he also just picked up.
• The serial number of Pierce's Clarion hearing aid is X13582.
• Hobbes lives at 3717 Alston. The Corona Hotel is at 8249 Front Street.

S01E24: Shattered Image ★★★½
Original air date: March 22, 1973
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Writers: Guerdon Trueblood, Roland Wolpert & Jack Guss
Guest Stars: Barbara Rush, Dick Sargent, Jim Davis, Jeff Corey, Richard Ely
"Buddy boy" count: 1

Fred Marshall, a big shot from the U.S. Department of Commerce, is killed with a spear gun while he is alone on a yacht in San Francisco Bay in a manner which tries to make it look like an accident. Marshall's administrative assistant Boyd Caldwell (Dick Sargent) refuses to believe that Marshall was murdered and threatens to pull all sorts of strings with Washington to avoid any kind of scandal. Senator Ralph Bowen (Jeff Corey), who was heading an investigative team looking into improprieties committed by Marshall, gives Keller a "filibuster" when questioned. Marshall's widow Anna (Barbara Rush) arrives on the scene which moves the plot in an unexpected direction, because she is the sister of Stone's World War II army buddy and best friend Andy Slovatska, who was killed in action in the Pacific during World War II. All of them grew up in San Francisco's Potrero neighborhood. Stone takes Anna away from the hotel where reporters are mobbing her like flies and they later go to their old neighborhood where they reminisce. Anna also cannot believe her husband was murdered, though she eventually tells Stone that he was in a great deal of trouble because he took money under the table to make up for overages on a government contract. There are plenty of suspects as to who killed Marshall, but it turns out that it was Skip Hunter (Scott Hylands), who worked for shipping magnate Reid Bradshaw (Jim Davis), who was connected to Marshall by a pilot project to create a new kind of merchant ship where public funds were likely being misused. However, in a surprising twist, it is revealed that Anna hired Hunter to kill her husband because he was having an affair. Keller participates in a sting where he meets Anna late at night, pretending to be Hunter who was killed earlier by a motorboat when he attempted to escape from him and Stone. After he moves in to arrest Anna, Stone tells her what he really thinks of her scheme: "Why should you pay the rest of your life for his mistake, isn't that it? You couldn't divorce him. That would be desertion. That would be the wrong kind of image. But a widow... Then you could start all over again. Find somebody else to keep you where you have to be." She slaps his face, yelling "Don't you judge me!"

EPILOG:

After Anna is taken away, Keller tries to chat up Stone about having found a new place, but Stone is stunned, and tells him "My old man used to come in every night, sit at the edge of my bed but he'd say, 'Every night, when the day is over, take a look at yourself. Inside yourself. See what happened. Take a look at the good things and the bad things. Especially the bad things. The mistakes. And tomorrow, when the sun comes up, you'll be a smarter man. A lot smarter.' Hit me tomorrow, will you, buddy boy? Please?" Keller takes the boat out, leaving Stone looking totally shocked on the docks, in one of the series' more serious endings.

REVIEW:

This show is somewhat complicated, because the idea the main theme of the show revolves around local cops being jerked around by the feds or by business fat cats is totally wrong; Anna was the one responsible for her husband's death. Whether this is clever or confusing is a good question. Stone had hot pants for Anna more than 30 years before, so after she jerked him around personally for most of the episode where he kept looking at her with goo-goo eyes, at the end of the show he looks like someone hit him in the face with a mackerel.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Anna arrived in San Francisco at 11 p.m. at night from Los Angeles, then went back to LAX by plane at 8 a.m. the next morning to avoid seeing her husband who she says had been drinking heavily the night before. Despite the fact she says she stayed with some friends in Los Angeles (Doctor and Mrs. Paul Banks), she managed to return to SFO by noon soon after this, despite the flying time from San Francisco to L.A. being around an hour and a half.
• A WWW page (WARNING: Do NOT click on any ads on this page!) has some interesting ideas about connections between this show and real life.
• The hotel where several characters from the show are staying is the Fairmont, these days a five star luxury hotel. Stone says that the place is too expensive for Keller, that he can't afford the coffee shop.

S01E25: The Unicorn ★★★½
Original air date: April 5, 1973
Director: Virgil W. Vogel; Writers: Jerry Ziegman & Morton S. Fine
Guest Stars: Richard Egan, Charles Aidman, Mitchell Ryan, Jonathan Lippe
"Buddy Boy" count: 3

In the early morning, two patrol cops encounter two guys who are smuggling goods off a freighter. The result is a firefight with one of the cops being shot dead, the second being seriously wounded, and one of the two smugglers cremated when a lunch wagon which he was using for transportation explodes. The second smuggler, Abel Hofman (Mitchell Ryan) is wounded and escapes, but he is seen fleeing by Father Joe Scarne (Richard Egan), a priest whose "parish" is the docks. A check of the ship's log later shows that two boxes containing cobra venom are missing. According to Dr. Robert Jayson (Charles Aidman), this venom was to be used by his chemical company for "research" in an "experimental program on muscle failure." Hoffman, carrying the one box which survived the shootout, hides on a ship in a scrapyard where he asks Scarne -- who was once a junkie and later a doctor in Burma before he became a priest -- for help. Scarne finds himself in a dilemma, because Hoffman, who is in desperate need of medical attention, has threatened to kill himself if he is caught by the cops. Scarnes goes to visit Stone (who, of course, knows him) and asks for some medical supplies, which Stone reluctantly agrees to get. Jayson also finds himself in a dilemma, because the boxes of "cobra venom" are actually boxes of heroin from Southeast Asia. As the cops' investigation later reveals, Jayson owed a couple of hundred thousand dollars to the Scirocco Hotel in Las Vegas for gambling debts, so knowing about Jayson's company with its connection to the Far East, the hotel made him "an offer he couldn't refuse." Three thugs employed by the hotel have shown up in town. They tell Jayson he better track down the one remaining box of dope if he wants to stay healthy. Jayson returns to Stone's office to check on the progress of the case, where he meets Scarne briefly and, after Scarne leaves the office, overhears Stone telling Keller to follow the priest, information which Jayson forwards to the trio from Vegas. These three go to the docks where they rough up Scarne, who doesn't tell them anything. They let Scarne go and follow him to the ship where Hoffman is hiding. At the same time, Stone and Keller have tracked down this ship with the help of Clint, Deputy Harbor Master (David McLean) at the Port Commissioner's office. They all arrive at the ship around the same time. Unfortunately, Hoffman is killed but two of the thugs who were pursuing him are taken care of.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller are driving on the docks where they see Scarne, and they honk their horn at him. Stone says that Scarne is "one heck of a guy." Keller speculates, "You know, someone who's spent all his time traveling around the world, spent as much time in places as he did, [it] really must be difficult to settle down in one spot. Maybe it's because I've never done it. But I see those big steamers out there, you know? And I just start thinking about places like Tahiti, Fiji, Bora Bora." Stone says, "I used to [do that] a long time ago. But no more." There is the sound of dispatch on the radio, and Stone says, "They don't have that sound in Bora Bora," and the two of them are off to another case.

REVIEW:

This is a very logical episode, and it's always nice to see Richard Egan, a solid actor, who gives a good performance as Father Scarne. Even the small parts -- like Hoffman's brother-in-law Burt Logan and sister (Bill Williams and Eve McVeagh) -- are well played.

MORE TRIVIA:

• When Stone and Keller make their final visit to Jayson's office with the intention of arresting him, Stone tells Jayson "Your life is a mess," and, knowing somehow (hard to believe that Jayson's file would contain this) that Jayson is a Catholic, lays a big guilt trip on him in advance if "a priest" (i.e., Scarnes) is killed.
• One of the three thugs from Las Vegas is played by Jonathan Lippe (later Jonathan Goldsmith, the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World"). Another is the sinister Paul Genge, who played a similar role in the classic film also based in San Francisco, Bullitt. Lippe's character's car has a mobile phone number XK14817, which he uses to call local number 824-7996.
• Stone asks Keller what is the significance of a unicorn, which is on the boxes containing cobra venom (actually heroin), Keller says "it lays its head in the lap of a virgin." Stone comments, "Now you would know that..."
• The address for Jayson's Chemicals on the box Hoffman is carrying around is 945 W. Upson Way, San Francisco 94119.
• Jayson tells Stone among the products his company imports are gambage (a concrete juice, or gum resin, produced by several species of trees in Siam, Ceylon, and Malabar), cardamoms, lac (the scarlet resinous secretion of a number of species of insects used in folk medicine as a hepatoprotective and anti-obesity drug), benzoin (a balsamic resin obtained from the bark of several species of trees), condiments and cathartics.
• Stephen Bradley, who plays Bernie the Medical Examiner from the third season on, is a beat cop in this episode.
• When Jayson is taken from his office, there are Christmas bells hanging above the street outside. He is taken to the Sutro Ruins, once the largest indoor swimming establishment in the world located in the Lands End area of the Outer Richmond District in western San Francisco.

S01E26: Legion of the Lost ★★★
Original air date: April 12, 1973
Director: Robert Douglas; Writer: Calvin Clements Jr.
Guest Stars: Leslie Nielsen, Karen Carlson, Tom Troupe, Dean Stockwell*
"Buddy Boy" count: 1

After three homeless men are killed in two weeks, all murdered the same way, Stone, who has just returned from a fishing trip, goes underground to investigate, pretending to be a grubby-looking bum who just arrived from Stockton. He befriends a dishevelled, alcoholic young man, Paul Thomas (Dean Stockwell), who is suffering from the DTs and lives under a freeway. When he tries to give Thomas some coffee and a sandwich, Stone is attacked by Big Jake Wilson (Leslie Nielsen), a former prize fighter who has had problems with booze himself, but has been clean for some time. Wilson, who has taken Thomas under his wing, tells Stone, who is using the name of "Mike Smith," to get out of town. When Stone goes to get a room at Vera's, an independently run mission for men who are down and out, he runs into Wilson again, who acts very menacing. Stone returns to see Thomas later, and finds some guy beating the kid badly. Stone gets Paul taken to the hospital. In Thomas's wallet is a picture of him with Paul Cullen, a man who "used to own half the boat yards along the coast." It is determined that Thomas is actually his son, Paul Cullen Junior. Keller goes to the company owned by the senior Cullen, who passed away a couple of months ago. It is now managed by Roy Richardson (Tom Troupe) who "inherited" the business, seemingly by virtue of the fact that he was its most hard-working employee. Richardson tells Keller – who says he is checking up on some unpaid traffic tickets from Paul -- that he has not heard from Junior for a few years, prior to which he lived the dissolute life of a playboy. Richardson says he doesn't like "all the Pauls, the clean fingernail kids with everything handed to them." Keller goes to see Cathy Cullen (Karen Carlson), Junior's sister at a marina, where she is trying to sell a yacht which she inherited. She is being visited by Terry Benner (Max Kleven), a fighter in Richardson's employ, who is warning her to be wary of Keller. Cathy, who is a major babe, is also a suspect because of her attitude towards her brother, who she calls "a schlep." She had to look after her dying father "while Junior was staring through his bottle bottoms." That evening, Wilson sneaks into the hospital where Paul is being treated for a mild concussion and takes him out of the place back to his "home" under the freeway. Soon after this, Paul is attacked by Benner and when Wilson intervenes, he is beaten very badly, so much so that he dies just as Stone and Keller show up. The two cops go to talk to Cathy again, figuring that she was the one who orchestrated Benner's attack on her brother, but she is shocked by this accusation, saying that while she had issues with her brother, there is no way she would want to kill him. Meanwhile, Paul goes to Richardson's office, intending to make trouble. He has figured out that Richardson hired Benner to kill the other three bums to detract from the eventual execution of himself. Then Richardson could assume control of the company without worrying about Paul "crawling out of [his] bottle someday." As far as killing the three men is concerned, Richardson tells Paul, "Some people might say I did the city a favor," just as Stone conveniently arrives on the scene. Both Richardson and Benner are taken away.

EPILOG:

Stone and Keller leave with Paul, who says Jake thought that Stone was the one killing the men; Stone says he thought it was Jake. Keller tells Paul "The big thing now is to prove that Jake wasn't wrong about you. He went the distance for you. Must figure you're worth something." Paul is reunited with Cathy.

REVIEW:

This show is OK, though it seems that Stone being the one to go underground is peculiar, because he has been a relatively high profile cop in San Francisco for many years. It also seems very coincidental that after assuming this role, Stone soon runs into Paul, who is the person that the plot revolves around. There is a question as to whether Wilson knows who Paul really is. A old photo of Wilson as a fighter is on the wall in the outer office at Callen's company. The receptionist there (Nancy Roth) doesn't even know Wilson's name, and is not asked by Keller if Wilson was a friend of Paul's father (therefore, he might have some special interest in looking after the kid). When asked by Keller if Wilson is a friend of Richardson's, she says "Mr. Richardson has interests in several fighters." The episode is interesting in the way it makes us think that Wilson is the one who kills Charlie Dermott, the wino who is seen at the beginning of the show. This is the least interesting of Leslie Nielsen's three appearances on the show, but it is still pretty good.

MORE TRIVIA:

• When Keller suggests some "fuzz-faced kid" from the station to go underground as a bum, Stone says, "he'd stick out like a harp polisher in a house full of hookers."
• Stone is walking with Keller, pretending to beg for money. When Keller gives him some change, he says, "Get out of here, you bum." Stone replies, "Bum, he calls me. A bum," a line which brings to mind a similar one spoken by Marlon Brando in one of Karl Malden's classic movies, On the Waterfront.
• Cathy flirts with Keller, calling him "Ivy League and handsome."
• When Stone and Keller are driving, Stone is talking to dispatch on the radio, and there is a huge shadow from the cord on Keller.