Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing The Master, which ran on NBC from January to August of 1984.  The show can be found on Tubi!

Max and McAllister continue their trip through California!

Episode 1.12 “Rogues”

(Dir by Gordon Hessler, originally aired on August 10th, 1984)

This week’s episode finds Max and McAllister on Los Angeles’s famed Rodeo Drive.  We know that this episode takes place on Rodeo Drive because every single establishing shot opens with a close-up of the street sign.  It’s as if someone in production said, “Do not let them forget that this episode is not only set on Rodeo Drive but we filmed it there as well!”

Wow, a television program filmed in Los Angeles!  The Master was all about spoiling their audience.

Here’s my thing with Rodeo Drive — the word is pronounced Ro-Dee-O.  Get out of here with all that Roe-Day-O nonsense, you yankees.

Anyway, this episode continues last week’s theme of McAllister and Max dropping in on people from Max’s past.  Apparently, the hunt for John Peter McAllister’s long lost daughter has been abandoned so that Max can drop in on his old high school buddies.  Seeing as how it hasn’t even been ten years since Max graduated from high school whereas McAllister has never even met his daughter and it’s totally possible that McAllister’s ninja rivals may be trying to kill her, it seems a bit odd that this is what Max and McAllister are concentrating on but whatever.  We’re nearly done with this show anyway.

Max visits his ex-girlfriend, Talia (Cindy Harrell), at the health club where she works.  Talia is an aerobics instructor, which means that there’s a lot of spandex in this episode.  While McAllister deals with a trainer who takes one look at him and declares him to be in terrible shape (and she has a point because, unlike his stunt double, Lee Van Cleef was noticeably overweight and often seemed to be winded on The Master), Max talks to Talia and discovers that Talia’s brother, Jerry (Paul Tulley), became a cop and is now missing!  Max promises to help her find Jerry.

However, it turns out that Jerry is just hiding outside the health club.  When he sees Max’s van, he tosses a note inside of it, asking Max and McAllister to meet him.  (How exactly did Jerry know that Max and McAllister would be able to help him?)  It turns out that, while investigating a series of Rodeo Drive robberies, Jerry discovered that the culprits were rogue cops who had been hired by a local gallery owner.  Now, the crooked policemen are after Jerry!  Needless to say, it’s time for McAllister to put on his black ninja outfit so that Lee Van Cleef’s stunt double can beat up some corrupt law enforcers!

This was not a particularly memorable episode.  The corrupt cops were generic villains and even the fight scenes, which were usually The Master‘s saving grace, felt sloppy and rushed.  While it was always obvious that this show was dependent on stunt doubles, it was especially obvious in this episode as the stand-ins for both Van Cleef and Van Patten didn’t even resemble their respective actors.  There was a brief moment of hope when the action moved to one of those police academy shooting ranges, full of fake buildings and cardboard targets but the show never really took advantage of the location’s potential.  This was one of those episodes where it felt like the basic plot could have been used for a dozen other shows without having to make anything more than a few cosmetic changes.  It could have just as easily been an episode of Half Nelson.

(L.A. — you belong to me!  No, no, we’ve moved on….)

Next week …. The Master ends!  Will McAllister even mention his missing daughter during the show’s final episode?  We’ll find out!