Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983.  The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, Ponch falls in love.

Episode 6.8 “Head Over Heels”

(Dir by Richard Irving, originally aired on December 5th, 1982)

Ponch falls in love.

Well,  of course he does.

Listen, it’s not like Bobby is going to be allowed to fall in love.  Bruce isn’t going to fall in love.  Grossman?  He’s been on this show since the beginning and he’s still struggling to even get a date.  Nope, if anyone on CHiPs was going to fall in love, it was going to be Ponch.  Watching this episode and taking the last few seasons into account, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was specifically written into Erik Estrada’s contract.

We all know what we’re watching.

Ponch falls for Vanessa (Beverly Adams), a teacher who he meets while speaking at a Mothers Against Drunk Driving meeting.  It’s a whirlwind romance.  Sure, they have their problems.  Vanessa isn’t sure that she can handle falling in love with a “street cop” who puts his life in danger every day.  Ponch gets mad when he sees Vanessa talking to her ex (Dennis Holahan).   But eventually, Vanessa realizes that Ponch will always be a cop and Ponch is informed that talking does not necessarily equal cheating.  Ponch asks Vanessa to marry him.  He gives her a “space puppy” that he buys from a kid on a street corner.  (“He’s not really from space,” the kid says.  Hey, kid, we saw Ponch battle a UFO a few weeks ago.)  Everything is perfect….

And then, during a big picnic to celebrate the engagement, Vanessa gets run over by a drunk driver.  Vanessa dies with Ponch holding her.  It should have been a big dramatic and emotional moment and perhaps it would have been if the show had let the scene play out as opposed to dropping in a montage of flashbacks to scenes that we had just watched ten minutes ago.  Perhaps if the episode had been scored to the unnerving silence that comes with most tragedies, it would have brought tears to my eyes in a way that the adult contemporary romantic ballad did not.  We get the full Erik Estrada experience as Vanessa dies, with Erik trying so hard to force us to cry that the performance runs the risk of having the opposite effect.  Ponch is distraught but Estrada still makes sure that the camera gets his good side.

I’ll say this.  I appreciate that the show’s anti-drunk driving message.  (Rumor has it that this episode was specifically made in an attempt to turn down the heat after Tom Reilly was arrested for driving under the influence and the real Highway Patrol  threatened to pull their sponsorship as a result.)  Imagine the episode’s impact if the victim had been someone we actually knew as opposed to a one-off character who was so obviously being set up to tragically die that she might as well have had “Doomed” stamped onto her forehead.  As it is, Vanessa ends up feeling more like a plot device than an actual human.

That said, don’t drink and drive.  It’s not worth it.