Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.
This week, Jamie goes undercover …. again!
Episode 4.4 “Users”
(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 16th, 1998)
Pacific Blue started out as a show about bicycle cops. I always thought that was a stupid premise but, regardless of my opinion, the first two seasons pretty much focused on keeping the cops on the bikes. However, with the third and now the fourth season, the bikes have started to feel superfluous. Now, the bike cops are suddenly working murders and going undercover. This all seems like stuff that actual detective should be doing as opposed to a bunch of glorified traffic cops.
For instance, this episode features Jamie being sent undercover to befriend a teenage drug dealer named Brandon Jeter (future choreographer and Michael Jackson-accuser Wade Robson). Brandon, who has witnessed a murder, is being used as an informant by an intense narcotics detective named Perry Marcus (Roger Floyd). TC and Cory make a big deal about how they don’t like Perry’s tactics but why would Perry care? He’s not a bike cop and they’re not detectives.
This is only Jamie’s fourth episode as a regular character but it feels like the 100th time that she’s been told to work undercover. The problem is that we don’t know much about who Jamie is so there’s not really any emotional pay-off to seeing her pretending to be someone else. Jamie is upset when she sees how everyone — from Detective Marcus to drug lord Nick Lambros (Corey Pearson) — is manipulating Brandon but we don’t really know why. We know nothing about Jamie’s homelife. We know nothing about her past. We don’t know why she became a cop. She’s a character with no inner life. It’s not the fault of actress Amy Hunter that Jamie comes across as being boring. The scripts, so far, have given her nothing to work with.
Meanwhile, Moncia is having an affair with the recently promoted Commander McKinnon (Jeffrey Meek). The affair is often physically abusive but, when Bobby confronts McKinnon, McKinnon claims that Monica enjoys the pain. Eventually, Monica and Bobby get McKinnon being abusive on tape. The episode ends with Monica lustfully spying on TC in a neighboring apartment. Ugh. This show really annoys me with the way it portrays Monica. She’s literally the only character on the show who has a positive and largely guilt-free attitude about sex and the show always seems to be determined to either punish or villainize her for it. (What makes this especially annoying is that the show both judges and leers at Monica at the same time.)
As usual, this episode could have worked if the characters were more interesting. The idea that everyone on the show was using someone else had potential but the execution fell flat.
Through the Shattered Lens 