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, someone is performing emergency surgery on the street!

Episode 3.23 “Nightengale”

(Dir by Don Weis, originally aired on March 23rd, 1980)

Something strange is happening in Los Angeles.  Every time there’s a serious accident, a middle-aged woman (Louise Latham) appears and provides medical help to the injured.  At the start of the episode, she even performs an emergency tracheotomy on the side of the freeway.  Whenever the highway patrol officer on the scene asks her for her name, she avoids the question.  And, whenever an ambulance shows up, she always manages to slip away.  As Jon and Ponch discover, the woman is named Lucy Kenton and, even though she’s a medical expert, she’s not a doctor.  With the help of the always-understanding Sgt. Getraer, Jon and Ponch help her to get her medical license so that she can legally perform surgery on the street.  Good for them!

This was a bit of an odd episode.  It seemed strange that the woman somehow always seemed to be around whenever there was an accident.  A car would crash and suddenly, Lucy would come running up, almost as if she had been patiently waiting.  The show acted as if it was just a coincidence but what are the chances that the same woman would be present at the sites of multiple accidents over the course of just a few days?  And what are the chances that Ponch would just happen to be the responding officer at two of those accidents?

To be honest, that’s one of the things that always struck me as being strange about CHiPs.  Somehow, the same people keep running into Ponch and Jon over and over again.  I mean, Los Angeles is a big city and it’s home to a lot of people.  But if you run into Ponch and Jon once, it seems you’re destined to keep seeing them for at least a week.  Once they get that first speeding ticket or stern warning, people literally can’t step outside of their house without Ponch and Jon just happening to be somewhere nearby.  That’s the sort of thing that would make me paranoid.

The B-plot of this episode featured a teenage couple whose van kept breaking down whenever they tried to run away from home.  There wasn’t much to this story but it did feature “special guest star” Dana Plato as the younger sister of the female half of the couple.  Plato delivered all her lines as if she was auditioning for a school play.  Oddly enough, Dana Plato appeared at the start of this season as herself.  She was one of the many celebrities to show up for the roller disco episode.

There really wasn’t much to this episode.  It wasn’t terrible but it did feel somewhat insubstantial.  We’re coming up on the end of the season and, from the last few episodes, I get the feeling the show’s writers just wanted to wrap things up and start their vacations.  I don’t blame them!

Next week, the third season concludes!