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, the bike cops go to Hawaii!

Episode 5.3 “Blue Hawaii: Part One”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 1st, 1999)

TC, Cory, Bobby, and Granger are sent to Hawaii so that they can spend five days training other bicycle cops.  If there’s anything that this show has shown over the past five seasons, it’s that it takes a lot of training to be a bicycle cop.  For instance, you have to know how to look smugly self-satisfied while holding up traffic.  That’s not a natural skill.  That’s something you have to learn.  Whenever Cory responds to a legitimate question by yelling and shoving someone into a wall, you’re seeing years of training.  Whenever Chris runs a bystander over with her bicycle and then says, “Just doing my job,” that’s her way of sayin, “Your taxes paid for this!”

Bobby and Granger spend their first Hawaiian night at a strip club.  A drug dealer (Dax Griffin) mistakes Bobby for a buyer.  This leads to Bobby and Granger getting involved in an undercover operation.  We meet the other members of Hawaii’s special undercover task force.  There’s Sgt. Aikau (Andy Bumatai), a surfer who puts a curse on TC.  There’s Matt Cho (Lorenzo Callender), who acts just like Bobby.  There’s an Australian cop (played by Corey Page) who acts just like Granger.  And then there’s Officer Claire Keene (Kristanna Loken) who acts just like Cory.

As you probably already guessed, this episode was a backdoor pilot for a series that was didn’t end up happening.  (This episode aired the same year that Baywatch became Baywatch Hawaii.)  It’s also a two-parter, which means this episode ends with Bobby and Granger still working undercover, the drug dealers still on the loose, and the Hawaiian cops in need of some lessons on how to work undercover.  Bobby is also falling for Claire and is thinking about transferring permanently to Hawaii.

Like a lot of backdoor pilots, this episode fails because it asked us to get emotionally invested in a bunch of new, poorly-drawn characters.  The fact that all of the Hawaiian cops had the same personality tics as their California counterparts didn’t help matters.  That said, I enjoyed this episode just because it was shot in Hawaii and the scenery was lovely.

Next week, we’ll conclude our trip to paradise with Part Two of Blue Hawaii!