Arva Holt | Through the Shattered Lens

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 …. hey, what is this!?

Episode 5.12 “Mitchell & Woods”

(Dir by Bernard L. Kowalski, originally aired on December 18th, 1981)

Paula Woods (Jayne Kennedy) and Melanie Mitchell (Cindy Morgan) may have once just been two members of the highway patrol who were trained by Ponch but they’ve now been promoted to working as plainclothes detectives in Ocean City!

“Look out Ocean City!” Jon Baker says.

When an old high school friend of Michell’s is murdered, Mitchell and Woods uncover a male prostitution ring. Along with bringing the guilty to justice, they also help Chickee (Pamela Susan Shoop) find the courage to leave her abusive relationship….

No, there’s not much motorcycle action. No, there’s no slow motion car crashes. Yes, this is an episode of CHiPs. Well, kind of.

It’s actually a backdoor pilot for a show about Mitchell and Woods. Ponch and Baker show up at the start of the show to wish Mitchell and Woods luck. Ponch and Baker return halfway through the show so that Ponch can tell Mitchell and Woods about an informant named Avrom (Tony Burton). And, finally, Ponch and Baker return at the end of the episode and give our erstwhile detectives a parking ticket.

Backdoor pilots at the worst! You’re all prepared to spend 40 minutes with people you know and suddenly, a bunch of new folks show up and start demanding your attention. It doesn’t help that Mitchell & Woods is a terrible pilot and I’m not really surprised that it didn’t become an actual series. Can Mitchell and Woods prove that woman can be good detectives? Will they ever impress their new boss (Paul Gale)? I don’t really know the characters so I don’t care.

I swear, they could have at least brought back Caitlyn Jenner for this episode.

This week, Bonnie is taken hostage! It’s good thing Ponch exists because you know no one else on this show is going to able to rescue her.

Episode 4.7 “Satan’s Angels”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on December 14th, 1980)

When confronting a group of outlaw bikers who are harrassing a teenager (Heather Locklear, in her screen debut), Bonnie is kidnapped! Reno (John Quade) manages to snap her own handcuffs on her wrists and then drags her to a cabin owned by Stan (William Smith) and his wife (Candice Azzara).

Can the Highway Patrol find the cabin? The cabin is in the mountains it might not be easy to locate. It’s a good thing that Ponch and Jon just happen have those motorized hang gliders! It’s California living to the rescue! Needless to say, Ponch and Jon (but mostly Ponch) are able to swoop in for the rescue.

This episode didn’t do much for me but then again, episodes about hostage situations rarely do. Once a character is taken hostage, it pretty much causes the action to slow down to a crawl. There’s only so many times you can listen to someone being told not to even think about escaping before it gets kind of boring. This episode did feature the great villainous character actor, William Smith. It had that going for it. But, otherwise, the episode itself moved very slowly and it didn’t help that Bonnie herself was required to make a lot of very stupid mistakes so that she could be kidnapped in the first place. When a show’s storyline depends on a previous competent person suddenly being amazing incompetent, it’s an issue.

This episode’s b-plot featured Getraer’s very pregnant wife continually going the hospital, just to discover it was a false alarm. Getraer’s wife was played Gwynne Gilford who was (and is) married to Robert Pine. Their son, Chris Pine, was born a few months before this episode aired.