Cliff Dorfman | 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 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, season 3 comes to an end.

Episode 3.22 “Best Laid Plans”

(Dir by John B. Moranville, originally aired on April 19th, 1998)

Heh heh …. they said laid.

The third season finale of Pacific Blue finds everyone at a crossroads, almost as if the showrunners weren’t sure who would be back for the fourth season so they wanted to make sure that everyone had an excuse to leave. There’s a lot of personal drama in this episode and I guess it would be compelling if any of these people were the least bit likable or sympathetic.

Victor Del Toro is being investigated by Internal Affairs and he spends the majority of the episode telling people that he suspects that he’s going to lose his job.

Cory is dumped by her long-distance boyfriend and leaps into a new relationship with some guy she accidentally punched at a bar. (She was trying to hit his friend, who was being pretty obnoxious at the time.)

Chris takes a pregnancy test and it’s positive. TC asks her to marry him. Despite the fact that Chris was previously hoping TC would ask her to marry him, Chris says no because …. well, because Chris is the worst. No, actually, it’s because Chris doesn’t want TC to marry her just because he feels like he has to. Chris and TC have separate scenes where they imagine how wonderful it would be to have a baby and how annoying it will be once the baby grows up to be a bratty teenager. But then Chris finds out that it was a false positive.

Palermo, meanwhile, is burned out. He’s feeling old. He wants to do more than just look at crime scenes. Plus, he’s having sex with a 22 year-old (played by Saved By The Bell: The Next Class’s Sarah Lancaster) and he’d rather do that then go to work.

Sadly, Palermo does have to go to work. A gang of criminals is breaking into people’s home and carving letters on their foreheads. (The letters correspond to their last name — Edwards gets an E and so on.) It turns out that the leader of the gang blame Palermo for his mother’s death and is spelling out P-A-L-E-R-M-O. The bad guys are always one step ahead because a member of the gang (Ginny Shcrieber) is working as a receptionist at Pacific Blue headquarters. Do they not do background checks before hiring people?

Palermo does catch the guy, though only after several people have been permanently scarred. Once again, you have to wonder why the bike cops are the only people working these cases. Add that the end of the episode, Palermo announces he’s going to Italy.

That’s one down and four more to go! Who will be around for season 4?

We’ll find out next week!

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 Baywatch Nights, an detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on Youtube!

This week, Mitch, Ryan, and Lou are held hostage!

Episode 1.7 “Pressure Cooker”

(Dir by Gus Trikonis, originally aired on November 11, 1995)

Episode seven of Baywatch Nights opens with Mitch and Garner, once again, whining about their job. They have been hired to work undercover in a fried chicken restaurant that has been robbed five times. Garner wears a chicken costume and greets the customers. Mitch works in the kitchen. This is not the type of work that Mitch and Garner had in mind when they decided to become part-time private investigators.

In his opening voice over, Mitch says that sometimes, you have to do what you have to do to pay your bills. Here’s the thing, though. Mitch is a lifeguard. He’s not just a lifeguard but he’s one of the top lifeguards in California. So, no, he doesn’t need to work as a private eye to pay his bills. I don’t care how much Mitch complains about the job. I think he just secretly enjoys working as a cook in a fast food restaurant. And good for him, if that’s the case! Myself, I like fried chicken and I respect anyone who cooks it for a living.

Eventually, the scummy Sosa brothers show up at the restaurant and try to rob the place. Garner and Mitch are able to stop the robbery but they only manage to capture one brother, Manny Sosa (Cliff Dorfman). Duke (Joseph Spencer) and Nick Sosa (Rich Werner) escape.

Later, Duke and Nick show up at Nights, which is the nightclub that doubles as the office of the detective agency. Because it’s the afternoon, Nights is not open to general public but that doesn’t stop Duke and Nick from taking Mitch, Ryan, and Lou Raymond (Lou Rawls) hostage. (Lou is the owner of Nights. Despite the fact that Lou Rawls was prominently featured in the opening credits of each episode, this is only his second appearance on the show.) Duke demands that Manny be released from prison or he’s going to start shooting hostages!

While they wait out the situation, Lou plays the piano and sings a song while Duke dances with Ryan. Meanwhile, Garner waits outside the club with the police and the press. Eventually, reporter Stormy Walters (Sandra Dee Robinson) is invited to enter the club with her crew so that she can interview Duke and get some footage of him dancing with Ryan. Garner puts on a fake beard and pretends to be Stormy’s sound guy.

As soon as Mitch sees Garner, he nudges Ryan and says, “It’s Garner!” Even though Mitch whispers, it still seems like a reckless thing to point out when there’s two gun-toting maniacs in the club. Fortunately, the Sosa brothers are pretty stupid so Mitch, Garner, and Ryan are able to give them a beat down. Unfortunately, before the situation is resolved, both Lou and Garner are shot but, apparently, not seriously.

This episode …. eh. As I’ve said elsewhere on this site, I am just not a fan of shows about hostage situations. As soon as the Sosa brothers show up at the club, the narrative momentum comes to a grinding halt and all that’s left is 30 minutes of sweaty losers pointing guns at people and shouting. It gets a little boring. As well, the Sosas were so stupid that, even when they were shooting people, it was difficult to take them seriously as dangerous criminals. They were just idiots.

Next week, we get the origin story as we learn how Mitch and Garner came to work with Ryan in the first place!