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, Cory makes another stupid mistake.

Episode 4.20 “Trust”

(Dir by Terence H. Winkless, originally aired on April 11th, 1999)

When her best friend is murdered, Cory assumes that the killer is her friend’s ex-boyfriend, Mark (Joel Gretsch).  FBI profiler Jerry Beck (Eric Scott Woods) agrees.  In fact, he claims that Mark is a serial killer who has been stalking and killing blondes across the country.  Cory, who blames herself for her friend’s death and who has recently broken up with Bobby Cruz, works with Jerry to try to stop Mark’s reign of terror.  But what if Jerry Beck isn’t who he says he is?  What if the real Jerry Beck was murdered and an imposter took on his identity?

This is one of those episodes where Monica pretty much figures out what’s going on but everyone ignores her because both the characters and the show itself seem to have a bizarre hated for her.  Every episode in which Monica appears seems to feature Monica doing better detective work than everyone else on the bike patrol and getting absolutely no credit for it.  In this case, Cory does eventually admit that Monica was right so I guess that’s progress.

Oh, this was a stupid episode.  Having an FBI profiler turn out to actually be a serial killer isn’t a bad idea but having the killer somehow steal the identity of an actual FBI agent without anyone noticing is one of those things that just asks for too much of a suspension of disbelief.  Having Cory then fall for the fake FBI agent while she’s supposed to searching for the killer of her best friend was just another example of Cory basically acting like an idiot.  That’s been a frequent thing with Cory this season.  It’s odd because Cory used to actually be the smart member of the bike patrol.

While Cory is trying to avenge her friend’s death, Granger hooks up with a woman that he meets online.  Jamie is skeptical that CyberVixen is going to be the next Mrs. Granger.  It’s always funny to me to see television shows that attempted to deal with the Internet in the 90s.  You can always tell that they were written by aging boomers who weren’t quite sure what the Internet was and probably expected it to just be a brief fad.

To me, the funniest moment in this episode was the members of Pacific Blue realizing that Cory was alone with a serial killer so, instead of calling a squad car, they all just hopped on their bicycles and rode over to Cory’s apartment.  I mean, would it kill them to take a car for once?  I imagine they would have gotten over to the apartment quicker.

This episode was pretty dumb.