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, a future star makes an appearance and Bruce gets a chance to prove himself.

Episode 6.9 “Return To Death’s Door”

(Dir by Winrich Kolbe, originally aired on December 12th, 1982)

Teenage Chris (Lee Montgomery) is risking his life in dangerous street races! Can Ponch, who knew Chris’s older brother and who was there the day that Chris’s brother was killed in a street race, get through to Chris? Sure, he can. He’s Ponch. He can do anything.

This episode of CHiPs felt very familiar. This is not the first time that the show featured Ponch having flashbacks to his youth as a juvenile delinquent. Of course, Estrada plays himself in the flashbacks and, by the time the sixth season rolled around, he was a little bit old to be convincing as a teenager. But no matter! What’s important is that Ponch took part in one last race to convince Chris to change his life around. That’s the power of Ponch!  (And fear not.  Ponch appears to have gotten over the death of his fiancée in record time.)

While Ponch was saving lives and changing outlooks, two honeymooners from the South were stealing cars and having a fun time seeing the sights. Honey Jean was played by Kathy Shower while her new husband, Billy Joe, was played by an actor named Bryan Cranston.

That’s right. Bryan Cranston!

This episode proves that everyone had to start somewhere. Today, Bryan Cranston is best-known for playing Walter White on Breaking Bad and the father on Malcolm in the Middle. (To be honest, I think Malcolm in the Middle is one of those shows that people claim to like more than they actually do.) In 1982, he was just a young actor playing a down-home car thief on CHiPs and speaking with a really broad country accent.

Interestingly, it’s Bruce Nelson who arrests Billy Joe and Honey Jean. Between Ponch ending the street races and Bruce making arrests, Bobby Nelson really didn’t get to do much in this episode. Tom Reilly may have been listed second in the credits but this episode treated him like a bystander. From what I’ve read, Reilly and Estrada got along even worse than Estrada and Wilcox. When Reilly got arrested for driving while intoxicated, it led to the real Highway Patrol threatening to pull their sponsorship and, if CHiPs had come back for a seventh season, it’s easy to imagine that Reilly would have been gone and Bruce Penhall would have been Ponch’s new partner. That actually might have worked because Penhall is a far more believable cop than the somewhat spacey Reilly.

In fact, Bruce gets to do a lot of good things in this episode. He also rescues a dog that had gotten loose on the highway and brings it to the station. Harlan adopts it and Getraer spends this episode sneezing. Eventually, the dog’s owner picks up the dog. Don’t worry, though. Bruce shows up with yet another dog and this one is even cuter than the first!

The dogs were cute and I enjoyed saying, “Wait a minute! Is that Bryan Cranston!?” For a sixth-season episode of CHiPs, that counts as success.