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 undercover and essentially end up looking like a bunch of cops working undercover.

Episode 3.3 “Rave On”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 17, 1997)

The bike cops go undercover!

If that’s not funny enough, they go undercover as ravers.

I swear, you haven’t really laughed until you’ve laughed at the sight of the extremely stiff stars of Pacific Blue hanging out at a rave and giving each other secret signals whenever they spot anyone doing drugs.  Chris’s drink gets roofied and, as someone who has experienced that in real life, I appreciated that the show was trying to warn its viewers about leaving their drinks unattended.  Seriously, if my friends hadn’t been looking out for me that night, it scares me to think about what probably would have happened.  Still, good intentions can’t disguise just how unconvincing Darlene Vogel’s performance was.

Palermo spends this entire episode saying that the parents of teens who go to raves and take drugs should be prosecuted and jailed.  Then Palermo discovers that his sixteen year-old daughter (Johna Stewart-Boden) has been attending raves and, while she hasn’t intentionally taken any drugs, she’s stood by while her friends have.  Palermo does not arrest himself.  He does not throw himself in jail.  He does not look in the mirror and smirk and say, “Oh yeah, buddy, your parent-of-the-year.”  In other words, Lt. Palermo is a big, freaking hypocrite.

The bike cops break up the rave scene but the music will never die.