Hans Rey | 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!

This week, the bicycle mayhem continues.

Episode 2.15 “Black Pearl”

(Dir by Terence H. Winkless, originally aired on January 5th, 1997)

TC arrests a woman named Alana (Angela Shelton) on drug and assault charges, just to discover that she’s an undercover DEA agent. TC fears that Alana is in over her head and he tells Alana’s superior, Enright (John Michael Bolger) that he needs to pull her out of the operation. Enright is like, “Whatever, bicycle boy.”

And, to be honest, I think Enright kind of has a point. Why are the bicycle cops always trying to tell other law enforcement agencies what to do? Every episode, either TC or Palermo and Chris gets a really angry look in their eyes and starts barking out orders at people they barely know. It’s bad enough that they ride bicycles. Do they have to act like a bunch of self-righteous pricks as well?

Speaking of bicycles, Victor has to get recertified to be a bike cop. Uh-oh, sounds like Victor could lose his job! Even worse, Victor’s partner in this episode is Chris so not only is Victor in danger of getting fired but he has to spend an entire week listening to Chris put him down. Seriously, there are few characters in the history of television that I dislike as much as I dislike Chris Kelly. Chris is the type who dismisses everyone’s problems before then launching into her hundredth monologue about how much it sucks going from being an Air Force pilot to a bike cop.

Victor trains with Hans Rhey. In this episode, everyone is like, “Oh my God, Hans Rey!” I had no idea who Hans Rey was. I looked him up after this episode and apparently, he was a superstar on the bicycle circuit. Hans does a lot of clunky bike tricks As was so often the case withe professional athletes who played themselves on shows like this, he wasn’t much of an actor. If anything, this episode reminded me of how stupid most people look riding their bicycles in the middle of the street.

Victor gets recertified. Alana ends up dead. Presumably, TC’s upset but since the actor playing him was only capable of one fascial expression, it can be hard to tell. In the end, the real tragedy remains how dorky everyone looks on the bicycles.