Holly Robinson Peete | 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, a crazed gunman takes over the beach. Good thing the Bike Patrol’s there….

Episode 2.16 “Soft Targets”

(Dir by Ron Satlof, originally aired on January 12th, 1997)

Zack Torrance (Terence Knox, a.k.a. St. Elsewhere‘s Dr. White) is a former soldier who claims that he has information about the CIA smuggling drugs into the U.S. as a way to help raise money to defeat the communists in Central America. This is a conspiracy theory that I’m very familiar with. I don’t quite buy it because it assumes a bit too much competence on the part of the CIA. That said, it’s a popular conspiracy theory amongst some. All I know is that communism sucks.

Kind of like this show!

Anyway, Zack opens fire on a beach and holds everyone hostage because he wants to get his story out. For some reason, the job of securing the beach and negotiating with Zack falls to these dorks:

The CIA shows up in the form of Franklin Quill (Sherman Howard). Quill takes over the negotiations and, while TC and Chris glower in the background, he proceeds to shoot and kill Zack. Zack dies and the story doesn’t get out. TC looks upset but he doesn’t really do anything to stop Quill so you know what? Get bent, TC.

Seriously, this episode …. ugh. First off, hostage episodes are boring to begin with. There’s only so many times you can watch some sweaty guy barking out orders before you get bored with the whole thing. Pacific Blue makes things worse by bringing in the Bike Patrol. We’re supposed to dislike Quill but actually, Quill shows up, takes charge of the situation, and brings things to a close. The fact that TC spends the whole episode standing around with an annoyed expression on his face doesn’t make Quill any less effective. For this entire episode, TC whines and bitches about Quill’s tactics but TC never actually develops any tactics of his own. If anything, the Bike Patrol is kind of superfluous in this episode.

Terence Knox was believably desperate as Zach. Holly Robinson Peete showed up as a woman who was wounded by Zach’s initial attack on the beach. She survived and then married a lifeguard (Robert Joseph). Palermo was not in this episode. Instead, he left to train a Bike Patrol in another country and left TC in charge of the Santa Monica’s Bike Patrol. Big mistake, if you ask me.

If there was any pleasure to be found in this episode, it came from just how poorly the Bike Patrol came across. Seriously, they couldn’t catch Zach. They couldn’t control the beach. What exactly do we need these people for? Bike Patrol, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Though the TV series that its based is a bit before my time, the 2012 comedy 21 Jump Street is a personal favorite of mine. The film tells the story of how nerdy Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and popular but none-too-intelligent jock Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) first met in high school, went to the police academy together, both turned out to really bad cops together, and then returned to high school together.

Why did they return to high school? Because they’re both working undercover now! As part of a recently revived program from the 80s (and that would apparently be the original television series), young cops are being sent undercover into high school. As all the other cops involved with the program appear to be super cops, Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube) has every reason to believe that Schmidt and Jenko will be able to discover who is responsible for dealing a dangerous new synthetic drug known as HFS.

One of the things that makes 21 Jump Street work is that, at no point, does the film pretend that either Channing Tatum or Jonah Hill could still pass for a high school student. One of the film’s best moments comes when a drug dealing environmentalist/student named Eric Molson (Dave Franco, brother of my beloved James) tells Jenko that he suspects that Jenko may be a cop. “Why?” Jenko asks. “You’re taste in music. The fact that you look like a fucking forty-year old man,” Eric replies.

Not surprisingly, Jenko and Schmidt prove themselves to be fairly clueless about how high school has changed. One thing that I’ve always found interesting about high school films is that often times, regardless of when a particularly film might be set, it still feels like it’s taking place ten to twenty years in the past. That’s largely because most high school films are made by directors who are trying to relive their youth and, as a result, they end up making a film about a high school in 2014 where all of the students look and act as if they’re living in the 90s. The truth of the matter is that things change pretty quickly.

That’s one reason why I haven’t set foot back in my high school since I graduated. As much fun as I did have in high school and even though I’ve been told that I can still pass for high school age (and I still constantly get asked for ID), the fact of the matter is that it’s no longer 2004.

When Jenko and Schmidt return to high school, they do so expecting to have to return to their previous teenager personas. That’s good news for Jenko and not so good news for Schmidt. However, once they arrive (and after their class schedules accidentally get switched), they discover that high school has changed. Jocks like Jenko no longer rule the school and Schmidt is now one of the popular kids…

Before I saw 21 Jump Street, I knew that Jonah Hill was funny. But the film’s big surprise was that Channing Tatum is just as funny. Throughout the film, Tatum shows a willingness to poke fun at his own image and proves that he can deliver an absurd one-liner as masterfully as just about anyone else working today. There’s a lot of reasons why 21 Jump Street is a funny film. It’s full of funny lines and the movie features a lot of very sharp satire of both the action and the teen genres. But the true pleasure of the film comes from the comedic chemistry between Tatum and Hill.

It’s just a lot of fun to watch.