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!

Who will be Jon’s partner this week?  Read on to find out!

Episode 5.7 “Bomb Run”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on November 15th, 1981)

I was really hoping that this would be another episode with Caitlyn Jenner playing Steve but no, Ponch was back.  (Erik Estrada is the better actor of the two but Jenner’s performance is often so bizarre in its utter blandness that it becomes fascinating to watch.)  This episode opened with Baker observing as Ponch piloted a small airplane.  CHiPs was all about the California lifestyle and apparently, a big part of that lifestyle was being able to take off in a small private plane whenever you felt like it.  Ponch thinks that he’s ready for a solo flight but Baker tells him that he still needs to work on his landing skills.  Sorry, Ponch, you’re not a Kennedy.

The highway patrol is preparing for the big air show.  Officer Baricza (Brodie Greer) is surprised when he sees his ex-girlfriend, Terri (Kristin Griffith), hanging out around an airplane and preparing to take part in the show despite the fact that she has always been scared of flying.  What Baricza does not know is that Terri and her father (Ed King) have planned a big robbery to take place during the air show.  While Terri drops bombs from the airplane, the explosions will cover the sound of two safecrackers (played by Brion James and Taylor Lacher) blowing open a safe and stealing a bunch of bearer bonds.  However, things get complicated when the safecrackers illegally park their car (which leads to a helicopter towing it off, carrying it through the sky).  Things get even more complicated when Terri’s father has a heart attack when they’re in the air and Baker and Ponch have to perform a mid-air rescue.

So, how does Baricza react to his ex-girlfriend being a criminal?  We never find out.  Ponch roughly lands Terri’s plane and then show pretty much ends.  As a result, we don’t know what happens to Terri and her father.  We don’t know if the police succeeded in catching the safecrackers.  We don’t even know if Terri’s father merely passed out or if he actually died up there.  Instead, Getraer makes a joke about Ponch’s terrible landing skills and we get the familiar CHiPs freeze frame.

This episode featured a lot of airshow stock footage and it was pretty obvious that the plot was secondary to showing off all of the planes doing fancy maneuvers in the sky.  It felt a bit lazy on the part of the show’s producers but I also imagine that this episode was also fairly cheap to produce.  There’s more stock footage than plot.  As a result, the ending is a bit unsatisfying.  Is Baricza upset about Terri being a criminal?  Who knows?  He certainly does seem to be amused by Ponch’s landing though!