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 Freevee!

This episode was a tough one.

Episode 2.5 “MAIT Team”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on January 13th, 1979)

On a desolate stretch of highway, several cars sit totaled.  At least two are in flames.  A truck sits stalled in the middle of the road, the bloody body of the driver still behind the steering wheels.  A woman screams that her father is having a heart attack.  Sitting off the road, in a ditch, is an overturned police car.  Officer Sindy Cahill is unconscious in the wreckage.

This hardly a typical episode of CHiPs.  This show has featured many spectacular crashes but this episode is the first to feature fatalities.  And its not just one person who dies in the crash.  Eleven people die, including the driver of the truck and the man having a heart attack.  The sight of Ponch looking at the dead bodies is jarring because it’s not what we expect from a show like CHiPs.

And, I have to admit, it was jarring for me on a personal level.  In May, my Dad was in a serious car accident, one that ultimately involved four vehicles.  He broke his shoulder and, afterwards, had to learn how to walk again.  He spent a week in a hospital.  (That was the week that we didn’t have any power due to the storms so I couldn’t even call to get an update on his condition.)  He spent a month in a rehab facility, staying there until his insurance company kicked him out.  Severely weakened by the stress and Parkinson’s, he came home and died a month later.  I still find myself thinking about how, if he just hadn’t gone to the store that Sunday, he never would have been in that accident and he would still be alive today.  Did I say that I merely think about it?  It’s actually something that I’ve been obsessing on, even since the hospital first called me to tell me what had happened.  I had a hard time watching this episode of CHiPs and I’m having a hard time writing about it right now.

It’s a good episode, even if it is very different from the episodes that came before it.  Ponch, Jon, and a group of experts (known as the MAIT Team) attempt to determine what caused the accident.  With a lefty state senator (played by Victor Newman himself, Eric Braeden) and an insurance investigator (Michael Bell) both eager to put the blame on Cahill, it falls to the MAIT Team to figure out what caused the accident and to assign blame.  In the end, just as with my Dad’s accident, they discover that no one was truly at fault.  The setting sun reflected off a distant mirror and temporarily blinded the driver.  Cahill ended up in a ditch after she swerved to avoid him.  The other drivers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Life is like that sometimes.

The emphasis here was on everyone working together to get to the truth.  Even the state senator and the insurance investigator played an important role in discovering what happened.  By being skeptical, they forced the MAIT Team to question everything and truly uncover the facts of the accident.  As this episode made clear, the MAIT Team wasn’t formed just to exonerate Cahill.  Instead, the MAIT Team was all about getting to truth, no matter what that truth might be.

Though this episode was not an easy one for me to watch, it was a good one.