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!

This week, a supporting character steps into the spotlight.

Episode 5.17 “Alarmed”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on February 14th, 1982)

While chasing a stolen sports car, Officer Bonnie Clark (Randi Oakes) finds herself stuck behind a van that will simply not stop blocking her pursuit.  When the van stops for a red light, Bonnie jumps out of her patrol car to tell the driver of the van to get out of the way.  The driver of the van turns out to be Toni (Christina Hart), an old classmate from the Academy.  A visibly nervous Toni tells Bonnie that she’s working undercover and then speeds off.  Bonnie, suspicious of her former friend, makes some calls and discovers that Toni is no longer with the Highway Patrol.  Bonnie thinks that Toni is a part of a car theft ring.  Bonnie becomes obsessed with putting Toni in prison.

And when I say obsessed, I mean that Bonnie seems to be positively unhinged about proving that Toni is now a criminal.  The way that Bonnie grins while telling her plans to Getraer really makes you wonder if maybe there’s something more to this story than just Bonnie wanting to capture a cop-turned-crook.  I mean, I dislike a lot of people who I went to school with but I wouldn’t ever call the cops on them.  It bothered me that Bonnie wasn’t even curious as to why Toni had become a criminal.  And CHiPs, as a show, wasn’t that interested in it either.  To me, though, that’s really the only interesting thing about Toni.

Bonnie joined the Highway Patrol at the start of the third season.  This is the first episode in which she’s really had the spotlight and, as I watched, I could kind of understand why it took so long.  While she certainly wasn’t helped by the show’s writers, there was still absolutely nothing convincing about Randi Oakes’s performance.  She delivered her lines in an excited rush and she seemed to be oddly giddy at times.  I would not want Bonnie carrying a gun.

This episode also featured cranky old Simon Oakland as a car security specialist who was trying to create a car that couldn’t be stolen.  He was upset that his daughter (Elizabeth Daily) wanted to go into the family business.  Ponch helped him see the error of his ways.

Finally, there was an odd scene where Baker and Ponch took two dates to a mud wrestling match.  Bonnie tagged along with her date.  Bonnie was disgusted by the mud wrestling, calling it degrading.  Of course, when Bonnie later arrested Toni, the two of them ended up fighting in a muddy puddle.

“Degrading!” Ponch said before Bonnie pulled both him and Baker into the mud.  As Toni was led away in handcuffs, Bonnie laughed and laughed.

The highlight of this episode?  Ponch’s bike got damaged and burst into flames while he was pursuing Toni.  Luckily, there  was a lake nearby.  Ponch’s plunge into the water was filmed in slow motion.  By the standards of CHiPs, it was actually pretty cool.

As for the rest of the episode, it featured what one would probably want from the show.  There were a lot of car chases and not a lot of plot.  Hopefully, this was not only the first Bonnie-centric episode but also the last one as well.