Robert O’Reilly | 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, the CHiPs team investigates an accident and a guest star gives a really terrible performance.

Episode 4.20 “Dead Man’s Riddle”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on May 10th, 1981)

An accident in the mountains causes three cars to explode and one driver to die. Since the dead driver was a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, the MAIT Team is sent out to recreate the accident and to try to figure out what happened. They know that at least three cars were involved in the accident. One driver died. One driver is in the hospital. And the other driver appears to be missing. Getraer suspects that the accident could be due to people racing each other in the mountains.

What makes this episode odd is the casting of Joanna Kerns as psychiatrist Colleen Jacobs. She’s assigned to the MAIT Team. She actually drives through the mountains frequently and she even gets involved in racing sometimes. In fact, she saw one of the cars right before the accident! At first, she doesn’t bother to share this with anyone. Instead, she just sits in the background with a guilty look on her face. Finally, Jon Baker — in an unmarked car — tricks her into trying to race him. That’s when she finally confesses….

….and faces absolutely no consequences! Oh sure, Getraer gets a little annoyed and says that it would have been helpful if Dr. Jacobs had been honest from the start. But Dr. Jacobs is allowed to continue to work with the MAIT Team. Even though she intentionally withheld evidence from investigators, she’s not charged with obstruction. Ponch tells her that she’s getting a chance to redeem herself which I don’t think is police policy. No one comments on the fact that, even though she was worried that she may have previously caused a fatal accident, she still tried to race Baker. Does no one care that, at the very least, she appears to have no impulse control?

Making things even stranger is that Joanna Kerns gives one of the worst performances that I have ever seen as Dr. Jacobs, delivering half of her lines as if she’s struggling not to laugh. Even when she’s admitting her fear that she may have been responsible for the accident, she still seems like she’s on the verge of breaking out into laughter. It’s very odd.

Speaking of odd, an eccentric old man named Max (Owen Brooks) claims that he saw a UFO before the crash. (Dr. Jacobs laughs when she repeats this.) It turns out that he just saw a hubcap flying through the air.

In the end, it’s proven that the captain was not at fault in the accident. That’s all that anyone really seems to care about. I assume that Dr. Jacbos and Baker then proceeded to race each back to Los Angeles.

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, its the most shocking episode of Highway to Heaven yet!

Episode 2.21 “The Torch”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on March 12th, 1986)

Everett Salomon (Herschel Bernardi) is a Holocaust survivor who has become wealthy and successful in the United States. In poor health and in need of a heart transplant, Everett spends most of his time giving speeches about his experiences in the concentration camp. He is disturbed by the rise in Holocaust denialism and has dedicated his remaining years to battling the scourge of Neo-Nazism. In a disturbing scene that brings to mind the horrible images of the October 7 attacks, a Nazi named Cal (Robert O’Reilly) sneaks onto Everett’s property in the middle of the night and murders his dog.

Cal is a follower of Jan Baldt (Paul Koslo), a Neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier who has turned his basement into a shooting range so that he and his buddies can fire their guns at pictures of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Moshe Dayan. Jan is consumed by hate and he’s teaching that hate to his young son, Rolf (played by a very, very young Mark-Paul Gosselaar). While Jan rants about conspiracies and bankers, Rolf cleans the guns in the basement.

At a Nazi rally, Jan’s speech is interrupted by Everett’s son, Joseph (David Kaufman). Cal proceeds to make his way through the crowd and ends up shooting Joseph dead. When Everett hears the news, he has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital by two paramedics, Jonathan Smith and Mark Gordon. Meanwhile, while Jan and Cal celebrate in their basement, Rolf picks up a submachine gun and, not realizing it’s loaded, pulls the trigger and guns both men down.

Everett finally gets the heart transplant that he’s needed ever since he was first liberated from the camps. Unfortunately, that heart comes from Jan Baldt. At first, Everett refuses to accept the heart but then the ghosts of his parents and of Joseph appear to him and tell him that he has to continue to live and let people know the truth about what happened in the camps.

Later, Everett leaves the hospital and tells the reporters waiting outside that he will never be silent.

This seems to be one of the episodes of Highway to Heaven that anyone who has ever watched the show remembers. Because the show is usually rather gentle and non-violent, this episode can be a rather jarring viewing experience. The first time I saw it, the only thing that stunned me more than Joseph’s death was the subsequent deaths of Jan and Cal. The episode ends on an uplifting note but I always find myself wondering what happened to Rolf. Without his father around to brainwash him, will Rolf be able to learn something other than hate? Or is it too late for him? Is Rolf damned to follow in his father’s footsteps?

With the current rise of anti-Semitism, this episode still feels incredibly relevant. There’s really not much difference between Jan Baldt’s rants and the stuff currently being spewed by Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Brianna Joy Gray. This episode reminds us that “never again” has to be more than just a catch phrase.