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.

Why is everyone bagging on my town?

Episode 3.15 “Armed and Dangerous”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on January 11th, 1998)

At the local high school, a gun is fired and the bullet grazes the arm of Jessie Palermo (Johna Stewart-Bowden).  Jessie, of course, is Lt. Palermo’s daughter.  Palermo becomes obsessed with finding out who fired the gun and how that person got the gun.  He sends Chris and TC into the school to work undercover and he orders Cory and Victor to find the gun dealer.  As for Palermo himself, he visits the local gun store and gives an impassioned speech in favor of gun control.

Yeeesh, this episode.

I mean, I get it.  Palermo has every right to be upset.  But it’s hard not to notice that he only seems to care whenever a case directly involves either his family or a member of the bike patrol.  Whenever it’s just some citizen with whom he doesn’t have a personal connection, Palermo just kind of zones out.  If some anonymous student had been shot at the school, there’s no way Palermo would have gone to so much trouble.  He would have shrugged it off and hopped on his bicycle.  In fact, I’ve noticed that this is true of all the bike cops.  They take the “one of their own” syndrome to an extreme that is probably not good for the image of law enforcement.  If it’s a friend who needs help, they’ll do everything within their power to help.  They’ll even stop doing their patrols of the boardwalk to make time to help a friend.  If it’s just some random person who gets mugged, they don’t care.  If she doesn’t personally know you, Chris will probably make fun of you for being dumb enough to get mugged in the first place.  These bike cops are the worst.

And here’s another thing.  Why are the bicycle cops investigating this?  Where are the real detectives?  Why are two bicycle cops going undercover as opposed to the cops who have actually been trained to do that sort of work?

This is an episode that deals with a serious subject.  But it’s hard to really pay attention to what it has to say when everyone’s wandering around in those silly bicycle shorts.