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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 119357" data-attributes="member: 57984">'Ambition'An eager young cop (Michael Burns) joins the squad, but he puts off Crowley and his co-workers for his cocky, hotdog attitude -- all except for Pepper, who is convinced he'll grow out of it and become a useful investigator. But when a corrupt and powerful lawyer (drunken comic Foster Brooks -- as this season the show seems determined to hire as many B-level Vegas acts as possible.... and yet CHARLIE'S effin' ANGELS get the Rat Pack??) and his co-conspirator (songwriter Paul Williams) get caught in a scheme to shake down criminal suspects for cash to buy off the charges against them, the evil pair try and pin their schemes on the young cop who's been using Williams as his all-too-effective snitch.Pepper gets one of her only kick-roll-and-fire kind of Starsky-&-Hutchinsonian moments when she goes to bust Williams for murdering a client who'd figured out the scam, so he knocks her down and draws a heater from his desk drawer.Burns was one of the better child actors of the '60s (although DRAGNET's Blue Boy would never prove it) and matured into an affably interesting second lead whose career never grew beyond the '70s cop show guest star junket (except for a notably weird Altman film with Sandy Dennis which I rather like) so he quit the business right after this episode and became a professor; he played graspingly nerdy, paranoid competence pretty well, and he does so again here.<img src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-99_NlSXkeaQ/U1vSv-e8HgI/AAAAAAAAFdk/VHPWj6RiAKc/s1600/Michael+Burns.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Despite the unavoidably LOVE BOAT era silly vibe of the season, this is still one of the year's better installments. But then, the first half of Season 4 isn't as pathetic as the upcoming second half. They seemed to be trying to avoid sidelining Angie this year as they'd done so much in the two previous seasons, but that doesn't prevent POLICE WOMAN from still becoming too stupid, and that's well on its way...<img src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0uXittvKljI/VF3qmL_0gmI/AAAAAAAADrU/8Iw_86OIzpw/s1600/1974_television_police_woman_cast05.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />_______________"Blind Terror"Sandra Dee is a mom who's obviously too blind to find the refrigerator -- she looks absolutely emaciated here. In her desert home, Pepper is protecting her after Dee's husband (yes, it's actually Tab Hunter) is kidnapped by thugs following a lame car chase. But, being in the desert, Angie's also got big dark sunglasses, so when the mob shows up to grab Sandy (who's inside), they mistake one for the other, snatching and then chasing Pepper into the yucca, baby in tow.It's an okayish episode. Yet Dee's innate sadness inadvertently keeps the story and by rote action almost grounded (I've never found Virgil W Vogel much of a director beyond just telling the crew where to place the camera).<img src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZNmoHYonUHQ/VF3rLHYTjLI/AAAAAAAADrk/62jL6ChPImw/s1600/1974_television_police_woman_cast07.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />_______________"Tigress"An attempt to flip -- and cannibalize -- the plot from "Target Black" three years earlier, this new entry sees Pepper forced by the department into protecting a campaigning rightwing politician (Laraine Stephens, the wife of executive producer David Gerber, in one of her numerous appearances on the series) whom Pepper knew from highschool (Stephens is 10 years younger than Angie) as an unscrupulous classmate. Eartha Kitt pops up as a prostitute for no real reason other than the obvious Catwoman jokes, one supposes.The anti-fascism message in the script is overly obvious. But in the era of Trump, I guess it can still stand to be repeated. Even in this puerile a fashion.______________"Sunset"In what may be the last really decent (and therefore aptly titled) episode of the series, while the squad is investigating the suspicious death of a race car driver who's also a friend of Joe Styles, Crowley's fragile ex-wife Jackie (Bibi Besch) returns to town with a designer's degree and a promise he can soon drop the alimony payments. (In Season 2's "Pattern for Evil" Crowley calls his ex "Mary Ellen" -- so perhaps he's been married and divorced twice, which would explain the perpetual scowl on his face and generally bad attitude).Pepper quickly suspects that Jackie's return is not so casual and intuits that the woman appears to be having chemo treatments; she has leukemia, and it's terminal.  In an era like the '70s when cancer, so often "leukemia"  for some reason, really was the TV disease of the decade and endlessly pimped for easy sentiment and hollow melodrama, it's commendable that this episode makes it work via understatement (much as it did in "Solitaire" last season).Good, low-key original score by Morton Stevens.</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?