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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 81565" data-attributes="member: 57984">Working backwards, this was the Season 2 (the 1975-76 year) DVD cover released five years ago:<img src="https://iyifilm.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/angie-dickinson_police_woman.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Pretty mediocre cover art and, unsurprisingly, nobody seemed to like it.I always liked my "alternative" S2 DVD cover art better, were it to have a tad greater resolution (but I need to place a revolver in her hand, don't I?):<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PWs2_alt.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />The episodes:"Pawns of Power" looked better on DVD than I'd ever seen it, although I hadn't seen it in ages. The episode has a crisp, clean, authority-over-itself kind of vibe that feels very much like a continuation of the latter half of Season One.The story starts out with Pepper undercover as a dealer/waitress in a casino on wheels --- in the back of an 18-wheeler (a scenario I hadn't seen before, and which STARSKY & HUTCH used again two years later) run by Eddie Diamond (Robert Goulet, who warbles not a note)... I find myself wondering if this was the episode in which Angie refused to drive a tractor trailer, as it seems the ideal opportunity.<img src="http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1328926543_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 620px" />The game is busted and Pepper gets caught in an estrogen-fueled brawl after going to jail. And the team learns from snotty Justice Department stooge Mr Moulton (Roddy McDowall) that one of their informants was killed that night by a mafia don (Syndey Chaplin, one of Charlie's sons) head of the west coast Masseria crime family.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pawns_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 660px" />To have been the best-liked guy in Hollywood, the double-phallically named Roddy McDowall plays an effectively high-handed bitch, barking orders condescendingly to the paeon locals, with no regard for the welfare of his pawns (hence, the installment's title, one supposes).Also, in the same episode, on the chart of Chaplin's crime syndicate are photos of the show's producers!<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pawns_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 692px" />If they're killing informants, Pepper doesn't want any part of continuing the dangerous investigation. But McDowall forces her into it, using a former acquaintance of Pepper's named Teresa, who has slid into a life of prostitution, as the new snitch to replace the dead one... Gently coerced by Goulet into driving 400 miles to San Francisco to make a drop, Pepper deliberately gets a ticket so she can have the motorcycle cop who pulls her over inform Crowley back in Los Angeles where she is and what she's doing.After which, back in L.A., in his paneled mansion livingroom -- decorated all plush 1975 orange-orange-orange, kingpin Masseria has her slapped around for getting that ticket. But decides to let her live, for now, since the drop in Frisco went down without a hitch.<img src="http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1328926543_8.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 708px" />What's most interesting about this episode is that scene between Bill and Pepper in the darkened bedroom after she chews out an impervious Roddy McDowall for his ruthlessness. It's an odd moment for the show actually, and seems suspiciously apparent that someone is editorializing in the script, however obliquely, on the politics behind the scenes as Season 2 began filming ("It's all downhill from here, honey..."), the pressure from executives to subdue the show's lead character and the reported "downright unhappiness on the set" as a result.Whatever the impetus for it, brief as it is, it's one of the finest scene of the entire series. Certainly, it's the most intimate, in a strange way.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pawns_5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 741px" />As Season Two commences, the series' mojo has not yet been stolen. At least not completely. The standard organized crime/Italian mobster motif of POLICE WOMAN has yet to feel tired or like a default setting for the plot. There is still an urgency, a sense of gravity to the drama, and Pepper's welfare-at-risk hasn't become a contrivance. All set to a new score, clearly by Morton Stevens in all his HAWAII FIVE-0 glory.But back to work. And Pepper gets caught phoning her hooker pal, Teresa, from the new casino location, and both ladies wind up in Chaplin's deadly mansion basement, only this time it's Teresa who gets the crap beaten out of her.Crowley and the police force move in on the mansion to save the women, and so Chaplin (having lost favor with the family back east and aware the bust is about to go down) tricks Goulet -- after a metaphoric squabble about too much oregano (there is no such thing, by the way) in the salad -- into leaving first through the front door, getting Goulet killed in the process. And no wonder. The front door looks completely different on the outside than it does inside. The disorientation would render any kingpin deposed.Back at headquarters, a furious Pepper submits her resignation, but is talked out of it on promises of teriyaki steak, mai tais, and fried shrimp by Crowley who also says something provocative about a fortune cookie.Ah, good ol' Angie... always the party girl.-------------  "The Score" opens up with an angry, middle-aged landlady using her pass key to enter an L.A. apartment from where psychedelic music is blasting in the middle of the night.Given how he turned out, it's unsettling to see Barry Crane, the veteran producer/director of such shows as MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, get his title card over the shocked face of the landlady in haircurlers peering through the doorway at the death scene inside. It's eerily reminiscent of the Season 1 episode, "Requiem For Bored Wives," featuring that other doomed Crane -- Bob -- who finds his TV wife dead in a similar fashion as he himself soon will in real life.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 728px" />Pepper forgoes a scheduled hairdresser appointment (talk about prescient moments of doom!) to interview the roommate of the young man who died, a victim of deadly "speed." Lovingly pawing his partner's belongings, the surviving roommate goes to the door and lets Pepper in. I hadn't seen "The Score" in quite a while, and had never realized that the blond dude Pepper interviews was the boyfriend of the male decedent. Funny, it's so obvious now that that was their intention, but all the hints never registered on me as such until receiving this DVD.Back in the day, y'know, you just couldn't be too obvious about this sort of thing. Not in 1975 television. We all remember what happened when three evil lesbians went to town on "Flowers of Evil" a year before... Sure, he's not homicidal like they were, but this is a guy!!<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_1b.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 753px" />Angelic Pepper, sympathetic in a tight yellow shirt, politely seduces the boy, validating him and his loss with her breathiness and brown-eyed look of love.The LAPD lab lady informs Pepper and Crowley that the deadly speed which is wiping out users all over town is too rich; it's uncut, and the purity fatally overloads the system.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 772px" />The team hits the streets to locate the supplier, forcing Pepper to don a midriff shirt and curly brown wig so a black man in clogs named "Astro" will sell her some chemicals. He asks her astrological sign, and Pepper responds "Gemini" (at last count, Pepper was a Scorpio, a Gemini, and a Virgo -- the latter two, only undercover).<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 767px" />Perhaps due to Barry Crane, there is a somewhat organic, not overly-produced, flavor to "The Score" and it's what most of Season 2 should probably have been like. As such, portions of it feel very Summer '75.Turns out that the teenaged girl (who looks about 35) of the meth lab trio who are producing the lethal junk is getting nervous, guilty about the increasing deaths that they probably have caused. She can't handle it. After calling her somewhat stereotypic, rigidly mousy, Bible-thumping sister in a tight brunette bun in San Francisco (San Francisco???) who rebuffs her with the recommendation that she "pray, if you haven't forgotten how!," the girl slashes her wrists, later found by a motel manager.Crowley takes Pepper's usual role of lending a sympathetic shoulder and ear to the surviving sibling in a scene which still looks and feels a lot like Season One (in part because it's set to an ethereal musical cue by Richard Shores, although screen credit for this stock score episode goes to Jerrold Immel). There's no real reason for Crowley to be doing this, except that Pepper seems to want to avoid dealing with familial grief, and Earl Holliman needs something else to do.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 786px" />Quite improbably, Pepper decides to pose as the prim and puritanical sister -- if that sister were also a heaving slut -- to infiltrate the lab and the distributor. So she slips into her biggest blonde shag hairpiece they occasionally pretend is her real hair and charms her way into the heart of the lab's surly boss (Michael Constantine, fresh from ROOM 222 respectability at the time) and guides him to an airport locker to find the lost batch of speed the tormented girl mailed to the police department just before offing herself.Every stash in the '70s is held in an airport locker.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/thescore_5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 793px" />Now believing that she can help increase production with her wily fundamentlist ways and graduate degree in pharmacological chemistry from Oral Roberts University, Constantine takes Pepper (and the squad, listening to their dialogue from a microphone between Angie's breasts) to the meth lab's secret location in the valley. Unfortunately, a remaining member of the lab trio knows from photos what the sister looked like. And Pepper doesn't match the photos. Protesting not entirely convincingly ("...I'm Betty...!!") Pepper finds her wig pulled off in easily half-a-second by one of the thugs.Her cover mysteriously blown, the squad moves in and surrounds the lab, exchanging gunfire with the crooks. Inside, Pepper pulls the old bullsh!t TV scam of jumping through a closed window, the audience expected to pretend that no one is sliced to pieces when they do so. It was a dumb convention, a cliché, even then, and they shouldn't have done it... What's wrong with an open window -- or maybe a half-assed boarded window??But, no. Angie's stunt double propels herself through the breakaway glass, just in time for Pepper to escape the conflagration when the drugs and ether and bunsen burners inside erupt into a ball of hellfire and damnation, appropriately.Horrified he may be out of a job, Holliman rushes the flaming shack. But have no fear: Pepper appears in adorable pigtails from behind the flaming structure, giggling engagingly, "Hey, sourpuss!" and he hugs her violently, yells at her to never do that again, and exits the frame. Leaving Pete to untie Pepper's hands in the episode-ending freeze frame set to cutesy music.As if people weren't burning to death in the house behind them even as they guffaw. It's a decent if by-the-book entry, but ends on an obviously wrong note."Miss an appointment with my beautician -- are you insane??"<img src="https://shoutfactory-productionsite.s3.amazonaws.com/system/asset/file/2f25754d64b14245d2d77d9b02838bbf84c46c136b696d898f9f6a91f27bfaf1/bbad30d2adb2e5f039c099a807f84e6e/product_detail_826663130270.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />------------'Paradise Mall'  The third episode of Season Two, the ironically-titled "Paradise Mall," gives us one of the earlier motiveless-psycho-on-the-warpath-killing-foxy-babes plotlines which became so ubiquitous in '70s television before the medium developed a sociological curiosity about the humanity of the maniac.Up through the end of this decade at least, they're all just whacked-out horndogs rebuffed by another hot chick. Oh, and their mother probably messed 'em up --- if the script even gets into anything that personal.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/paradisemall_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 779px" />Helmed by Alvin Ganzer -- for a while, one of the show's better directors, "Paradise Mall" is the series' first fully-macabre installment (I'm not sure S1's "Warning: All Wives" really qualifies) complete with creepy music courtesy of DALLAS' Jerrold Immel, and close-ups of the killer's face with only the eyes illuminated by a narrow band of light.A wedding gown boutique is robbed in the middle of the night and a number of bridal veils are taken, followed by various bodies of young blondes popping up dead around the city -- one washes up under the boardwalk at the beach -- all the corpses donned in those veils.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/paradisemall_1b.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 794px" />Eventually, one of the detectives working on the case, Tom Foley (James Wainwright), learns his own wife is a victim of the killer. Turns out she was having an affair, his long work hours to blame. He feels responsible for what happened to her, his neglect leading to her death, and confesses his sense of guilt to Pepper over cocktails in their old stomping grounds at Barney's.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/paradisemall_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 786px" />It's difficult to watch this episode without thinking of that THE FUGITIVE episode from eleven years earlier, the one in which David Janssen's Richard Kimble is hired by Angie Dickinson in her evil plan to set him up for the murder of her brother, Robert Duvall. Much of "Paradise Mall" appears to be shot in the same locations, the same pier (Santa Monica Pier? Venice Beach??), carousel chases and all.It's also difficult to not think of that old TWILIGHT ZONE episode, "Nightmare as a Child," in which a female character called "Helen Foley" whom Rod Serling named after his real-life gradeschool teacher (and has the same name as Detective Foley's doomed wife) has emerging childhood memories of her mother's murder at the hands of a mysterious stranger --- a TWILIGHT ZONE directed by none other than Alvin Ganzer. And given that this POLICE WOMAN entry was filmed only a week or two after Serling's 1975 death, one assumes it's a deliberate tip of the hat.On the trail of the crazed Paradise Mall killer, Detective Foley (Wainwright) roughs up one scruffy-looking suspect (Gavan O'Herlihy) who, despite his seedy, goofball exterior, turns out to be nobody's fool.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/paradisemall_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 777px" />While interviewing strippers in their club at the pier, Pepper -- in a protective wig which is, inexplicably, blonde -- catches the eye of handsome, wiry Bruce Boxleitner, an embittered fry cook who works in a nearby greasy spoon. He pops up in the backseat of her car (why lock your vehicle and wear a brown hairpiece just because a crazed lunatic is killing lady towheads in the middle of the night??) and pulls a switchblade on Pepper, confusing her for the blonde girl who he thinks jilted him, forcing her to drive somewhere... But before they can get far, Wainwright -- whom Crowley ordered off the case -- pops up out of nowhere, saves Pepper from the murderer, and shoots butcherknife-bearing Boxleitner before Bruce can blade another babe.But not all is what it seems. O'Herlihy, half-lit, wanders into the police station while Pepper is there late, apparently composing her reports, and tells her that Wainwright, while tossing him around, had gotten the number of missing bridal veils wrong by exactly one... He's figured out that Wainwright killed his own wife, and is letting Pepper in on the scam.Gently confronting Wainwright in his apartment, Pepper learns that he'd known all about his wife's affairs, had struck her during a fight, killing her accidentally, then pinned the blame on the bridal veil killer... Excusing himself to change clothes before his arrest, he slips into his bedroom as Crowley arrives, Pepper making the common error of cops when arresting one of their own of not confiscating his weapon first.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/paradisemall_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 784px" />Crowley bangs on the bedroom door and then, gun drawn, he and Pepper burst in to see ..... Wainwright ..... holding his holstered service revolver, deep in thought, sitting beside his and his wife's wedding photo (which appears to have been taken last Tuesday), pulling the weapon out. And the frame freezes on Angie and Earl, who seem to relax once through the door.Say, what???This scene reeks of something being switched. Everything about the scene seems to be leading to his off-camera suicide. And yet it ends in a ridiculously ambiguous, sell-out kind of way... Given the pressure on the show from the network at the outset of the filming of Season Two, had the NBC brass become that paranoid about any additional controversy POLICE WOMAN might generate? How much of an edge did they now want this once-edgy show to avoid? You'd seen suicides on television occasionally even then, if not often, but networks have irrational, quixotic judgment when they're trying to avoid the negative attention of various pressure groups.Almost everybody I know who's seen this episode winds up with the same instinct about this final moment: it's just weird.Another point of curiosity is that "Paradise Mall" (along with two other early S2 episodes) has a new, dynamically funky orchestration to the opening theme. It’s fabulous, and markedly different. It sounds orange and purple...[MEDIA=youtube]_S4qPaYvrME[/MEDIA]But they quickly dropped this, too, after only three episodes, reverting to the original opening theme orchestration from Season One... What gives? While the original S1 version of Morton Stevens' POLICE WOMAN theme was great and basic, why were they so afraid to switch it to something new for Season Two? Especially when it was such a hot, effective new spin on the tune? If it had been weak, then one could understand the decision.Yet it seems another example of how the show was both afraid to go forward and yet forced to leave its best elements from its first year behind.------------In "Pattern for Evil" (the show likes the word "evil" in their titles) the brutalizing of fashion models and sabotage of haute couture inventory signal an attempted organize crime takeover of the industry on the west coast.It also signals an opportunity for Pepper to show off her perfect middle-aged physique.<img src="http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/6767102/740full-angie-dickinson.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 783px" />Free-lance Pepper is soon hired by the Tibbets, a nice couple from "the only Carolina" but who play their cards close to their chests.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pattern_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 779px" />On her breaks, Pepper wanders around High End Model High Rise in L.A., cracking jokes about Pete's vegetarianism and calling him "Mr Okra" whenever a suspicious-looking guest star spies them together and wants to hire her... Apparently, trolling the food court is how you get work in California.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pattern_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 785px" />At her apartment, Pepper uses Pete as a live model for a new gown "because we're the same size" and the viewer has to look away from Pete's crotch, clearly not the same size at all. Bill says that if his ex-wife "looked that good, I wouldn't have divorced her!" and everybody laughs.Having overheard a tense phone exchange with the Tibbets ("...it's New York") Pepper intuits this may be where the trouble is coming from. So Crowley and Joe Styles hop a jet to The Big Apple and as soon as they're met by the NYPD at the airport, blow Pepper's cover by bragging that they've got her "duked in" as a model back in Los Angeles. They are overheard.It's snowing in Fun City, and the mostly interior scenes are fairly convincing. Bill and Joe hover around a desk in a shabby, crowded office and make macho jokes and KOJAK dialogue with the locals. There, they learn that Pepper's boss, Mr Tibbet, is the grandson of aging east coast mob boss Gregory Essex, the younger man wanting no part of the family business after being shot in the leg a decade earlier during an assassination attempt on his grandpop, the godfather of gourmet garments.Unfortunately, armed with this data, Pepper and Pete make the error of requesting the Tibbets' presence for a police station interview, to see if they're knowledgeable about any of the recent rash of crimes; tight-lipped, the couple suggest their lawyer be contacted instead, and then leave. But it's too late. Their visit to the cops does not go unnoticed -- and a mafia thug follows them out of a parkinglot and chases them down, attempting to careen them into the L.A. sewer system.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pattern_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 776px" />It's a pretty dramatic action sequence for TV at the time, although imperfectly edited (we see the Tibbets' rear window having been blown out with a shotgun before it's actually blown out with a shotgun) and once the hitmen succeed in hitting the gas tank and the car explodes, Mrs Tibbet (who is driving) turns into a heavy-set, middleaged man with hairy arms, gloves and a wig, the doomed couple flying into a concrete crevace of untreated waste and death.But enough poetry.Well, Mrs Tibbett isn't quite dead yet. Burned from head to toe and in an oxygen tent, she tells Pepper whatever she can about the filthy business, their estrangement from Grandpa Essex, and even identifies the driver of the other car as a heavy who'd visited their shop on several occasions menacingly. Once outside of the wife's hospital room, Pete informs Pepper that the husband has succumbed to his traumatic wounds, leading Pepper to moan that's she's now got to go back in and tell Mrs Tibbett that hubby is dead (I think I'd ask the doctors first, Sergeant Anderson).Pepper foolishly goes against Crowley's orders and goes back on the job. But it's her unit co-workers who once again blow her cover when Pete calls in the middle of a private client showing (Pepper does a good model "spin" in her tangerine chiffon ensemble) to tell her that the creep they're looking for -- an ugly, obese and kinda homo-looking dude (that's the pattern for evil which tells you he's the bad guy from his first scene) who works with Essex's crooked lawyer who has taken over the family enterprise -- is now one of Pep's new bosses.Naturally, the creep in question is listening in on the phone. He confronts her in the changing room, and Pepper makes stilted accusations, "dumb questions from a dumb cop?," which frankly kinda are. With the new restrictions on Angie's vocal delivery, much of the edge is gone, so her comments do indeed sound kind of silly.But she looks fab, so who cares.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pattern_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 774px" />One of the things I like about this reasonably tight episode is all the 1975 orange. Orange-orange-orange. Even the highrise hallway which the ugly thug forces her down at gunpoint is striped multiple shades of orange, with a passing extra dressed in an outfit to match. Pete and his team arrive just in time to chase Pepper and Mug Face around one of those sunstreaked L.A. rooftops the series seems so fond of, the audience asked to ignore the fact that Angie Dickinson looks like she could disarm and wrestle Mug Face to the floor in about three seconds by herself.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pattern_5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 779px" />It's like asking us to believe that Blake Carrington could easily rough-up and ravish linebacker Linda Evans against her will and with little force. So it's all suspension of disbelief.And, again, she does look fabulous: orange dress, golden hair, yellow sunshine, Angie in full-hyperventilation mode so you'll know she's scared, Pete in an fuzzy orange suit trying to save her from Mug Face.One thing that doesn't look so good are the cops accompanying Pete, who look exactly like extras who just got a non-speaking bit part on this week's show, unconvincing in their spontaneous regulation firing poses.When Pepper sees Pete with a high-powered rifle aiming from a nearby spire (Charlie Dierkop really does look like he might fall to his death at any moment) she's suddenly imbued with the moral conviction to push her assailant away, presumably to make the way clear for Pete to shoot -- which Pete does, but her heroics seem a bit late and probably weren't necessary as Mug Face was clearly in Pete's crosshairs anyway.But it's drama.Later at LAX, Pepper and Royster meet Crowley's and Styles' plane, at which point Joe makes jokes about Pete being a cross-dresser and Crowley makes jokes about Joe Namath's predilection for pantyhose. And Pepper puts on a funny hat.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?