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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 83706" data-attributes="member: 57984">The only episode directed by dynamic Reza Badiyi (best known for designing the iconic opening titles to THAT GIRL and HAWAII FIVE-O and the freshman season of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW), the self-titled mercenary gang "Sidewinder" pull off a weapons heist at an armory where a security guard is hurt.Pepper and Crowley show up the next morning and determine that somebody somewhere appears to be planning a small war. Pepper also establishes that she's a Scorpio (undercover, she's been a Gemini and a Virgo, while Angie herself is a Libra) and that her contract binds her to the show and to Earl Holliman "for at least another three years" -- and given the series' huge ratings by this point, a four year run indeed seems assured. (Alas, its snap-crackle-and-pop is not so guaranteed to last).<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PWsidewinder1_zpsrje7qtmj.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 781px" />The heisting posse is made up of a bunch of old service buddies (including Ron Masak, Geoffrey Lewis, and Glenn Corbett) with their own agenda: they plan on knocking off an armored car for the loot. (Is that so much harder than knocking off a National Guard armory in order to obtain the firearms necessary to knock off the armored car??) In preparation for the big event, they bazooka an old car, shoot a guy behind a counter (they really didn't wanna do it) and their wives are becoming increasingly concerned.The day arrives and the Criminal Conspiracy Unit is on to them, showing up just as the robbery is going down on a stretch of rural road. Pepper fires repeatedly, but even now when the series is still good, the producers have to slap her down a smidgen by having her emptying her revolver into one of the thieves running directly at her result in absolutely nothing: it doesn't even slow him down -- and then Crowley fires his high-powered rifle from behind the perpetrator and he finally falls ... turns out he was wearing a bullet proof vest.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PWsidewinder2_zpspjugal1h.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 780px" />The installment ends with Pepper and Crowley and Pete and Joe all sitting around a bar room table as Bill toasts Sergeant Anderson with the popular cigarette ad line, "You've come a long way, baby...!"Two years later, a sequel episode of sorts, S3's "Banker's Hours," focuses on the wives, their husband's in prison, knocking off Savings & Loans while dressed as men.-------------"Blast".After the skeleton of a blown-up luxury car, one owned by local district attorney Edward Littel, is pulled from a lake, Crowley meets with the decedent's widow (played by the executive producer's wife, though it seems a great role for Bette Davis, but oh well..) and her father, Jonas Van Dyke, powerful patriarch of a corrupt California political dynasty. But Crowley neglects to mention that the forensics department found in the vehicle a sole finger print from an African American go-go dancer, the improbably-named Paris Palmer, employed at a local dive."You mean, kill one of their own?," Crowley asks George Daner, the cagey member of "that political machine you call the Special Prosecutor's Office" who'd worked with the late Edward Littel. But Daner protests, "He was not one of their own -- he hated what they were doing and he wanted to bring them down. Edward always said 'power corrupts in the hands of a godfather or a Jonas Van Dyke'."  So it seems the dead D.A. had it out for his oligarch father-in-law. And, just possibly, vice versa.The script is by Chester Krumholz, who always seems adept at high-society crime plots. (And he would briefly work with Ed de Blasio on the first season of DYNASTY).<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PWblast1_zpsmzdmizdz.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 778px" />Pepper goes under as a Reno casino showgirl, revealing her supposed affiliation with the missing Paris, and promptly earns a place on the dance floor by charming the club's owner, Robert Vaughn, and bumping-and-grinding to his satisfaction -- somewhat startling material for pre-Charlie's Angels TV in January of 1975, the leading lady of a prime time series shakin' it up in a white fringe bikini. (Miss Dickinson would years later decry her own go-go moves as "awwwwwwful !")<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PWblast2_zpsofcamtsd.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 777px" />Vaughn invites her, as a sideline, to participate in "private parties" (in which businessmen and politicians are photographed in flagrante delicto and presumably blackmailed). Pepper declines the offer and enquires as to whether her old pal, Paris, was engaging in that kind of activity, too. "There are two things I want: a good job -- and to be left alone," she informs the club's owner, and then adds, so as not to put him off, "and a little champagne now and then..." But this doesn't prevent Pep from being wined and dined on the town by her dapper new employer, off-camera.At this point early in the series, you're never quite sure with whom Pepper is or isn't sleeping. And neither is Crowley.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PW6.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 851px" />While her absurdly-monikered alter ego, Flaxy Dupree, swoons over her boss's allusions to taking her to exotic places like the French Riviera, Pepper is careful not to sound overly curious about the dead dancer's whereabouts. But one of her co-workers is not so cautious, desperately pulling a knife on Vaughn and his business partner, the girl herself disappearing the same evening and found under a bridge the next morning by the police.Bill Crowley then pays a visit to the Van Dykes' mansion, dropping a hint to the widow that her late husband had been using Paris in some kind of crime investigation while simultaneously having an affair with her, the girl recorded tapes, and that Crowley presently has "an agent" in the club where Paris Palmer worked "and she does all the digging for me."Inspired by the paranoia Bill has now instilled in her, the brittle widow drives to meet Vaughn whom she'd blackmailed into having her husband and the call girl killed; enraged that he may have blown the job, she shoots Vaughn when he threatens to blackmail her and she drives off in her rented car... Back at the club, the mortally wounded owner returns to find a gushingly gorgeous Pepper awaiting him, and she gets him to confess all on audiotape.[ATTACH=full]39943[/ATTACH]Vaughn now having expired, Crowley informs Pepper that "all we have is a voice on tape," the duo unsure that Mrs. Littel will indeed take the fall she deserves... And then they freeze frame on the sidewalk, illuminated by a flickering sunset thru the leaves, but not before Pepper says something philosophical about the climate in California: "I hate winter out here -- it never gets cold enough, and it doesn't stay warm enough..." [ATTACH=full]39944[/ATTACH]____________________</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?