This one seems to be a sort of sequel to my all-time favorite episode of this or any other series, "The Mud Nest" form season 2. The boys are in Savannah, Georgia, where they witness the crash of a small plane. They pull the dying pilot, (Herschel Bernardi) out and he gives them $38,000 in cash, saying to give it to a child he fathered by a waitress in Savannah a generation before. Once again, Linc is the idealistic one that wants to go through with it. Tod is more practical, thinking they should report the money and go through the Bureau of Missing Persons, (as he and Buz did in The Mud Nest). Instead they get a local lawyer who helps them much in the way Edward Asner's BMP operative did in the prior episode.
They find a troubled youth played by Daniel J. Travanti, (two decades before "Hill Street Blues"). They also find the waitress, (Sylvia Sydney, (who had also been in the poignant first season episode "Like a Motherless Child"), which could have been the title of this one), who is in the country home. They bring them together in a scene that has some superficial resemblance to the climactic scene of "The Mud Nest". Instead of being poetic and touching, this scene is bitter and angry. He's not the child and lashes out at Sydney, expressing his hatred of his own mother who abandoned him and her because she abandoned her child. The one is over much more quickly than in "The Mud Nest". The boys eventually find their query, a young businesswoman who thinks she is the natural child of the family that raised her. That family doesn't want to hurt her by telling her what actually happened. It's a strong episode but not the equal of "The Mud Nest". Nothing is.
They find a troubled youth played by Daniel J. Travanti, (two decades before "Hill Street Blues"). They also find the waitress, (Sylvia Sydney, (who had also been in the poignant first season episode "Like a Motherless Child"), which could have been the title of this one), who is in the country home. They bring them together in a scene that has some superficial resemblance to the climactic scene of "The Mud Nest". Instead of being poetic and touching, this scene is bitter and angry. He's not the child and lashes out at Sydney, expressing his hatred of his own mother who abandoned him and her because she abandoned her child. The one is over much more quickly than in "The Mud Nest". The boys eventually find their query, a young businesswoman who thinks she is the natural child of the family that raised her. That family doesn't want to hurt her by telling her what actually happened. It's a strong episode but not the equal of "The Mud Nest". Nothing is.