User Reviews

The cops smelled a rat, but were lousy mouse traps. At every turn, they really dropped the ball-and very nearly allowed four people to get really dead, including Joe. If you listen closely and pay good attention, you'll spot the rat before anyone else (Hint: it was information supplied by Joe; even the Lieutenant didn't pick up on it). Once again, it's another case of Joe Mannix beating the cops at their own game.

A standard plot device for PI/cop/lawyer shows is for the bad guys to have some elaborate plot to gain some nefarious end and the good guys spend the episode getting to the bottom of it. This outing has the good guys with the plan and the bad guys trying to figure it out.

Danny Lavor (Gordon Hoban) robs a drugstore for the second time in a month, shoots the pharmacist, and barely eludes the police on stakeout near the front door. Looks like an open and shut case, but Joe is visited by Danny's wife (Leslie Charleson) and is nagged by Peggy into investigating it. Turns out the whole thing was a police plan to hide Danny as he spills his guts on the mob. Danny was suppose to surrender at the drugstore door but he realized one of the guys was a crooked cop so he ran. Instead of doing all this, why didn't the police just move him to a safe house? No idea but it would have been easier. Two mob hoods Vodich (Jan Merlin) and Hammel (Sandy Kenyon) are after Danny. The pharmacist "victim" is in a hospital room to complete the illusion of a crime so the two hoods go there. Why? I have no idea. Why would the victim know where Danny is? Turns out the victim is just lounging around his hospital room doing not much. The bad guys discover this and realize it is all a set up. Joe chases Hammel though the hospital before getting hit on the head (again!). The crooked cop had the wife's phone tapped and hears a conversation between Danny and the wife arranging a meet in code. Finally, it all comes to a head when the bad guys follow Joe to the meeting arranged through the wife and everyone ends up at Danny's hideout. It turns into a gunfight with Joe and Danny against the two hoods and the bad cop (Scott Brady). Guess who wins.

There is plenty of action and the story moves along but the plot holes stand out. Why did there need to be a first robbery done a month before this story starts? No reason for it. When the pharmacist is "shot" in this second robbery, we can assume the people in the store rendered first aid as the two cops let Danny escape. Since there is no bullet wound, how did that get handled? This next remark is in the weeds but the police lieutenant says that the pharmacist is a guy from the police lab. Since the two robberies were a month apart and we can assume the first robbery was not on the guy's first day, we have an untrained, unlicensed undercover guy doing a pharmacist's job and filling dozens of drug prescriptions every day for several weeks. Highly illegal but okay - it's only a show. There is one part where the wife is supposedly worked over "pretty good" by one of the hoods and when you see her again, she has a small bandage on her cheek. Not very convincing. At least give her a black eye. I've hurt myself worse shaving.

The cast is fine. Merlin and Kenyon make good hoods. Every time I see Jan Merlin, I think he should play only Gestapo agents or SS officers. Kenyon was around forever and seemed to always play slimy guys. Scott Brady plays the bad cop well but he played heavies his whole career so has it down pat. I knew he was a bad cop when I saw him on the stakeout. I used the "guest star rule". It states big time guest stars who seem to have only a small part means there is more to come. Brady was an "upper tier" guest star who had his own western show back in the day and there is no way he does a standard "cop partner" role. An earlier Mannix episode had Paul Carr playing a PI who is supposedly killed in the first five minutes after a couple of lines of dialogue. No way Paul Carr takes that gig so I knew we would see him later. The same rules applies to crime and mystery shows from the 60s and 70s. The murderer is always the biggest guest star. The series Murder She Wrote broke that mold but it was good up until then. Dewey Martin plays police Lt Lockwood for this single time. It would have been interesting to have one of Mannix's normal police lieutenant buddies in the role and see a little conflict there.

Not a horrible outing but it does lack logic. Not the first time I've written that about Mannix and I'm sure it won't be the last. If you're looking for an episode that makes absolutely no sense, A Gathering of Ghosts will get you there. Joe does get paid. He should split it with Peggy.

This one is about a guy who robs a pharmacy and then runs from the cops when they confront him outside the store.

Unfortunately, this episode is filled with plot holes which start in the very first scene where the cops are talking in their car about receiving a tip that Danny was going to rob the pharmacy again when it was revealed later on that THEY THEMSELVES SET UP THE HEIST, so why are they talking about receiving a tip that he was going to rob the store??? Then when Danny runs away from the police after exiting the pharmacy, they MAKE NO ATTEMPT to stop him but simply LET HIM GET AWAY, and as a result, everyone spends the whole episode trying to find him because the cops simply let him get away. There was also no explanation provided on how the guy who got shot in the pharmacy was not injured even though Danny CLEARLY SHOT HIS GUN AT HIM. I'm assuming the gun had blanks in it and that's why the guy wasn't injured, but this was never explained or followed up on during the episode.

There's also a major contradiction throughout the episode as everyone keeps saying Danny is afraid of guns but yet he clearly DID fire a gun at the guy in the pharmacy at the beginning and clearly WAS pointing a gun at the cop at the end. None of it makes any sense.

Then there are all of the clichés in this one - Joe once again gets clobbered over the head, gets shot at but never hit, and gets followed by the bad guys but either doesn't notice or doesn't do anything about it.

There are a few bright spots in this one. There's a good chase scene in the hospital and the performances by Jan Merlin and Sandy Kenyon as the mobsters are really good, as is the performance by Ted de Corsia as Danny's father. Too bad they weren't accompanied by a better plot and were wasted in what was otherwise a bad episode.