Robert Marshall (Richard Hatch) - a handsome, well-dressed and well-groomed but exceedingly violent psycho signals his presence in town by leaving his car - complete with a young woman's corpse in the trunk, with a hotel parking valet who by chance discovers tell-tale blood on the bumper.
Veteran cop Sgt. T.J.Hooker (William Shatner) and his young partner Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed) are summoned by dispatch to investigate. They find Marshall in the hotel and give chase but they lose him. Hooker - the kind of overqualified workaholic TV audiences would like to believe is patrolling the streets in uniform, takes it upon himself to stalk Marshall and bring him to justice even if it means working off duty.
Marshall is presentable and charming enough to hide in plain sight. Part con-man he is also able to entreat strangers in to helping him. Hooker's quarry, whilst clever, elusive and resourceful is nevertheless plagued by a psychosis which causes him to mark his movements with the blood of new victims.
This is how I have always thought the role of guest villain on a show should be cast. Getting someone who played a villain on another show is a good idea. But getting someone who played a hero on another show is an even better one. An antagonist who audiences identify as this remarkable hero is subconsciously more formidable than a familiar baddie who has been bested on another show.
If the protagonist can be seen besting this actor identified as having all the same strengths it suggests the contest is a more balanced one. The actor playing the baddie can have fun hamming it up whilst broadening his or her range in a very different role. Sadly we don't see it very much. A hero from a different show tends to be played by an expensive actor - one out of reach of single episode budgets of even the most popular shows.
Few episodes of this show ever really delved in to the psyche of the criminal balancing out the narrative. It was almost exclusively a simplistic good vs evil dialectic and villains carried with them an "otherness" for lack of a better word. This episode is a surprising and perhaps even shocking exception.
Richard Hatch was equal to the task of interpreting the material giving one of the best performances of his career. This particular installment is so good it doesn't even seem like the same show. The excesses and clichés of this series remain but are so understated as to submerge beneath the strength of the story and characters.
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