Reviews

This episode is actually quite good, the plot is believable, Kris partly falls for the villain and the scene of them talking in the car about travelling to Europe was really well done. I liked the shots of Vegas from the early 80's too since no doubt it has changed massively since then.

This episode comes close to one of the worst in the series. First of all it was a bad choice to have an episode where the angels cover is stunt women since in most of the episodes it's painfully obvious that the actresses are replaced by stunt doubles. And perhaps times have moved on and we have been spoiled by behind the scenes documentaries and director's commentaries but stunts on a movie are not thrown together with quick chat about "throw a punch here and fall off that balcony" but everything is planned and designed so that people don't get hurt. Fights are planned out punch by punch and things are filmed shot by shot, not just some mad brawl with action going on all of the set. And the idea that the archer would shoot somebody and everyone else just stands there thinking how terrible it is rather than run after him is rather far fetched too. Some semblance to reality would be nice.

This is a really awful episode although the writer is the same as on many previous episodes so I wonder how it can be so much worse than others. Kelly suddenly becomes a bundle of nerves when receiving a death threat over the phone - despite carrying a gun in her handbag and (by now) having five years of experience as a private detective and dealing with countless murders and villains. Things go from bad to worse because she ends up having lunch with the possible killer and in the middle of lunch receives a phone call from Bosley in the Townsend office warning her that it might be him. She gives her excuses and leaves, but instead of going to the police or the Townsend office (where the other three are really worried about her) she goes to the scene of the initial murder. The phone in her car seems to be broken because she doesn't tell anyone where she is going. The killer of course is there to meet her and when confronting him she forgets all her police training in self defence or disarming somebody with a knife and fights like a sixteen year old girl. The killer comically falls into a puddle trying to escape and then shivers in fear like a scolded dog. For some reason this is the only episode on the blu-ray set which is transferred from video, all the other 109 are transferred from film. Perhaps it's because this episode was so bad that even the makers threw away the film and only a video tape of this abysmal episode remains.

The producers were no doubt hoping for a spin off series with three male detectives, but I put the disk in expecting Charlie's Angels, not a pilot for another show. The basics of the plot don't make sense. If somebody released from jail is trying to kill the angels and has planted a bomb already then you don't have the angels mooching about getting into danger. You would hide them away and set the three male detectives on the trail of the villain. That of course would block any interaction between the three male detectives and the angels (how annoying for common sense to get in the way of a good plot). The part with the lassoing of the plane by somebody with a rope on a horse was hilarious, lets try and have some grounding in reality, please.

I really liked the episode since it was what we would call now an "anthology episode". It was fun to see the three scams although a bit twee that the amount scammed back was exactly the amount Harley Dexter ripped off the three victims.

This episode is really the worst episode I've seen in my trip through all the series. There is a real ghost causing trouble in the house (and at the Townsend offices it seems) and it looks like the writer had been watching Alfred Hitchcocks Rebecca the night before also since there are shades of the evil housekeeper who doesn't like the new young wife.

This is my least liked episode of Charlie's Angels so far and that has a lot to do with the presence of Sammy Davis Jr. Probably the episode went down better in the 70's when he was famous and appreciated but 45 years later the episode feels quite flat and his mannerisms and comedy mean nothing to me since I have not seen him in movies or whatever he was famous for years ago and he certainly doesn't add much to this episode. The main problem is that his "lookalike" behaves so much like him that the whole premise of the story is flawed. Another actor without such distinctive mannerisms and behaviour would have been better since then it would be believable that there were actually two people who just look almost identical.