Reviews

I never had much like for Matt Lauria. He is treated like the Captain of the football team in a college, and not like a scientist who has to use his brain. By comparison, Gil Grissom was a real CSI type of character, and he was credible.

Paula Newsome, who plays the director of the CSI never impresses me. She looks weird, like if Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King had a baby, it would grow up to be Paula. I keep expecting her to give life coaching advice, and a lot of times she does.

Why is everyone stopping their jobs to focus on getting Matt Lauria out of the mess he created for himself? It just seems like he is abusing a taxpayer agency by getting a whole bunch of people to work to exonerate him. What about everyone else?

Lauria created his own problem, and he should sink in it. Live by the sword, die by the sword. I gave up on the episode where Paula Newsome tells the review board that Lauria was totally irresponsible and abused his position, and then she tells the board that she wants him back on the CSI team. Wow.

It is not a complicated show. Every episode sticks to a general formula. The Lone Ranger or Tonto (or both of them) seem to get captured very often. They turn over their guns and knife, they are hostages or prisoners, and yet they are never worried too much.

The calmness and faith in goodness and good people is amazing to watch. The Lone Ranger and Tonto always give people the benefit of the doubt. They put themselves in danger to protect others. It is all part of their normal day.

It is hard to put into words, but these two characters are so positive, and so nice, they are superheroes. Their superpower is good intentions, wanting to help people in trouble.

Jay Silverheels is a really good actor too. A lot of his acting is without words. He lives in a world that treats Native Americans pretty badly, and yet he gets his job done without expecting anything. He also puts a lot of meaning into his looks and body language. I doubt that he ever got the credit he deserved for his acting.

It takes around thirty minutes to introduce all the rejects from the surface world that live in Vault 33. I was trying not to puke as I watched this smarmy sugary jello bomb.

The bug-eyed girl who thinks she is God's Gift wants to get married, but she cannot find anyone in her vault, so she forces her Dad, the Mayor (Kyle McLachlan) to get her a mail-order husband. He reaches out to the next vault, 32. Apparently over the previous 50+ years nobody has kept in touch with their neighbors, and has no idea that vault 32 has ceased to exist.

All hell breaks loose when the wedding guests arrive to vault 33. Not sure why or what the point of the invasion was, except killing the vault-dwellers. Just a lot of pointless mayhem and ridiculous nonsense.

Bug-eyed girl decides to leave vault 33 so she can search for her Dad, who got kidnapped. None of this makes any sense, just a bunch of random stupidity and not much else.

This looks and feels like a parody or comedy, but it is really boring and lame. The non-stop songs from the 1940s makes it painful to listen to this garbage.

I fast-forward through most of it, since it is one of those shows that fills up time by showing you someone walking every step from one place to another, so you can fast-forward a minute or two so they can get where they are going faster.

Looking at the big eyes and goofy face of Vaultgirl is another downer. There used to be a TV series that featured a mongoloid kid. He could make that look work.

A lot of the characters are just dysfunctional and pointless. There is not much going for this show, except the Ghoul, and he is just a standard chaos character.

Whenever the annoying 1940s songs start playing, I put it on mute. Most of the dialogue is lame. This show is based on a video game, so dialogue is not a priority. You can guess most of it from just watching, and thus avoid listening to the horrible music.

The music is all cheerful love songs and other cheerful stuff from the 1940s, so I guess it is meant to be sarcastic or cynical view of the post-Apocalypse. I guess most of that music is in the public domain, and that is why it is being used (for free). There are lots of cheerful songs from the 1970s, 1980s, etc. That would not be so annoying, but those are not free.

This is a very interesting story that features several cold hearted killers. The story opens with Sam Pryor (Howard Petrie) fighting back against a robber who kills him as Pryor's daughter (Fay Spain) walks in and sees her Dad murdered.

A second later the Sheriff walks in (Joe Patridge) and arrests the killer (Harry Bakalyan). Fay Spain immediately demands that the Sheriff (her ex-boyfriend) kills Harry. When the Sheriff refuses, Spain vows that he will not live to take the killer to trial.

Fay Spain really put forward a powerfully mean and cold-hearted character in this episode. She was usually a temptress or girlfriend. Sometimes she had a harder edge, but I cannot recall any time that she was this ruthless.

Into town comes Josh Randall (Steve McQueen) along with Warren Oates and young Wayne Rogers (of MASH fame). They tell Randall they are just looking for work, but Randall is suspicious.

As the story unfolds, the Sheriff gets murdered taking Bakalyan out of town. Randall takes over, and he is told by Fay Spain that he is next unless he gives up Bakalyan.

A short time later, as Randall is on the road, he comes across Spain, Oates and Rogers, who are now going to free Bakalyan and kill Randall. Spain is fine with it as long as Bakalyan gets lynched, but the twist is that Oates and Rogers came to town to free Bakalyan, who is their buddy.

The very cool shootout happens, and Randall barely avoids getting killed. One issue I always have with this episode is that I believe it was Fay Spain that ordered the Sheriff to get killed, but apparently the blame is swept to Oates and Rogers.

Afterwards, Fay Spain is asking Randall to look her up in San Francisco, like she just may have had her ex-boyfriend murdered, and she paid Oates and Rogers to kill off Randall too. Why would any sane human want to be her friend??

The ridiculously incompetent and pathetic characters on this show manage to get an innocent bystander carjacked and kidnapped because of their horrible law enforcement practices.

They were supposed to do a controlled buy and arrest a guy. Scoma and Whiffany manage to botch that, because Whiffany imagines that she saw Hakim, the guy who killed Hobbs. Whiffany feels guilty that she ordered Hobbs into the restroom to befriend Hakim, and got him killed (she did).

So now Whiffany takes over the FBI and changes the orders. She decides to follow Hakim to a daytime strip club that is full of people. That is just bad writing, or else the outside scenes should have been dark instead of daylight. I have never seen a morning strip club that is packed with party people.

So Whiff goes in, and her spineless weasel partner Scoma is afraid to say no. Scoma does whatever Whiff says, even though he is the senior officer. Scoma is terrified of being accused of you-know-what, so he is always begging her forgiveness for anything white people have done.

In the club, the targeted villain immediately spots Whiffany, and gets very suspicious. She pretends it is just an accident they are meeting again, and immediately demands to know if Hakim is back. Villain gets more suspicious, and Whiff keeps pushing, like she is going to glimmer the guy into talking.

Guns are drawn, Whiff and Scoma do a typical failed chase, and squat down when shots are fired. The vil picks up a hostage, as is the tradition in every episode of this show, and another chase happens. Eventually after a car crash that should have put everyone into hospital, Scoma and Whiff shoot the guy and free the hostage.

They failed to get any information, they failed to arrest the target, and they almost got another innocent bystander killed. Typical good day on this show.

Whiff goes by Hobb's house to scare the hell out of his widow, and to feel better about herself. Hobb's widow tells her to get lost and not to contact her anymore. Somehow Whiffany can never show any credible concern for anyone else. Nobody likes her. She is a psychopath who happens to be in law enforcement.

The highlight of this episode is that Doc Adams is the star.

Kathleen Hite, John Meston, and Norman McDonald ruled the Gunsmoke writer's room during the first ten years, and their concept of an "adult Western" was that often all the good characters died, and nobody was happy. While the villains were usually killed off too, Matt Dillon avoided gunplay if possible, so a fair amount made it to jail.

Here we get a really dumb and depressing story that could have had a positive and happy ending. Mary (Jan Clayton) and her son Sully (Peter Brooks) are friends of Festus. He realizes they are very ill when he visits them, and calls on Doc.

Doc realizes that they have scurvy, and he gets Matt and Festus to help him round up vegetables and other foods with vitamin C, to help Mary and her son. So far it was a great story.

Unfortunately, because the "adult Western" crew was involved, they wrote Mary into not eating all the healthy foods that Doc brought over, because she wanted only her son to get healthy. This was really dumb, because Doc visited her several times and explained that the food was very important for their health.

As Mary refuses to eat the good foods, her health continues to decline, with predictable and unnecessary results. This should have been a triumph of medicine by Doc Adams, but Kathleen Hite, the writer, robbed Doc of his victory.

Into the mix comes Adrew Duggan, as some old friend of Doc Adams. He used to be a doctor too, but went looking for gold and got rich. Now he feels sorry for himself, because he wishes he had faith in himself and continued to be a doctor. So sad. The violins are out for sad little rich man.

It turns out his partner was Mary's husband, so he goes out to meet her just in time to witness her death. Unhappy trails thanks to the "adult Western" writing crew. Fortunately, their reign on Gunsmoke was about to end, and happier times were coming to Dodge City.

There is not much in terms of nudity in this film. Unlike most exploitation prison or reform school movies, we just get a confused teenager who gets shunted from place to place because she does not fit in.

The lead character is played by Madeline Hinde, who had a short career in films. The lead guy is played by Dennis Waterman, who had a very long career. He was famous as Jerry Standing from the New Tricks detective series. In 1969, when this movie came out, he was 21 years old.

He tries to be a good boyfriend and friend to Madeline, but she is too traumatized by a previous sexual assault. She is acting out fantasies that she killed her attacker, but in fact he recovered. So it is all about her mental health issues and the creepy guys who linger in her life. If you find that kind of stuff boring, this is full of it. There is some light sexual stuff for a few minutes, but it is mostly left to the imagination.

An experienced undercover drug agent finds some drums of drug chemicals at a gym, and immediately blows his cover by getting caught taking photos and running away. He also gets intoxicated by the chemicals and has a heart attack and dies.

Wow. That looked so bush league, like he was a high school newspaper writer going for the top story? Jimmy Olsen getting nabbed following the bad guys to their hideout? Literally hundreds of similar stories, but when somebody bungles it so badly that he not only gets caught but also dies, it is not the top-dog undercover agent of an Australian task force.

Suddenly Tuuli Narkle is hiding evidence, and Sean Sagar is getting suspicious. This show seems to want to turn Sagar and Narkle into an unprofessional office romance, so you are supposed to give Sagar slack for being her stalker, and not just her law enforcement colleague.

At some point he follows her to the gym like she is his woman, where she is working undercover on her own initiative (another example of professionalism), and then she punches him out to prove to the gang that she is one of them. This scene was somewhere between bad and comical.

Just like Narkle, Sagar goes off the chain of command to follow Narkle. Nobody on this team has any respect for the concept of being a member of the team, or the heirarchy of command.

To top it off, we get more scenes of Blue Spazz (Mavournee Hazel) getting nothing done as she stammers away and makes excuses. Basically she can do Google searches, and that's it. Really lame character, and her scenes are painful and annoying to watch.

This movie has some great scenes. The story is not very good, and the movie does not flow very well, but thanks to the miracle of fast forward, you can enjoy all the fun scenes and make up your own story.

David Emge of 1978's Dawn of the Dead is one of the good guys. John Saxon, who had a long and distinguished acting career is the evil villain, mad doctor. He invented a serum injected in the base of a victim's neck, that steals their souls. It also turns them into evil zombies of a sort.

Mama Jones is the evil nun, played by Ron Asheton of Iggy Pop and the Stooges fame. The guy with all the scars on his face is played by Eric Kingston. He had a very short career, but he does a really good job as a psychotic killer in this movie. Neil Savides plays a creepy little zombie boy, and he is excellent and super-creepy. There are a couple of other satanic zombies in the cast, and they all do a pretty good job of being creepy and scary.

Robert Dole plays the good professor who is trying to stop John Saxon. Emge, Dole, and a couple of students (Amy Raasch and John Croteau) are all trying to stop the satanic rights, but all of the good characters have issues with each other, and are not fighting together. That is one of the flaws that makes this movie more choppy and confusing than it had to be.

One bright spot is Dave Dixon, the famous Detroit DJ who also became a famous Night Owl movie host in Miami, makes a cameo here as the radio announcer.

So now Jerry is gone, and Sasha was out sick. Cranky Jerry was the heart of the team. Jack was the smarts and professionalism, and Brian was the intuition and weird brilliance. Amanda Pullman was the discipline that held them all together. Now they are all gone.

The only guy in the current cast that has the spirit of the original group is Steve / Denis Lawson. He is great as a member of UCOS. It would have been awesome if he had been in the cast even before Jack and Brian left the team. He fit with the style and philosophy of the orignal cast.

By comparison, the shrill Danny (Nicholas Lyndhurst) is not a nice guy or a team player. Never liked him on this show. Now his girlfriend is on in every episode, so we can find out if they should get married or live together (who cares?).

The new replacement guy, Ted Case (Larry "had a little" Lamb) is another version of Danny, but less nasty. Might as well open an accounting or lawyer's office with all the warmth that Ted and Danny exude. Change the title to "New Taxes" and make it about collecting old tax debts.

The best thing about this episode were the cute furry critters that everyone had. Those were the best trained dogs I have ever seen on TV. After at least a couple of hours, none of them had done their business in the cafe!

Even better was the focus on the only good actor in this series, William McInnes. Unfortunately, Todd Lasance got to scream at his boss like a little girl because the police might actually shoot someone who was pointing a gun at numerous people while walking around with a bomb vest.

It would have been interesting if she had blown the cafe, just to see the reactions of all the smarmy jackass characters at NCIS who were crying for the bomber, even though she was an accomplice to a fellow police officer being killed. The way the NCIS just glossed over the murder of a police officer was disgraceful.

Even worse was the horribly annoying spazz, or rather Blue. She spends the entire episode in tears, because she has so much sympathy for the bomber and her sick sister. She cannot get anything decrypted, and she is totally useless. Finally, at one point she runs into the restroom to cry. What is this character doing on a crime show??

Eventually she notices that the sick sister has a tracker on her book bag. As she points out to the rest of the losers, "It has been staring me in the face all day." Yes it has. Once again Blue spazz whiffs it. I cannot even remotely take this series seriously.

Between spazz and the crybaby Ozzie detective Dempsey, it is a joke. Then in every episode, Sean Sagar is twriling the basketball on his finger tips. Is that his only acting skill? Is that what he brings to the table?

Perhaps the best part of this episode is that Olivia Swann was hardly involved at all. The best thing that could happen to NCIS Sydney is if Swann and Blue eloped and they brought in better actors.

I saw this when it came out, and it was so boring that I totally forgot I had ever seen it. Netflix kept putting it on my list of things to see, so I started seeing it again, and all I could remember was all the boring parts, so I was able to fast forward to the two or three minutes of action in every episode.

I love Tamara Taylor, she is a unique combination of good-hearted and brilliant. When she first gets in the same scene with droopy J. C. McKenzie, the guy that plays her husband, I thought it was her step-father or her butler. There is no where in the universe where Tamara Taylor would even have coffee with the little toilet drip that plays her husband.

McKenzie is just a total drag on the story, the other characters, and the credibility of their organization. I can imagine him as a florist, a funeral home director, a maitre'd at a French restaurant, or a restroom attendant at a night club. McKenzie as a monster hunter is laughable.

His kids are worse. The chubby girl who is always angry and disliked at her school? She is an elitist snob who is always talking Japanese with her creepy brother. Her brother has at least one making-out scene in every episode where he finds some random guy from the school and gets on it. He ends up with Pranett Akilla as his high school boyfriend, who was 27 but looked 35.

There are a few twists, and they seem pointless. The kids are only too happy to throw their parents under the bus. People die all the time because one of the monsters figured out how to get revenge on Presidio, the monster-hunters.

This series would have been better if it just focused on hunting monsters, but that would have required action scenes and special effects. Instead it is layers upon layers of drama, politics, betrayals, romance, etc., and if you don't care about the characters it is boring.

Except for Tamara Taylor, the rest of the characters were just two-dimensional nothing.

Not sure why Danny (Nicholas Lyndhurst) came into this show like he was supposed to be a better James Bond, but in almost every episode he does a great job as a horse's bottom.

He was in the foreign corps or something, and it is hinted strongly that he was some kind of spy. If being arrogant and abrasive is the main quality, then Danny must have been a great spy.

Danny was constantly putting down Jerry (Dennis Wateman), and always putting on airs around everyone else. By comparison, Steve (Denis Lawson) was great at his job and could have a normal conversation with anyone. He was a great detective who was a nice and humble person.

So we get to the Roman reanactment games, where everyone is young and in great shape. Danny shows up to go undercover, and I had to laugh at that scene of the tall, gaunt, lumbering jackass pretending he could run with the Roman tigers. Funnier still that all the Roman club members are fawning over Danny, like he was Hercules or Spartacus reborn.

The actual mystery plods along and gets solved. The twist ending was especially "politically correct" and the main evil doer is given a free pass because the victim was a bad actor. All's well that end's well is the new motto of the new UCOS team.

Dodds is implicated in murders by someone framing him. It is pretty obvious, and yet he is falling apart over it. McDonald is not a very warm or friendly person, and it is hard to tell if she has his back or not.

The killer is out to get revenge on Dodds for arresting him several years earlier. His life was ruined due to spending five years in prison. Killer thought Dodds owed him some jail time.

The killer's Mom is one of the worst Mom's in the history of cinema. She saw her son getting arrested as a great opportunity for her to kick him to the curb, and turn his room into a music studio so she could revive her career as a lounge singer.

The underwhelming finale was a scene ripped from a dozen other shows. McDonald and Dodds are both shocked and overwhelmed by walking into a trap on a bridge. Bad Mom shows up to support her killer son, who just wants to finish his perfect revenge.

The convoluted resolution was a miracle that the two detectives were not killed. They should not be handling sharp objects or solving crimes. McDonald's needs fry cooks.

Nicholas Lyndhurst has all the charisma of a soggy diaper. He comes into the UCOS office like a big jerk. He is rude and abrasive to Jerry, and arrogant to everyone.

I have seen the entire series a few times, and after the two Gibraltar episodes, New Tricks crashes and burns for the most part.

Lyndhurst / Danny Griffin is a gigantic prima-donna. He does not like or trust the team, especially Jerry. He is constantly taking shots at Jerry and making sarcastic remarks. He is often investigating in a sneaky manner, like he thinks the other guys are idiots. He loves to show them up by springing his findings on them. Griffin is very cut-throat and unpleasant.

The best part of this episode was the introduction of Storme Toolis as the daughter of Griffin. She is a very bright character, and it would have been nice if she could have joined UCOS instead of Griffin.

By contrast, Dennis Lawson / Steve was a positive addition to the team. He supports and gets along with everyone. He does not snipe at his colleagues, show them up, or degrade them.

Lawrence Dobkin is the featured guest star, and he really hams it up as Pascal, the insanely controlling clown who owns a little circus and married the young Gloria Talbot.

She is one of his aerealists but she is paired up with a young stud who tosses her up in the air and grabs her, holds her, catches her, and is all over her on the acrobatic swings. Pascal can't stand to see her in his arms, and he is full of rage, and constantly verbally abuses Gloria, and her swinging partner, Dario (Britt Lomond). He also slaps Gloria around.

Into this festering hellishness enters Gil Favor, who whines and complains to Pascal that his animals smell bad, and the beeves are scared of them, because they are muy macho. Not even the toros want to tangle with the old lions.

So for the sake of drama, Favor sends Wishbone to the circus, so he can make sure that it is all kosher. Pascal is a pretty nice guy, and so is everyone else on the circus. Pascal's best friend is Billy Barty, the famous little person who starred in dozens of Mickey Mouse short films in the 1930s. Pascal is not very nice to him. It seems like Pascal likes to hurt the ones that he loves the most.

As drama, the dynamics between all the characters is compelling. Wishbone does his best to make things better, but he just becomes part of Pascal's downward spiral. Pascal wants to control Gloria (is that love?), but he feels that he is not worthy. She loves him, but she is burned out from all the abuse.

It all comes to a head, and Pascal goes from one extreme to the other, where he ends up wanting to free her from his love and their marriage. Definitely a sad story, and not very much of it is a Western. It is nice to see Wishbone as the lead character.

At the end, Pascal gets into fights with a couple of people, and the red rubber bulb on his nose never falls off. He also never loses the sock on his head. Even as a kid, I had a hard time taking it seriously. R. I. P. Pascal...

George Kennedy was usually a bad father on TV shows. A wooden lack of expression and a monotone robotic voice made it hard to know if he had any feelings. Condemning his kids for whatever they were happy doing made it hard to like him as a Dad.

In this episode, Kennedy is upset that his super hottie daughter (Katherine Ross) is sparking with Quint Asper (Burt Reynolds). Reynolds was another actor who had a hard time emoting. He could smile or frown, but that was about as far as it got.

So these two guys are fighting with each other over Ross, and along comes Royal Dano, another guy that had zero range of expression. Normally Dano played dim-wits, hill-people, miners, etc.

This time Dano plays the tough hill-man from the Dagler family tree. Kennedy is his cousin, and called him down to Dodge so he can kill Quint, the man his daughter loves. Not very great family values.

Festus knows Dagler, and he gets added to the mix of tough characters. This was back when Festus was a tough hill-man himself, before the last years, when the writers watered him down into a goof-ball.

Reynolds and Ross are going to elope, but even though Quint can see that trouble is brewing, he wants to do it on his own time. Ross wants to go sooner, because she is knows her Dagler family, and that all hell is about to break loose.

Unfortunately Quint leads his girlfriend into a major family conflict and then leaves her hanging there, and she pays the price. Not a great moment for Quint. He should have protected Ross, and he should have had a bright moment by taking out Dano, the bad guy.

So after some space warfare between the Covenant fleet, the UN Space Command and the new Spartan 3, the Master Chief sees that most of the Spartan 3 (Junior Varsity) and Kai are getting wiped out. MC finally puts on his big boy pants (armor) and does some super-soldier fighting, and he turns the tide for the Spartans. Most of this season the so-called Master Chief has done nothing, and has been without his armor.

After MC helps out, Kai takes over a Covenant ship and crashes it into the main Covenant warship and blows it up (and seems to have died). Finally the good guys win one.

Kai also avoids detonating the K-Spike that would have vaporized everyone on both sides, which was what Shabana Azmi, who plays Admiral Parangosky wanted to do. Thanks to Cortana, the UN Command is convinced that the Covenant will always win, so they were ready to engage in "Mutually Assured Destruction" of everyone.

Meanwhile MC takes off for the final confrontation with the big Mega-Lizard guy, at the Halo pocket universe, where blonde Makee and Mega-Lizard guy are waiting.

The fight between MC and Mega-Lizard guy is not awesome, but at least this time MC wins. Considering that the whole season was building up to this fight, it would have been nice to see something a lot more impressive.

So far the most impressive thing about Halo is that Makee's hair looks like a DEVO helmet. When her Lizard Master dies, Makee / Super Sonic tells MC that "she is a demon too" and she gets into the secret building first, and closes the doors. Sonic the Hedgehog (Makee) is smarter, and ahead of MC when it comes to the Halo power. Hopefully she will not end up as Master Chief's boyfriend.

MC gets help from Cortana, and what seems to be the guardian of the building, another floating light-bulb. They are going to help him understand what to do. Some narration tells us that there is more to come... next season.

Meanwhile psycho Dr. Halsey and her daughter unleashed a zombie plague while they were just randomly picking things up in the cave. The tie between the mother and daughter is that they are the two most irresponsible, treacherous, and negligent scientists in the human race. Sadly, in this TV series, a lot of the human characters are not very admirable.

I enjoyed this two parter, but a lot more without the misery and obsessive bi-polar depression of Brian and his endless selfishness. All he cares about is himself, and how he feels. He is willing to drag Sandra Pullman down the tubes with him, by directly disobeying every command.

This is a comedy drama, but in real life, a loose nutjob like Brian would get himself and his boss and possibly his co-workers all terminated for Brian's many failures to follow orders, and his refusal to follow procedures. Not to mention punching a senior officer and leaking a tape to the mother of an alleged victim.

None of that would happen except on TV, especially the part where Embleton has totally outsmarted Brian, and then confesses into a tape recorder and while Brian's wife is also a witness. Just Bush League nonsense.

So while Dennis Lawson and Jerry are doing a great job investigating the Gibraltar murder, in drops Brian like a wet sack of brownies, to make it all about himself. He goes to the casino, confronts the owner, ignores the advice of his colleague / co-worker, just off the rails all the time. Who could work with anyone like that?

I really enjoyed the chemistry between Dennis and Jerry a lot. They made their scenes work. Brian just makes everything awkward. His goodbye should have been one episode, not four.

Jack is gone, and his classy personality and thoughtful attitude is sorely missed. The part of the show's time that was spent with Jack flows to obnoxious mentally defective Brian, and what a drag that is.

Brian goes to the retirement party of some old guy he blames for the death of the kid that was in his custody, and which got Brian retired / kicked off the Metropolitan Police. Brian assaults the old man, because he figures that will force a hearing and he will get to bring up the dirty laundry.

Brian got blamed for the death of a detained suspect because Brian was drunk and left the kid alone at the station. He wanted to get smoke a fag (cigarrette). He told some other guys to take care of the kid, and they ignored Brian, because nobody likes him. The kid is in the cell, and dies while drunken Brian is out smoking.

Brian gets the blame, and spends the next ten seasons griping and complaining that it was not his fault. But it was. He was drunk, he left the kid, and the kid died.

The fact that nobody took charge of the kid when some drunk shirked his job responsibilities is whose fault? Whose fault is it that drunken Brian has no friends that want to do him a favor?

In Brian's sick brain he wants justice for himself, and in his imagination he is doing it for the dead kid. After a confrontation at the hearing, his nemesis, Embleton admits he let the kid die by not watching him.

Why would he do that? The hearing was over, and Embleton had outsmarted Brian, so why would he make a terrible admission against himself? Of course Brian has taped the confession, and gives the tape to the kid's Mother, so presumably she can sue the Police Department.

Brian subsequently is suspended, and he goes on his psychotic way traveling to Gibraltar to "help" the other two guys that are investigating a murder. Brian marches to his own drum, disrespects Sandra, and their boss, and everyone else. He is mentally disturbed and out of control.

It is too bad that in season 10 they decided to write Brian as a really sick, narcissistic, dangerously obsessed character. His last few episodes are disturbing, and they are also a boring waste of time. I never cared about why Brian got retired, and the trip down the rabbithole of Brian's sick brain is unpleasant and unwanted.

In almost every episode of this TV series, when the villains shoot at the FBI, the agents all dodge and squat and wait for the gunfire to end. Then they yell at the bad guys to give up, and the villains usually take a hostage.

In this episode, the director of a migrant center gets kidnapped by an angry migrant who blames the director for his daugther getting kidnapped. It turns out he is innocent.

Meanwhile the enraged migrant kidnapper is going nuts, screaming, yelling, making threats, etc. At some point Missy Mindless trades herself for the two hostages, so she can be special.

Zacko keeps asking her on the hidden earbud if the kidnapper is by the window, so he can take the sniper shot, but Missy refuses to cooperate. She does not want to kill the bad man, she wants to be a social worker. She wants to be on Sesame Street. K is for Kidnap.

Meanwhile the real kidnapper is tracked down by Scoma and Whiff. He gets stopped, he shoots at Scoma and Whiff a whole bunch sparkle bullets that don't make holes in cars or windows. Eventually they chase him down.

The FBI search his apartment and find a clue to the location of the little girl. However, the search is taking to long. The angry migrant gave them 30 minutes to find the little girl, and time is up, so he decides to kill Missy. When the kidnapper is trying to kill Missy, the FBI breaches the house and captures him. Afterwards the angry kidnapper whines about how the American Dream blows, and he expected more free stuff, and it sucks to go to prison.

Everett Sloane was a pretty intense character actor in most of the roles I have seen him in. He committed suicide in 1965.

Even after death, Orson Welles would badmouth Sloane on his frequent TV appearances on talk shows. You had to live in that era to remember how Orson Welles seemed to pop up all the time on talk shows, and he never had a lot to say that was nice about anyone. Welles had a grudge against Sloane because he quit Welles' Mercury Players during filming of Othello in 1951.

Here in this "Reckless" episode of Wanted, Sloane is the bitter and very angry father of Ron Hayes, who was killed in the first scene. Hayes was engaged to Jean Allison, who often played mean or arrogant ladies in most roles. When Hayes was not ready to take her to the barn dance, she immediately spotted Les Johnson, who was ready to go.

Allison tramped out to his buggy and asked him to be her date. Hayes ran out and asked her to stay, but she got on the buggy. Then Johnson whipped the horses and they ran over Hayes and killed him. I do not understand how that was an accident, it seemed pretty intentional.

I can see why Sloane would be upset, especially since he got run down too, and ended up crippled. Two victims, and no charges brought against Johnson? Hardly seemed fair.

Randall brings in Johnson on Sloane's personal bounty, and Sloane refuses to pay the ransom unless Randall kills Johnson. Sloane really ramped up the conflicts in this episode.

The Sheriff, played by Mark Allen, is clearly a friend of Johnson. Allen comes down hard on Randall, and threatens his safety too. I did not like this episode much because everyone pushes Randall around. It would have been nice to see Randall face off against the bullying Sheriff.

On November 8, 1958, New York jeweler Harry Winston donated the famous Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, he chose the U. S. Post Office. That story was in the news all over the world.

A few months later this "Drop to Drink" episode had the same story, except that bandits would try to hijack the mail in order to steal the diamond. It was up to Randall to save the mails, which also included blessed Holy Water from the River Jordan.

The cast of good guys included veteran actors Willis Bouchey (Perry Mason, Westerns), Dabbs Greer (Westerns), and Kenneth MacDonald (Three Stooges shorts, lots of Westerns).

The bad guys were John Cliff (Three Stooges, Westerns) and Joe Maross. Maross was the vile astronuat that abused the tiny aliens on the Twilight Zone episode "The Little People." He usually played sneaky, mean, backstabbing, insecure, or paranoid characters.

Cliff and Maross are out to steal the $20,000.00 diamond that is being sent by mail. $20,000 in 1870 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $473,780.15 today.

Randall does a great job as the honest man trying to save the mail, and the life of the mail carrier. Maross does a great job pretending to be a good guy, and then cracking Randolph's skull with a rock when he turns his back on Maross.

Lots of offbeat action, not just gunplay. Randolph faces several character-building moments that make the story even more memorable.

Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Andy Griffiths Show, and probably other shows dipped into the idea that two families killing each other off in a feud was funny.

All those shows had at least one comedy episode that had the same basic formula. Two families of really dumb hillbillies were feuding, but they were also very cowardly, so they never actually killed each other. The lead characters got to show them up as really ignorant cowards, and the audience got to laugh at them.

The implications are that the Hollywood community enjoyed smearing the midwest Bible belt types as illiterate knuckle-dragging stereotypes. I thought those types of shows were very boring. Even Steve McQueen looked bored in this episode. It was hard to find anything positive about it.