Ironside - Season 1 Episode Reviews

Ironside Season 1 Episode Reviews

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Copyright ©2017-2024 by Mike Quigley. No reproduction of any kind without permission.

WARNING: The following contains spoilers and the plots are given away!

MAIN PAGEPILOT EPISODEOTHER SEASONS


S01E00 Pilot Episode
After someone tries to assassinate Ironside, chief of detectives for the San Francisco Police Department, he is determined to find the shooter and bring him (or her) to justice.

S01E01 Message from Beyond
Ironside and his team investigate a robbery at the racetrack during a power outage after Ironside himself made a bet where he lost his shirt. What does the title mean?

S01E02 The Leaf in the Forest
A crooked financial adviser uses recent serial murders to cover up his own killing of an old lady who is one of his clients.

S01E03 Dead Man's Tale
Ironside keeps a dead man on ice to draw out a gangster lawyer whose criminal career would be exposed by the man's testimony if he was alive.

S01E04 Eat, Drink and Be Buried
An advice columnist receives threatening messages -- who is behind these? There are several suspects, including her husband.

S01E05 The Taker
Ironside works to vindicate a murdered cop he mentored who is accused of blackmail.

S01E06 An Inside Job
Two prisoners escaping from the police department lockup who wind up in Ironside's office take The Chief and Eve hostage and intend to use them to help get out of the building.

S01E07 Tagged For Murder
Military men from World War II have hoarded stolen money for over 20 years. Martial arts legend Bruce Lee is a guest star. This show has a lot of issues.

S01E08 Let My Brother Go
Ironside wants to convince a superstar football player to help black youth turn away from gang life but this is complicated by the player's brother's problems.

S01E09 Light at the End of the Journey
A blind woman who was close to a murder scene is used to help catch the killer because he doesn't know that she couldn't see him.

S01E10 The Monster of Comus Towers
Mark unbelievably turns into a geek who is familiar with the tower building's security system, resulting in hard-to-swallow technological issues. There is no "monster."

S01E11 The Man Who Believed
A young woman singer is found dead under the Golden Gate Bridge -- did she jump or was she murdered? This is a claustrophobic episode which takes place mostly indoors.

S01E12 A Very Cool Car
Ironside is asked to find out why so many cars are being stolen in the city, and whether this is because of a cover-up involving the cops. Two "hippies" in this show are laughable.

S01E13 The Past is Prologue
Young Harrison Ford's father is a convicted and sentenced-to-death killer who has been on the lam for years. The way the plot exonerates the father is ridiculous.

S01E14 Girl in the Night
Ed, on assignment in Las Vegas, is attracted to a woman pianist and singer who is connected with gangsters.

S01E15 The Fourteenth Runner
A Russian athlete defects during an international track meet. Ironside plays a cat-and-mouse game with the runner's KGB handlers.

S01E16 Force of Arms
A rich right-wing crackpot has created his own army which he says will do a better job at keeping order than the police. One of his former acolytes makes trouble.

S01E17 Memory of an Ice Cream Stick
An acquaintance of Mark finishes a jail term and resumes a criminal lifestyle. Mark becomes unwillingly involved with this guy again.

S01E18 To Kill a Cop
Pernell Roberts is a psychotic cop-hater who rants and raves when he is busted for minor infractions; after the two cops who arrested him are murdered, Ed is on the case.

S01E19 The Lonely Hostage
Ironside and Mark are kidnapped by a cop who robbed a bank where he was moonlighting. There are topographic issues and at the end of the show the way Ironside puts the cop out of commission is stupid.

S01E20 The Challenge
A confusing show, where three artists are the suspects in a murder ... did one of them do it? As well, one of the victim's acquaintances is involved with forgery ... or was it also murder?

S01E21 All in a Day's Work
After Eve kills an escaping criminal, she is so distraught she almost quits the force. An excellent show, though some of the things Ironside says to her are pretty brutal.

S01E22 Something for Nothing
A singer gets involved with gangsters to help pay off his gambling debts. Most of the show is OK, but the bank robbery in the middle doesn't make any sense.

S01E23 Barbara Who
Ironside gets hot pants for a nurse's aide who helped him after he was shot, and she likewise falls in love with him. The woman has no memory of her early life. A soap opera!

S01E24 Perfect Crime
A clever college student is out to prove a perfect crime can be committed; Ironside doesn't think so. The acting of the obnoxious bad guy is very good, you want to punch him in the face.

S01E25 Officer Bobby
A baby is left in Ironside's van. The show is kind of "cute," but there are issues relating to the mother's psycho ex-husband who is trying to track her down and murder her.

S01E26 Trip to Hashbury
Since we are in San Francisco in the late 60s, this is the default hippie episode. The atmosphere is thick as marijuana smoke, and Ed is in big trouble for "police brutality."

S01E27 Due Process of Law
After Mark's girlfriend dies of a heroin overdose, he makes a total pest of himself trying to override all the normal legal and police procedures dealing with the aftermath.

S01E28 Return of the Hero
Ironside wants to clear an ex-cop, now military man, who is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. The bad guy is a mundane villain and there are technological issues.


S01E01: Message from Beyond *
Original air date: September 14, 1967
Director: Michael Caffey; Producer: James McAdams; Writer: Don M. Mankiewicz; Music: Oliver Nelson. Time: 49:53.

In what is kind of a humdrum introduction to the series, Ironside and his team start out spending time at the local race track, instead of solving some nail-biting crime. "The Chief" is annoyed, because due to a power outage, the mutual machines all shut down just as he is about to place a bet where he figures he will make a killing (he later estimates he lost $634). Although Ironside is seen using an elevator, I kept thinking during this show how the race track, which is actually the one at Santa Anita in Arcadia, California near Los Angeles, according to IMDb, not one near San Francisco, would probably be pretty "handicapped unfriendly."

During the "blackout," $175,000 is stolen from the track's money counting room in a mere two minutes. Despite there being thousands of people at the track, its security chief Al Hayes (Gene Evans) just happens to run into Ironside in a hallway, and tells him, "We need you inside." The track's boss, Herb Jarman, played by special guest star James Gregory, says that he asked Hayes to bring Ironside, who worked with Hayes previously as a cop, to meet him.

The thief is suspected to be an employee of the track named Louis E. Blackwell, who has worked there for about six weeks in "internal control, seeing that people didn't go where they weren't supposed to go," according to Hayes. Blackwell, an unidentified British-looking actor seen in a photo and briefly in person later, is an older guy; his wife Margaret, played by Madlyn Rhue, looks much younger. When Ironside and the team visit her, she is suspicious that her husband may have been involved in some kind of criminal activity, especially because he just cleaned out their joint bank account. However, Ironside figures that Blackwell is just a "tool" who stole the money to hand it over to the planner of the caper, "Mr. X," the man who "runs none of the risk and winds up with all the money." Blackwell's actions are not those of a sophisticated thief.

Blackwell is seen escaping in a car later, though after the robbery when he disappeared from the track, it was determined that his car was still in the parking lot. If this was the case, why didn't someone like the cops put surveillance on his vehicle? Is that what Blackwell is driving now? When he runs into a roadblock which was set up after Hayes had an APB put out, Blackwell flees from the cops and is killed when his car crashes.

The team go out to Junctionville, a rinky-dink town near the place where Blackwell died. Russ Quinn, the deputy sheriff there, is played by the gravelly-voiced Ken Lynch. Some of the police procedures of this town's cop shop get Ironside riled up, because the car, which might have contained the money or other evidence, is still sitting, uninvestigated, at the crash location. A cop named Kellogg, played by Kent McCord, later of Adam-12 fame, offers to go to this location ahead of the team. But when Ironside and the others get there, following him, he is found knocked unconscious. There are tire tracks nearby, probably from a tow truck, which fled the scene without taking the car.

To try and find out who is interested in this car, where no clues connected with the robbery are found, it is put up for auction. Some chatty geezer named George Bentley (George Chandler) buys it for $90. When Ed and Eve confront Bentley after the purchase at his place, he says that he bought it so that his wife and he could visit their kids, who live in Southern California. But when Ed and Eve finish talking to Bentley and come back outside his apartment, the car is missing, because Bentley was paid off by "a friend" to buy this car, who has now taken it. The car is later tracked down to an alley, left there for junk, after which it is hauled to the police impound garage.

Ironside finally figures out the "gimmick" with this car. As he is having a massage, he has a brainstorm motivated by one of the lamps brought by the torturous masseuse Helga (Kathleen Freeman) who is working on him. This lamp reminds him of a device used at the race track where whatever is stamped on people's hands with some substance (for re-admission to the place, for example) can be seen with the help of one of these lights. This technology, which involves luminous paint, is very geeky, and not explained at all. Letters inscribed with this "invisible ink" are found written on the car's body, and they spell out "HIRA INLET," along with some other words which are smudged.

Ironside explains to Ed and Eve: "Mr. X, the planner, tells Blackwell to run with the track's money to hide it, then paints the location on the fender and leaves the car somewhere. That way there's no contact between them leading back to Mr. X." Yeah, whatever. There is still no explanation as to whether or not this car was Blackwell's.

Hira Inlet is where "the old boat cemetery" is located, and Ironside and the rest of his team end up at this location, where there is a paddlewheeler. Both Hayes and Jarman are nearby. Jarman turns out to be the bad guy who got Blackwell to steal the money (don't ask me to explain this). But Jarman tries to make it sound like Hayes, who has been knocked out by Mark, was the mastermind. Jarman offers to give the money to Ironside, who says, "You keep it, you went to a lot of trouble. You knew Blackwell was a gambler on the hook for money [WHAT? Have we heard this before? No.] Simple to con him into a partnership setup." After Jarman pulls a gun on Ironside, saying "Don't crowd me," revealing his true intentions, he is knocked by Mark into the water nearby. Hayes, who has had a low-key presence throughout the show, has also been chasing Jarman, telling Ironside at the end of the show after having been suspected of being the thief, that he was "not a very good cop."

This whole ending is convoluted and lame. And the episode's title doesn't make any sense.

TRIVIA:


S01E02: The Leaf in the Forest *
Original air date: September 21, 1967
Director: Leo Penn; Producer: James McAdams; Writer: Don M. Mankiewicz; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:32 (C).

Here is the beginning of this episode..

Notice at 19 seconds, there is a shadow on the wall on the left where some person was in the shot and moved away. As the camera pans left, there are huge shadows on the wall behind various objects, including Esther Garrison (Lillian Bronson), the old lady in bed. What is making these shadows (aside from the lighting for the scene)? There is a lamp which is on, suggesting that is the only lighting that should be in the room.

Also notice when you first see Esther reading the newspaper, there is a banner headline on the paper that we see. The paper is folded in half. There may be some time between this and the next shot, but in the next shot, as Esther turns to look at the door, this banner headline is not there.

As she puts the paper down in front of her, you cannot see the banner headline anywhere on the paper or anything like photos, even though the paper has been turned over.

Before Esther gets out of bed, she throws the paper on the floor, where it is not folded, and also open to its front page. We can see both the banner headline and pictures. Later, there is a big deal made about this by Ironside, as if you threw a paper on the floor like she did after she was reading the "back page," it would always open to the front page.

After Esther opens the door, she isn't surprised ... in other words, it is someone that she knows. This is quite correct, a big clue which is not really important as far as the viewer is concerned at this point, but Ironside later figures this out.

In the next shot of the front page of the paper, the killer steps on it, and there is dirt from a plant beside Esther's bed which gets messed all over the paper as it got knocked over as she falls backwards on to the bed in the killer's point-of-view shot. The mess from this dirt does not tally up with what we see soon after this in the show, where there is less dirt on the paper and the footprint -- which is made by a size nine shoe -- is much "clearer."

I think there are other issues relating to how close the paper was to the plant after the paper was thrown on the floor, etc.

And this is just the beginning of the show!

Esther's murder is quickly discovered -- by whom, who knows? Later, there is a suggestion that the morning papers in San Francisco were already reporting the murder. There is nothing said as to how someone found out about her death so early.

When Ironside and his team show up at Esther's apartment, cops under the direction of Detective Vince Keeley (Burt Freed) are already there. Ironside says there are differences between this murder and four others which preceded it, cases which Ironside was investigating before he was incapacitated. For example, this killer came through the front door, as opposed to the previous ones, who came through a window.

Ironside wants to reconnect with the case and solve this one; Keeley can keep working on the others. When he tells this to Keeley, the response is like "It's your baby," and Keeley and the other investigators leave. Prior to this, a cop is spraying the newspaper with some material, probably to preserve the footprint on it, but most of the dirt that was on this paper, as seen just prior to Esther's murder, is now gone or has been brushed off. When Ed is shown holding the paper shortly after this, it looks like it has been mounted on a piece of cardboard.

At they leave the apartment, Ironside picks up a bottle of milk outside the door which was delivered to Esther's earlier, saying "Waste not, want not," without thinking about checking it for fingerprints.

Back at the office, Ironside points out (as mentioned above) that Mrs. Garrison knew her killer because she opened the door to him. He also finds some things at her place to be significant: "a radio, a camera, a rather nice knife carving set." After a guessing game as to where these things came from, which gives him an excuse to abuse his team for being dumb, Ironside says these are advertising premiums, and these were likely from some financial institution.

While there may be more than one such institution in San Francisco, the one which Esther did business with is quickly determined, without having to get a warrant to investigate her bank account(s) and dealings with similar organizations. Ed and Eve end up at the Bayside Savings and Loan, where Edward Andrews is the huffy and puffy manager who is busy making a commercial. He reveals that his company did business with Esther only after Eve threatens him with a warrant. His character's name in the credits is Mason Bylis, which is not what he seems to say when he is seen making the commercial. Bylis says that to get the three premiums, Esther had to open three separate accounts, two of which were co-signed by Pierre Dupont, her "business manager."

This leads to Dupont (John Larch), who works in a separate office, in the "Old Bay Building." It is not specified if he is an employee of Bylis' company or an independent contractor. Ironside comes along when they go to meet Dupont, who was Esther's husband's accountant; Dupont has managed her finances after her husband passed away. A cocky individual, he says that he used $200,000 from Esther's savings and managed to raise its value to a million dollars by investing in things like "pig bladders, linseed oil, futures, wildcat river estates." Two years ago, Esther told him to start investing conservatively, and he said he followed her instructions, because "the customer is the boss."

Before Ironside and his team leave, Dupont smugly suggests Ironside should remember him from a few years back, and Ironside does recall his name then was Peter Bridges, and he was busted for "false pretenses, fraud, bunco and practising accountancy without a license." He spent three years in jail, and is clean now, adding "Of course, you won't believe that." He shows Ironside Esther's "holographic [handwritten] will"; everything goes to her old church in Du Quoin, Illinois. He plays with Ironside, throwing stuff at him like "I'm a suspect," pointing out that the night of the murder, he was home with his wife.

When Dupont's wife Myra (Barbara Barrie) is visited, she confirms her husband's alibi, saying that she had been warned by him that the cops would be visiting. The wife says "Why can't you leave us alone?" which is odd, considering this is likely the first visit from the police she has received over these issues.

In the middle of the night, Ironside wakes Mark up and makes him read the back page of the paper, the one from the crime scene, which looks like it is no longer on a piece of cardboard, and Mark handles it very roughly. Ironside then says there is someone at the door (no one is) and Mark throws the paper on the floor, and, as mentioned above, the paper is completely opened up and the front page with the footprint is visible. Ironside tells Mark, "what you just did gave us a very important clue." (Seriously.)

Ironside says this nonsense proves that Esther was reading the back page of the paper prior to throwing it on the floor, and there is a column on this page called Marty's Market, which dispenses financial advice. When they go to the local paper, they talk to Marty (Robert Ellenstein). They get a copy of the letter which Esther wrote to him which was answered in the issue of the paper which she was presumably reading prior to getting murdered. When they compare the handwriting in this letter (dated September 4, 1969) with the handwriting in Esther's will (dated November 23, 1964), it is the same. (Does Ironside now have the only copy of the will?)

Ironside gets Dupont thrown in jail, because he set up a system of matching buy and sell orders to speculate with Esther's money (how this was determined is not mentioned). The Commissioner is very agitated over all this, because this move does not prove that Dupont murdered Esther. Ironside says that he will soon have Dupont's confession, but while he is trying to get this, news comes that there has been another murder of an old lady. Dupont leaves the grilling that Ironside was giving him, saying, "I'll tell them [the reporters who are nearby] it was all a mistake, no hard feelings on my part."

Ironside tries to figure some other way that he can prove that the real killer of the first four women had some kind of M.O. Using a map, he suggests that the killer lived in the area of the Bradley Plaza, because all the murdered women were near this location, and he could see the lit-up windows of older women who lived in the area and if they were home at some specific time. (Uh-huh...)

They decide to set up Eve to be an "older woman," thanks to an awful makeup job, and have her sit around with the light on in an apartment near this plaza so the killer will see her as a potential victim. This is done, and despite the fact that Eve is a judo expert (resulting in more than just one WHAT?!?! for this scenario), the killer shows up at her place, comes through the window and attacks Eve, who almost loses the fight until Mark, who has been stationed nearby, intervenes. It turns out that the killer was really the neighborhood milkman and he confesses everything.

Returning to Dupont's apartment, Ironside engages in some major browbeating of Dupont's wife, with Dupont himself listening to everything. This is going nowhere, until Ironside flashes on Dupont's shoes ... that Dupont would have taken the shoes he had on during the murder out of his home the morning after Esther was killed. There is again a reference to how the morning papers had articles about Esther's murder very early. When Ironside asks the wife if her husband took some shoes (the ones with dirt on them from the murder scene) out of their place, climaxing with "Would you cover up for a killer? Would you go and alibi for a killer that put a pillow over an old lady's head and pushed and pushed and kept on pushing until..." Finally, she cracks and says, "No," and admits that she has been covering for him all along.

In a post-mortem at the office, it is said that Dupont had power of attorney over Esther's affairs, which has not been mentioned anywhere yet. Why he committed murder as opposed to taking the rap for a minor charge of speculating with her money was because with this power, he was executor of her estate (also not mentioned) and could have taken the million dollars and "parlayed it into a fortune for himself. Dupont was a gambler, he figured the odds were with him."

Because of the grilling of the wife at the end and various other factors, I think this is going to be a very difficult case to prove in court, because a wife is exempt from testifying against her husband unless he gives her permission to do so -- though this is among the least of issues raised by this case.

The title of the episode looks like it would be dumb, like that for the previous one, but Ironside explains what it means: "The best hiding places are these: for a book, a library; for a man, a city; for a leaf, a forest. Ancient Persian proverb." Eve takes joy in telling him, "Confucious say, 'Man who use proverb to reply to direct question often talk through hat'." At the end of the show, Ed asks Ironside if his proverb is legitimate, or did he just make it up. Ironside replies, "It's legitimate, just ask any Turk." Eve says, "Turk? You said it was Persian." Ironside tells her, "Turks are quite familiar with Persian proverbs," as he throws a dart at the nearby board and gets a bulls-eye.

TRIVIA:


S01E03: Dead Man's Tale *
Original air date: September 28, 1967
Director: Don Weis; Producer: James McAdams; Writers: Donald A. Brinkley & Don M. Mankiewicz (teleplay), Don M. Mankiewicz (story); Music: Oliver Nelson. Time: 49:54.

When I first reviewed this episode in 2017, I said the show finally seemed to "get its groove on," which is true. Compared to other early episodes before and after, it is pretty logical and devoid of plot issues.

The guest star is Hawaii Five-O's Jack Lord as John Trask, a sleazy mob-connected lawyer well-known by Ironside for laundering fishy money with various legitimate businesses. The exchanges between Trask and The Chief in the show are quite delightful.

Warren Stuart (Simon Scott), one of Trask's associates, is about to blab all sorts of dirt about his boss and the "organization" to Ironside, so Trask has him knocked off at the beginning of the show by someone whose aim with a rifle seems a bit off target. Stuart dies from his injuries, but Ironside decides to pretend that he didn't die, and makes it look like he is in the hospital suffering from "critical" injuries.

Stuart's doctor, Leon Chaffey (Ben Wright), has some problems with this scenario, but Ironside says if he doesn't co-operate by not filing a death certificate right away, not only Stuart will be dead, but it is quite likely that the doctor will be too, as well as Stuart's cute blonde girl friend Tina Masson (Suzanne Cramer, again a young-looking woman; the actress was 16 years younger than Scott).

Stuart's body is taken to the barred area of the hospital reserved for criminals and he supposedly is still alive but unconscious in his room, having suffered "multiple gunshot wounds." Eve is sometimes seen playing a nurse. The Commissioner is annoyed by Ironside's plan, especially the amount of manpower it will utilize. Ironside tells him that Trask is "a new breed, a businessman, a professional man, not in the 'muscle business.' He depends on and operates behind a legitimate front, in this case a law firm. He pushes buttons, never gets personally involved." They have to make him think he made a mistake because Stuart was not knocked off properly.

Trask eventually shows up in the hospital, identifying himself as "Stuart's associate." Tina, who is there, doesn't want to talk to him. Ironside comments this is because "maybe she doesn't like hoods." Ed, who has been assigned to be her bodyguard, takes her home to her apartment via a back door to avoid reporters. She tells him that Stuart met her a couple of years ago, and he helped her parents, who needed money and helped her with her career as a model. She knows Stuart has a bad side, but, on the other hand, he was very kind to her.

Back at the hospital, Trask is sticking around. He has arranged for some guy named John Henderson (uncredited actor), playing a hospital worker, to set off a bomb just outside the secured area, which causes havoc. Although only a cop seems to be seriously injured, the principals are all OK. The bomber is prevented from getting into Stuart's room and escapes from the hospital. Ironside tells Trask what a great alibi he has, being present when the bomb went off, which would make it seem like he had nothing to do with the explosion. Trask finally leaves after threatening various legal action to see Stuart, telling Ironside, "You know where the courthouse is."

Soon after, Trask shows up at Tina's apartment, where Ed is still guarding her. Trask's suit looks pretty clean, considering it was all covered with dust from the explosion in the hospital, and he has a bandage on his forehead. In a very oily manner he says to Tina when she sees Stuart, "Tell him of my concern." Trask continues, "It might relieve him to know you are being looked after. What else are loyal friends for? Warren knows the high price I place on loyalty ... from everyone ... the first fundamental of business ... and living."

When Trask leaves, Tina tells Ed she knows Trask was telling her to keep her mouth shut and to tell Stuart to do the same. She says that Trask and the people who he associates with are "worse than animals," and tells Ed to pass a message along to Ironside that she will do anything possible to "get them."

Back at the hospital, Ironside is fending off questioning from reporters, suggesting that Stuart is "somewhere else." Henderson was hired at the hospital only the day before because he passed a security check. When cops go to his apartment, he is found dead. Ironside says "even the syndicate frowns on that."

Ironside ups his scheme by releasing news that Stuart has regained consciousness and is "very talkative." Stuart will continue his conversation with the grand jury which meets in a few days. Various gangsters in town are shown freaking out over this, and Trask is getting calls from "Mr. Big," a guy named Gregory (Byron Morrow) who says "the situation will have to be resolved very quickly." Local gangsters are busted to be held over the weekend, which has the Commissioner yelling at Ironside, because the jails are full. When one of these guys is arrested, he leaves a hooker in his room who is just dressed in her slip.

Getting desperate, Trask arranges for a Smith Ambulance to show up at Tina's apartment. The doorman, who previously seemed to be connected with the bad guys, is a cop, and he is knocked out as is Ed, who is still guarding Tina, who gets the chloroform treatment. Notified what is going on, Ironside and his team leap into their trusty van and co-ordinate a bunch of other cops who are tailing the ambulance through town.

However, when going through a tunnel, Tina's body on the gurney is switched to another ambulance which throws the cops for a loop. Ironside figures out they are headed to the fictional Bayside Airport where Trask has a private plane and he has filed a flight plan to Mexico. With the co-operation of the airport controllers, Trask's plane is redirected from one runway to another, which lets Ironside and some cop cars stop him from taking off, just in the nick of time.

Tina is rescued and Trask and two stooges are busted, causing Ironside to describe Trask as "wearing the cuffs, just like any cheap hood." When Trask throws a half-lit cigarette on the ground, Ironside says littering will be added to the charges against him ("two counts of assault, ambulance theft, conspiracy, felony kidnapping"), which will result in "up to 25 years in prison, no possibility of parole or, at the discretion of the jury, the gas chamber [presumably for the murder of Stuart ... assuming all this can be proved]." As Trask is taken away, Ironside is amazed that he has finally met an attorney who is at a loss for words. He tells Trask, "Better get yourself a good lawyer."

TRIVIA:


S01E04: Eat, Drink and Be Buried
Original air date: October 5, 1967
Director: William Graham; Producer: James McAdams; Writer: Tony Barrett; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 49:51.

Francesca Kirby (Lee Grant) is a well-known, hard-hitting columnist who not only dispenses advice in the newspaper five times a week, but also has her own TV show where she does the same.

In the evening after a pool party with friends at her rural estate, Francesca is walking alone in a forested area close to her place, smoking a cigarette which she flicks into a nearby pond. Suddenly a frogman in a scuba outfit surfaces out of the water, pursues her back to near her house, picks her up in a Tarzan-like manner, throws her into an Imperial Crown Coupe convertible and drives off as she screams for help.

The car speeds down a nearby hill as there is a really bad process shot (projected background) behind the two of them, showing a fence which doesn't appear anywhere when we see the car from further away. Francesca grabs and twists the steering wheel which causes the car to veer off the road into some bushes. The frogman beats a hasty retreat from the scene as several men who were still at the house after the party rush down the hill and surround the car, making sure Francesca is OK.

Soon after this, Francesca's husband Mitch (Farley Granger) shows up at Ironside's office to ask for help to find out who tried to kidnap his wife, though she is brushing off the whole incident as "some kind of bad joke."

Ironside, who was a friend of Francesca many years before when she was a police reporter, goes to her place where she is taping her TV show. She shows him a typed letter on blue paper received about a month before which says "people like you should not be allowed to live -- and you won't -- somebody's got to stop you." She also gives him a drawerful of other threatening mail and he takes it away with him. She says she doesn't want any police protection; Ironside says that it will be just him in charge of the investigation, with no publicity.

Back at the office, Ironside says of the blue paper letter, "a worn typewriter key never hits squarely," but the distinguishing feature of this message is the capital letter "E," which seems to be darker than the others. Eve complains that it will take forever to go through all of the letters in the drawer. As she checks the letters, she flicks them on the floor if they don't match the one with the defective character. Ed goes to investigate the scuba driver's oxygen tanks; he finds out the name of the person who rented them was a phony, with no fixed address.

Mark, a "jazz buff," is assigned to find what he can about Mitch, who was formerly a drummer. There were rumours a while ago that his marriage to Francesca was "rocky." Mark goes to The Key of C jazz club, where a combo is rehearsing. Les Appleton, the pianist, who Mark knows, is none other than series (and this particular episode's) composer Quincy Jones, whose acting is very good. Les tells Mark, "It's all over the street now that you are living with the fuzz." Annoyed, Mark replies, "Man, it's a job, and that's all." Les tells hims, "Don't get so up tight about it, man, I'm not putting you down ... it's a lot better than what you were doing."

When asked about Mitch, Les says, "Freddie Profile ... that's what we used to call him. He's a good-looking guy, played a few gigs with him once or twice ... He's bad news, though. He's a jive funny-time-keepin' toned-out musician ... Buddy Rich won't lose any sleep over him ... No talent, still, he winds up marrying that lady columnist with all the bread ... The way I hear it, he hasn't changed at all. I know a couple of bookies he's on the hook to, and I've seen him with other broads. He's still frustrated with playing, he comes in every now and then, wants to sit in."

Ironside and Mark go back to Francesca's place, only to find out she has been poisoned with strychnine. A police doctor is summoned; after examining Francesca, he assures Ironside that she will be OK. Mitch tells Ironside that Francesca's sister Doris Keller (Maria Lennard) visited her earlier, and the two "have always hated each other."

Ironside goes to Doris's business, which is "Photography Models / $3.00 an hour." This consists of some hot blonde wearing a bikini on a "set" which looks like a bedroom, and three guys, who could probably be described as "major league wankers" are taking her picture with flash cameras. These guys are dressed normally, though one of them is on the floor looking up at her. After Doris kicks them out, she describes them as "kooks."

Doris tells Ironside she didn't try to kill her sister, but says "I would have done it if I had the nerve." Doris was the one who originally came up with the advice columnist idea for her sister, which Francesca "stole" from her, "lock, stock and money." Doris says, "this town's wall-to-wall with heads she's stepped on."

Next in the list of suspects is Darren Sanford (Richard Anderson), Francesca's publisher. He tells Ironside that he and her had become an "item" around town before the idea for Francesca's column was finalized. Francesca convinced Sanford to divorce his wife, but after the column began, Francesca suddenly developed an interest in Mitch. Sanford says there is no reason why he should want her dead, because the column and TV show are both very successful, and he benefits from this.

Ironside goes to see Francesca, who is on her yacht. There is a small ramp at the edge of the dock making it easier for Ironside to see her. Ironside tells her "we're not dealing with a sick fan any more." She tells him people would consider Mitch to be a major suspect because of his background, but "the marriage is solid, it just needs a little working on from time to time." Someone suddenly tries to take a shot at her, and Ironside gets wounded in his right arm. Both Mark and Ed who are nearby respond, and the shooter's car is put out of order, but like the frogman earlier, he totally vanishes.

Ironside has another trick up his sleeve. He arranges for Francesca's secretary Annie Royer (Joanne Medley) to take a few days off, and sends Eve as a temp to Fran's place, replacing her.

With Eve out of the office, the other three consider suspects with the help of a large transparent board like used on Hawaii Five-O. Mitch is ruled out because "on his own, he's nothing," and because of his "rich marriage," which is "security." As far as Doris is concerned, Ed says, "Sisters rarely kill sisters ... and Fran is always good for a touch [lending money] no matter how much Doris has to beg." Sanford is seen as a man who "lost a wife and a lot of his self-respect," but he also needs Francesca alive. That leaves Vic Durant, Francesca's business manager, whom Ironside met at the taping earlier. He has "no demerits," though he was an explosives expert during his military career.

Ironside suddenly has a brainstorm, and sends Mark back to the jazz club where he is seen punching out some chords on the piano while Les is mopping the floor. After some more questions, Les describes Mitch as formerly a "number one lush." After he married "that bread lady," she put him into a sanitarium, which sobered him up. As Mark leaves the club, Mitch is seen close by watching him.

Mitch is summoned to the office, where Ironside says that strychnine is used in small quantities to help alcoholics recover their appetite. Mitch says that he does have a small bottle of the stuff, but he never tried to poison his wife, and that anyone could have taken the bottle. Mitch leaves with a tail from the cops following him, but he goes directly home.

Eve has a sense that there is something going on between Francesca and Durant, the manager: "the little things, small glance, an attitude, the unsaid things." Ironside says, "You sound like a Victorian novel or a bad case of woman's intuition."

Meanwhile, Francesca has gotten two weeks ahead in her schedule, intending to go marlin fishing with Mitch off Acapulco. When Francesca goes out, Eve, who is sitting outside the house in her Mustang, goes back inside, where she witnesses Durant opening up Francesca's safe using the combination which is in a book stored in a desk. After Durant leaves, Eve opens up the safe using this information. And voilà -- what does she find in the safe but a receipt from a storage company for a typewriter.

This receipt was issued on the day the death threat on the blue paper was sent (8/21/67). In the middle of the night. Ironside summons the owner of the storage company who is bitching because of the hour. Ironside says "I'll pay the flamin' overtime, open the box," which has been brought along. Not surprisingly, the stored typewriter has the same defective "E" as the death threat letter.

The next day, Ironside is waiting for Francesca on her yacht. Not only is the small ramp still there, but so is another ramp which allowed Ironside to get down inside the boat. Ironside, having figured out everything, confronts Francesca, giving her a huge speech. He says that she is a "a girl with a problem, a husband she wants dead" who has "set up a reign of terror against herself." In cahoots with Durant, she had a bomb configured on the yacht which will blow up Mitch.

Francesca tries to weasel out of this scenario, but after Ironside shows her the typewriter, she runs off the boat after warning him to do the same. But how would he would get up the steep ramp by himself is a good question. Mark and Ed are nowhere to be seen. Fearing he will be blown up, she soon returns, but Ironside tells her the bomb has been disarmed, and "it's all over." They have Durant in custody and Mitch was warned away.

Francesca confesses that she wanted to get rid of Mitch because he was the witness three years ago to an accident where she hit some old man when she was drunk driving. The guy survived, but charges for being impaired as well as the hit and run would have completely derailed her career. As well, Mitch's marrying her was part of a blackmail scheme connected with this incident. She says "He never lets up, he's a monster." This is rather odd, since we have not seen this side of his personality in the show.

The end of the show is "cute," aside from news that the charge against Francesca (and presumably Durant) will be conspiracy. It has Ed sampling some of Ironside's almost inedible chili. Eve and Mark are playing pool in the background as Ironside refers to them as "hustlers."

I seriously disliked this show the first time I watched it. It sort of makes sense on a basic level, but there are some big issues, suggesting the show was overwritten and then majorly edited back:

TRIVIA:


S01E05: The Taker
Original air date: October 12, 1967
Director: Don Weis; Producer: David J. O'Connell; Writers: Irving Gaynor Neiman & Winston Miller (teleplay); Irving Gaynor Neiman (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 49:52

After SFPD detective Andy Anderson (Virgil Frye) is shot dead at point blank range on a foggy San Francisco night by someone he seems to know, Ironside is pissed when he doesn't find out about this until he hears a news broadcast the next morning.

Ironside has some very harsh words with the Police Commissioner, because he brought Anderson into the force and trained him. The Commissioner reminds Ironside that he is not chief of detectives any more, just a "special consultant," and that he is "too emotionally involved" in the case to deal with it. Ironside tells the Commissioner to "dispense with the high school psychology [and] tell me in basic English why you were trying to brush me off."

The Commissioner says that Ironside's protégé was "on the take." He was found with $500 cash on him when he was killed and had $2,000 in a bank account set up recently. Aware that Anderson was recently trying to build a case against a gangster named Johnny Utrecht, Ironside leaves the Commssioner's office unconvinced that some connection with this resulted in Anderson's death.

Ironside goes to see Utrecht (Robert Alda), who says he is just "a businessman," but in reality he "runs book" for his part of town. He keeps calling Ironside "champ." Utrecht says Anderson was trying to pin a "gambling rap" on him, and it doesn't make sense for him to knock off a cop. Ironside sternly tells Utrecht that if he finds out that Utrecht was involved in Anderson's death, he is "going to hang." I think he means this figuratively, since the last hanging as capital punishment in California was in 1942.

Soon after this, Ironside and his team are at Anderson's funeral, where they spot some mysterious blonde woman in the small crowd. The four of them leave before the funeral is over, which seems kind of rude. Back at the office, the blonde's picture is found in a pile of Johnny's cases. She is Adrienne May (Jan Shepard), who used to be a brunette.

Adrienne was involved with another case Johnny worked on, the murder of magazine publisher Darryl Fraser's wife, where the killer, an "unknown intruder," was never caught and Fraser had an alibi. Ironside goes to see Adrienne, who tells him she was the art editor for Fraser's California Life magazine. She denies being involved with her boss when she first knew him, despite a lot of gossip and speculation, because she didn't find Fraser "attractive." However, later on, Adrienne became the cop Anderson's mistress after she encountered him totally by accident. It was suspected that Fraser was responsible for Anderson's death because he was jealous of her attentions being diverted to the policeman.

Ironside goes to see Fraser (Mark Richman), who is extremely hostile to being questioned, especially about his relationship with Adrienne. He tells Ironside to get lost. Earlier on, Ed also got hot under the collar when talking about the case with his boss, but now he redeems himself when he finds evidence at the lab that the same gun used to kill Fraser's wife was also used to kill Anderson.

There is one more person involved in this imbroglio, photographer Simon Arkoff (William Schallert, with a hokey Eastern European accent). Arkoff provided Fraser with an alibi for the day of his wife's murder because he, Adrienne and Fraser were all supposedly attending a yacht race in Sausalito near San Francisco. Ironside visits Arkoff, but doesn't get any new information. Ironside checks the weather for the day of the murder which he compares to pictures of the race which Arkoff showed him. Nothing untoward there.

Later, based on the fact that Eve knows how to identify yachts based on the number on their sails (seriously), and the numbers of three boats on the cover of a copy of California Life that Mark picked up at Fraser's office showing a race that took place four months ago are written on a piece of paper in Anderson's folders, Ironside goes to the Belvedere Boat Club where Fraser's yacht is anchored and talks to Commodore Wallace (Cyril Delevanti) who manages things. Ironside wants to know the exact date of the race which the three people from the magazine were covering, which was supposedly May 12th, but that page is missing from the Commodore's log ... and it sounds like that page may have been removed from the log by Anderson. It seems like a huge coincidence that Mark picked up the particular issue of the magazine which may have been several months old.

When the team return to Arkoff's place, which they enter with a master key that Ed possesses, they find the photographer dead. Going back to see Adrienne, Ironside tells her what they have uncovered recently, particularly that Arkoff was killed. Suddenly Adrienne changes her tune. She and the two men were at Sausalito, but the day after this, she and Fraser (whom she supposedly did not like) were at her place. Fraser left late, only to return because he found his wife dead at home, and didn't want it to be a suspect in her death. Adrienne and Fraser then concocted the elaborate alibi around the trip to Sausalito. Ironside figures that Fraser shot his wife as well as Anderson.

Ironside and Mark go to Fraser's palatial apartment to arrest him, but he is not there. Instead, they are confronted by a servant with a gun (Ernest Anderson). Directed to the marina, they find Fraser and Utrecht aboard Fraser's yacht, Blue Zephyr. Despite the two acting tough, Ironside starts throwing accusations at both of them, accusing Fraser of three murders -- his wife, Anderson and Arkoff.

Fraser says, "I guess it's time somebody told you what really happened." He says that Adrienne killed his wife after she went to see the wife about giving Fraser a divorce, which she refused. She was shot with a gun off the "wall rack" at the house. "She [Adrienne] cooked up that alibi to save herself, not me." If Fraser didn't go along with this scenario, she would accuse him of being the murderer. He says that Adrienne also killed Anderson, planting the $500 on him and having set up the bogus bank accounts (obviously she told Fraser about this). Ironside says that Fraser should have married Adrienne, because a wife can't testify against her husband, but Fraser says "I couldn't stand the sight of her."

Suddenly there are shots fired from far away, and Fraser slumps backwards. Mark pursues the shooter on foot, and then, outside the marina, a car speeds away. At the same time, Ed is arriving at the marina's parking lot, having finished at Arkoff's place and the escaping car swerves to miss him, running into some bushes. The driver is Adrienne, it looks like she gets knocked out by the sudden stop.

Back at the office, Ironside is reading a copy of the San Francisco Dispatch newspaper which has a huge headline: "Woman Arrested For Triple Murder." Once again, Eve makes a big deal about how she thought there was something odd about Adrienne because of "feminine intuition." Ironside says intuition is not enough to go to court with, some evidence helps. When he tells her the bullet (there were actually two shots) was fired from at least 50 feet away and there was no way Adrienne would have known what Fraser was talking about, Eve says "Women can tell about a thing like that from any distance." The three men are left shaking their heads.

This is another convoluted episode -- I wonder if Raymond Burr had any input, suggesting that the scripts be written in a manner similar to Perry Mason?

TRIVIA:

  • When Ironside first visits Adrienne, she offers him a drink. He accepts it, saying, "One of the benefits of my unofficial status is that I can drink during working hours ... I always did anyway if I felt like it. But now I have the virtuous feeling that I'm not breaking any rules."
  • On a subsequent visit to Adrienne's, Ironside accuses her of perjury. When she says she doesn't have much choice as far as telling the truth now is concerned, Ironside says that she has a right to remain silent and also to call her lawyer. Is he a cop or not?
  • Shouldn't they have gotten a warrant to get into Arkoff's house instead of Ed opening the door with his master key?
  • In Ironside's van, he talks to Mark in the back using a microphone, but there is a sliding window right behind Mark in the driver's seat.
  • Ironside's office is #48.
  • Fred Helfing tracked down Utrecht's office, which is at 445 S. Figueroa Street ... in Los Angeles.


S01E06: An Inside Job
Original air date: October 19, 1967
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Sy Salkowitz; Music: Benny Carter. Time: 47:50.

Two prisoners being transferred from a a detention cell in police headquarters murder one of two cops during an escape attempt. Both of the cops are kind of old guys, Willis (Jim Drum) and Flagg (Ben Hammer). Flagg is stabbed to death, Willis is knocked out.

The prisoners are Carter (John Saxon) and Bains. When I first saw Bains, I said, "This looks like a part that Don Stroud should play." Then I checked the creidts and it was Don Stroud. He looked different than he did on Hawaii Five-O only a few years later.

The two try to escape from the building, but they end up in Ironside's living quarters. Carter knows that Ironside is "ex-chief of detectives," saying "we have ourselves a way out."

Downstairs on his way to fetch a book from the library for his boss, Mark runs into Eve, who is late for work. Ed is over at the state college pathology lab. Mark says, "I don't know if he's hiding or trying to make time with that cute little chick who runs it."

Ironside tells the two crooks they are wasting their time trying to escape, but Bains says Flagg now "has a hole in him" thanks to a shiv that he was hiding in his shoe. Ironside knows that Carter and Bains were in jail because they attemped to rob a posh jewelry store where they killed the owner. An associate robber panicked, resulting in their arrest. Bains tells Carter he knew the third man was "a phony," but when Ironside tells Bains that he trusted Carter's judgment before and it didn't work out, suggesting that Carter is the "brains" of their current escape and he shouldn't trust him now, Carter says that Ironside is trying to "divide and conquer."

Saying that Ironside is a "very bright man," Carter figures that he can help the two of them get out of the building -- that a mind that's spent a lifetime catching criminals "can turn itself around and be a criminal." Ironside ignores them and resumes typing a speech, but Bains goes crazy and pushes the typewriter onto the floor. As Eve arrives at the office, Bains holds a gun to Ironside's head.

Captain Lauren (Norman Fell) has been alerted to the escape and he has got all exits blocked. Two cops arrive at Ironside's door, but he tells them to look "not in here, [but instead] somewhere you might find them ... haven't you learned anything about police work? Air vents, elevator shafts, fire escapes, the roof!" The cops leave after almost coming into the room.

Ironside tells Carter and Bains there are four exits: "the garage, prisoner reception, the duty entrance and the main lobby." Ironside gets Eve to phone Ed, who is trying to hustle the woman in the college lab (Eileen Wesson, in the credits as "Pretty Girl"). She is even talking about how they will have "beautiful kids"! Eve is very convincing as Ed's "girl friend," ending her conversation -- which is full of clues that Ed should pick up on that something is wrong in the office -- with "I love you."

Mark phones from the library. When he tells Ironside the book he wants can't be taken out, Ironside tells him to copy the entire chapter seven, plus pages 223 to 287 from another book. Ironside tells Carter and Bains this is ostensibly to keep Mark "away from here," but Mark instead decides to photocopy the material that is needed ... at 25 cents a page. Where does he have the bread to pay for such a huge order? When Mark returns to the station before the end of the show, he doesn't have any of this paperwork -- is he going to pick it up later?

Ironside calls Bay City Television Repair and tells them his TV, which was only repaired a week before, is on the fritz. (We saw Mark wanting to fix the TV at the beginning of the show, Ironside cautioning him not to electrocute himself.) He asks for two men to come and check out the TV and remove it if necessary, wanting to get the two men's coveralls for the two escapees. Eve tries to go to a drawer where a gun is normally stored, which Carter found and gave to Bains earlier on. Bains violently throws Eve on the floor. Meanwhile, Ed returns to the building, and tells Captain Lauren "there's something wrong up there," based on Eve's peculiar phone call.

The TV repairmen arrive and go into the elevator but a cop stops the door and escorts the two out. There is no dialogue with them that we hear. Then there is a very odd shot with some guy looking, presumably in the direction of the elevator. This makes no sense at all. I think that two cops are substituted for the two repairmen, though we don't hear anything about such a plan.

The "repairmen" go to the office, their coveralls are taken, the TV set is worked on, and then they are tied up. Ironside and Eve start to accompany Carter and Bains to the main floor, the idea being that Ironside will somehow distract people in the lobby away from the two TV repair guys (as if no one will recognize them), but the lobby is swarming with cops. And most of these cops are in their full uniform -- aren't there any detectives or plainclothes people?

Their journey is seriously disrupted, first by a janitor (Ken Renard) who wants to clean Ironside's area, another guy from the records department named Irv (John Alvin) who wants details about a case from 1948 which Ironside might know about (only 19 years before), and some cranky cop who barges into the elevator on its way down and starts making a huge fuss about the repairmen not using the service elevator. This doesn't make any sense -- isn't every cop in the building on high alert and supposed to be watching for the escaping twosome?

When they get down to the main floor, Ironside drops the brake from his wheelchair on the floor, which was supposed to distract people. He picks up this brake, made of metal, and uses it to short-circuit the back of the TV which Bains is carrying, resulting in Bains getting a huge shock (don't ask me how this works). Then Ironside uses a bottle of cleaning spray which he took from one of the repairmen's bags, and sprays Carter in the face. The cops in the lobby rush over and grab the two crooks.

Up to the point of everyone leaving Ironside's office, the episode was kind of a nail-biter, though it mostly consisted of Ironside telling Carter and Bains in his usually crabby manner that their attempt to escape was futile, provoking the pair's equally nasty responses. However, all the interruptions before they got down to the main floor started to resemble a comedy. As well, the script left a lot to be desired. At one point, Carter tells Ironside, "Don't let [Bains'] rough talk fool you," and Bains -- whose psycho persona kept turning off and on -- replies, "Affectation." (Seriously!)


S01E07: Tagged For Murder
Original air date: October 26, 1967
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: James McAdams; Writer: Art Weingarten; Music: Oliver Nelson. Time: 47:50.

At the beginning of the show, someone is shown connecting a wire to a metal ladder which goes down into a swimming pool. This is the same swimming pool we have already seen at the beginning of S01E03, Dead Man's Tale. The owner of the house, George Bellingham, goes for a swim and dives into the water. He comes out of the water, not touching this metal ladder but splashing some water on the ground near the ladder and then, wanting to relax, leans backwards up against the metal ladder and gets electrocuted.

This whole sequence is stupid. If you wired up the ladder, which goes down into the pool, there would be immediately be a short-circuit and the fuse or circuit breaker where the wire originates in the nearby house would trip and there would be no possibility of a lethal shock at all. There are numerous scenarios on the internet for what would happen in a situation like this which I investigated and many of them were wrong. One example was that the entire swimming pool would become some giant conductor of electricity and anyone who dove into it would be killed instantly.

The electrical stupidity in this show reminded me of another "shocking" scene in the 1989 TV pilot Peter Gunn which was supposed to reboot the detective show from the late 1950s. It also made no sense. I think whoever came up with this idea in Ironside was thinking of the scene in the movie Goldfinger where a bad guy was taken care of quickly with electricity. To make matters more complicated, trying to confuse whoever might investigate Bellingham's death, a setup was created that he turned on a TV which was plugged in by the pool and got a killer shock that way. Equally wrong!

The next morning Ed is on the case with Sgt. Cable (Burt Freed, who played Detective Vince Keeley in S01E02, The Leaf in the Forest). Bellingham's body is no longer up against the ladder, but several feet away. Ed quite rightly suspects this is not an "accidental death," though Cable seems to think it is a cut and dried (no pun intended) case. Cable tells him, "If people didn't do so many stupid things, there wouldn't be any accidental deaths." Ed says, "It ain't necessarily 'not murder'."

Back at the office, Ironside is dismissive of Ed's theories about why Bellingham died. Ed responds with typical Ironside interjections: FACT and QUERY. There were burn marks on Bellingham's back and neck. Ironside tells Ed to get back to the house and "tear it apart ... you don't know what you are looking for until you find it." Ed returns later, not having found anything of significance. Eve goes to check on Bellingham's bank account and other things. She finds out he "had money," was in the service between 1942 and 1946, came home with a Silver Star and an Italian war bride, and founded a company which he later sold, but stayed on with it as a consultant. "No arrest, no convictions, no nothing."

While Ed was away, Ironside examined a watch which Ed brought back with him from Bellingham's earlier. He took off the back of the watch, a G.I. watch issued to troops in World War II, which was not working. Despite the watch not being very large in size, Ironside was able to see six numbers inscribed inside:

39071648
36112040
36078844
32197049
32941080
19186702

These are army service numbers or "dog tag numbers," which start with a 3 if you were drafted or a 1 if you enlisted. The first number is Bellingham's; the others, including the names and places of enlistment based on information received from the Pentagon, are Peter Spangler, Chicago; John[ny] Corman, Des Moines; Arnold Mitchlen, Boston; Andy Sheldon, Philadelphia; and Kim Soo, Seattle. Parts of Mitchlen's and Soo's numbers are circled, represented by red above. It is difficult to believe so much information could have been inscribed on the back of the watch.

Ironside and Eve go to see Bellingham's widow Andra (Antoinette Bower). She says at the end of the war, she was a "gamina," a "vagabond" and a bar girl in Bolzano, Italy. She married Bellingham and came to the States, "to escape, simply to come to America." Later, it is determined two of the men listed on the watch have died in the San Francisco area, Mitchlen in a warehouse fire under suspicious circumstances, and Soo of "indisputedly natural causes" (kidney failure). The other three men are also living in the city, which seems like an odd coincidence. Johnny Corman (Jack Kelly) is an "itinerant musician and A&R [artists and repertoire] man," while Andy Sheldon (Gene Nelson) is a "highly successful advertising photographer." Pete Spangler is a "sometime dishwasher, auto polisher, pool hall rack man, and full-time wino."

Ironside and Mark go to Sheldon's studio where he is photographing three babes in bikinis and some stud with a relatively small 35mm camera compared to what you might expect. Sheldon tells Ironside that near the end of the war, he was part of a "special force" which specialized in "sabotage and demolition." He says he runs into the two other men who are living in town occasionally, but not Bellingham, who he read about in the paper recently. He says Bellingham was their squad leader, "a great guy."

Corman's company is Barbary Records. Ed goes to the Mastercut Recording Studio to talk to Corman, who is monitoring a song called "Turnaway" sung by a group called Pleasure Fair that sounds like The Association. Corman is slimy. He recalls Bellingham's wife: "Back in Italy, it always was a pleasure to buy her drinks, even when you knew it was only sugar water." He met her and her husband at a party a while ago: "I'm always glad to see another hustler strike it rich." When Ed leaves, Corman phones someone.

Mark and Ironside go to some fleabag hotel where the desk clerk, an old dame chewing on a chicken leg (Marjorie Bennett), says Spengler hasn't been there for "two or three weeks." Spengler is later crushed up against a wall by a car. His body is identified at the morgue by Sheldon and Corman, who have been summoned. Ironside throws some theories at them, but the case is far from being resolved.

The karate school run by Leon Soo, son of the late Kim, at 237 Grand Avenue (phone 421-0713) is the final place to be visited. Eve gets the honors. Leon demonstrates some incredible martial arts moves. I looked at him saying "That guy is like Bruce Lee," and was surprised at the end credits to find out it was Bruce Lee. Eve asks Leon if his father left a dog tag when he died, and is told that it had his name and six numbers on it. But when Leon searches for this tag, it is missing.

What Eve says to him is confusing: "Are you sure there were just six numbers, and not eight?" (The numbers above all have eight characters. there were six numbers.) Leon replies, "At top, his name, at the bottom, four numbers [unintelligible] close together, then a little hole and two more numbers." Eve says, "There should have been a hole at the top," and Leon says, "There was a hole at the top, that's where the chain went. I'm speaking of a second hole, between the two groups of numbers."

At the office, Ironside is studying a typical dog tag. (World War II dog tags were 1⅛″ x 2″ in size.) He says, "According to Leon Soo when he saw [his father's] dog tag, there were four numbers, then a hole, then two more. So the two missing digits [I think he means the numbers with 8 characters each] are the same two circled in Bellingham's watch [but the numbers containing circled digits are on lines 4 and 6, not together]." As to how the numbers were punched out, Ironside has a theory, based on dog tag dimensions: "The digits are of such a size, that to remove two and only two would require a hole three-tenths of an inch in diameter ... Now assume the hole was made overseas during the war. The army, I suppose, did not carry a supply of metal punches. But the manufacture of three-tenths of an inch holes was its principal business, a rifle, a 30-caliber rifle, M-1 or a carbine ... Six men served together overseas, one brought home an Italian wife. All brought home something that brought them home to San Francisco, held them together."

Eve interrupts to point out that Bellingham's wife was not Italian, her accent was wrong. She described herself as a "gamina," which is a French word ("gamin" [a street urchin]) with an "a" on the end, an "Italian" ending."

The team goes to an Army office where they view some footage from the end of the war which they hope might provide some clues. When it doesn't, Ironside asks this General who is there if it's possible the six men might have come into something "of great value." The general says a currency office got hit during the confusion of the Italians and Germans retreating, with over two million in dollars, gold and other currencies still unaccounted for, and two men found dead. An investigation into this revealed nothing. On Bellingham's army record it notes that his wife was Swiss, a country with multiple languages.

Ironside has the solution -- the men grabbed the two million dollars, and then stashed it in such a way that the other men couldn't get at it alone. "The numbers ... anyone can find a serial number, but only I could know only which two digits I shot out of my dog tag." Ironside also realizes that Bolzano is as far north as you can go in Italy; other countries like Austria and Switzerland are right next door ... which suggests that Swiss banks were involved in all this. "No one member could grab the treasure because each member had only one-sixth of the number." Are we assuming that the "password" for the account in the Swiss bank where the money was deposited was supposed to be all the numbers together in one big mish-mash and the money was deposited "in trust" for all six members of the squad -- which it was not, it was deposited in an account that only Bellingham and his wife could access?

Bellingham's wife phones Ironside and says she is being threatened by Corman who phoned her saying she had something he wanted. The team heads for her house, but Corman is already there, and he has a gun. Andra escapes after throwing a drink in Corman's face, but he recovers quickly. He actually has plenty of time to shoot her before she heads out of the driveway in her car, but she escapes. Sheldon is actually there with Corman, they pursue Andra in one car. Bellingham's wife drives right past Ironside's van as he heads towards her place, followed by Sheldon and Corman, so Mark turns around and starts pursuing all of them.

Andra and her two pursuers end up at the barns where the San Francisco cable cars are kept. This is probably the most boring San Francisco location where you can shoot scenes for the show, where you can actually film something in "San Francisco" rather than on the back lot at Universal Studios. Ironside is left alone, while Ed and Eve pursue the two men in the barns and Mark is delegated to turn on the lights. This is all very lame.

Eve yells to the two men, "We know you didn't kill Michlen, Bellingham did it. He stole Soo's dog tag. We know it because he had both men's numbers." Ed chimes in, "Then somebody else took up the killing, killed Bellingham. But it had to be somebody who knew what Bellingham was doing." After Ironside says both Sheldon and Corman were set up, both of them surrender, throwing their guns on the ground. Bellingham's wife, who now has a gun, is disarmed by Eve. Andra, identified by Eve as "French speaking Swiss," calls Ironside "sal flic," which means "dirty cop."

Back at the office, everything is explained. This has been such a screwed-up episode, I will just refer you to a video clip of the final scene. Ironside does say something here that doesn't make any sense, by the way: "She and Bellingham had hated each other for years." Where did this information come from?

TRIVIA:


S01E08: Let My Brother Go
Original air date: November 2, 1967
Director: Don Weis; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Donn Mullally; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:51.

Several cop cars arrive at the hangout for the black Mambas gang. Ed is there, and after he and the other the police get inside, he is very pushy. Ironside is there too, which I thought odd – is dealing with stuff like this part of his mandate? Ironside tells the assembled, over a dozen men and women: "I thought I was your friend. I thought we were working out things pretty good. Even had jobs in sight for some of you. I suppose that makes me some kind of a nut." A couple of the gang members talk to them in a Stepin Fetchit manner.

When some furniture is moved, weapons hidden in the wall are found, including a pistol and a zip gun. Ironside says, "Get them out of my sight." The people in the room are escorted out.

When they get back to the office, Ed is fed up and leaves. Ironside is in a somber mood. Mark tells him, "You're blowing your cool, Chief." He says of the gang, "Tomorrow morning they'll be at the junk yard looking for pipe to make new zip guns. What can you do about them anyway?" Ironside replies, "I can try harder."

Mark and Ironside watch a rerun of a football game from the previous week. With only a minute left in the game, Charles Edward "Bat" Masterson (Ivan Dixon -- not actually the actor at this point), an old friend of Mark's, makes a sensational touchdown by running almost the complete length of the field. Mark says he sees Masterson when his pal comes to town – he stays at his mother's, a place that he bought for her. Even when Mark was in Vacaville Reformatory "learning a trade" a long time ago (thanks to Ironside), Masterson came to visit.

We switch to Masterson's mother's, where her other son Joey (Don Marshall) has come to see his brother. A cop comes to the door, and the mother (Maidie Norman) tells Joey to go to her room and hide. But the cop merely wants to get Bat to autograph a football and point out that Bat's car is parked a bit too close to a fire hydrant nearby.

Back in the house, Bat wants to know what's the deal with secrecy as far as Joey is concerned. Turns out that Joey is out on parole. Joey's wife Betty (Ena Hartman) says the cops never leave him alone. Bat gets a call from Mark who says "This is the new Mark Sanger." He invites Bat to come downtown to talk to Ironside. Joey tells his brother he thinks Mark is Ironside's "Uncle Tom," but Bat scoffs at this. When Joey asks Bat to put in a good word with Ironside for him, Bat says, "I don't know anything about you."

At his office, Ironside makes a pitch for Bat to help out with a program for kids. "The police have to be able to reach these kids with something other than a riot stick – there has to be a dialogue ... I've been trying to do it for months and getting nowhere." Bat says he can't help, but Ironside says, "Thanks for coming over ... thanks for listening." On the way out of the building, Mark further tries to sway his friend, but Bat says, "Just tell Ironside he can sell his fuzz a whole lot easier if he could get them to stop rousting folks ... like Joey."

Ironside does some investigating and finds out that Joey, in addition to working as a shipping clerk on the docks, has been acting as a runner for a bookmaker and he shows surveillance photos of Joey doing this to his brother. When Bat talks to his mother about this, she tells him, "He couldn't help it, he needed money, he had to take another job." Bat tells Ironside he will take care of this ... and wonders if Ironside wants anything in return. Ironside says no, but Bat is soon seen at a park where he is throwing passes with some "kids."

Ironside, when he sees the small turnout at the park, says "We didn't expect a mass conversion." Predictably, when these "kids" are on their way back to their neighborhood (identified as "the Fillmore" by Ed), they are chased and beaten up by members of the Mambas. The cops are quickly on hand to make some arrests and take care of one of the "kids" who is badly injured. Bat is with them and gives a couple of the gang members some choice words, but they just mock him.

When he arrives back home at his mother's, Bat is approached by the bookie Joey was working for, a guy named Harris (Curtis Harrington), who says that Joey owes $2,000 because of gambling. He says that Joey is at a poker game at a hotel right now, so Bat goes there and confronts his brother. Some thug named Georgie Main (Peter Mamakos) pulls a gun on Bat, and knocks him out. A fight erupts after Joey turns the table over and Joey knocks Main through a window. He falls a couple of stories to his death.

Bat calls the cops, then goes to Ironside's office. There, Bat tries to convince them that it was he who pushed Main out the window. Ironside is not happy after a call to the Commissioner -- this will be a very messy situation to fix. He grills Bat, trying to tie down details about what happened, because Joey is totally left out of the story. Mark pleads with Bat to tell the truth, otherwise he might end up playing football at "Q" (San Quentin). He calls Bat a "jerk" ... and Bat is taken to be booked.

Ironside goes to Bat's mother's place again. Joey is there. He tells Joey that Bat's career will be over if there is any suggestion that he was engaged in gambling, despite the claim of self-defense which resulted in Main's death. Ironside slips a bug into Joey's jacket, which is lying conveniently right beside him and no one notices this.

When Ironside, Mark and Eve leave, Bat is actually in the van along with Ed. With only about 6 minutes to the end of the show, this has to get resolved quickly.

Joey goes out "for a walk," but instead goes to a pay phone where he calls some guy and says that he is "in a jam" and has to get out of town fast. This is all overheard in the van thanks to the bug: "I need some front money ... this is big heat. No, they're not after me yet. Now my brother's making a scene as the family hero. Yeah, but you know he's gotta crumble, and by the time he does, Little Joe's gonna be long gone."

When there is a talk from Joey about a "job" that night as a "wheel man" (armed robber), Bat suddenly tells Ironside, "Stop him." Asked once again if Joey was the one who killed Main, Bat says, "Let's go get him." As Ed is chasing Joey in an alley, there is an incredible stunt as Joey grabs a fire escape above and kicks Ed in the head. Joey is grabbed by his brother in an emotional scene.

The show ends shortly after this back at the park, where a much larger number of "kids" are practising football under Bat's supervision. Ironside says, "They came out, and that's a beginning."

This ending is far too rushed, suggesting again the episode was overwritten and had to be cut back somewhere. Otherwise, the show is okay, though the gang members in this show do not look like "kids," they are more like "Michael J. Fox young," where the actors are in their 20s or older.

The show leaves us with a couple of big questions -- like what will happen to Joey (parole violation, manslaughter and ?) and can the tape recording that was made with the bug be used in court (will it be used?).

TRIVIA:


S01E09: Light at the End of the Journey
Original air date: November 9, 1967
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writers: Robert Van Scoyk & Sy Salkowitz (teleplay), Jeannot Szwarc (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:52.

This episode starts with Ted Bartlett (Steve Dunne), an old rookie cop pal of Ironside's, now a private investigator, getting shot dead in a hotel hallway by a blonde-haired killer named Marston (Bill Fletcher) after being requested to a come to a meeting in what is later described as a "very classy saloon" upstairs in the hotel. After Marston, who is using a silencer, pumps a second shot into Ted, the elevator that Ted was waiting for arrives, and the door opens, showing a blonde woman, Norma Wales (Katherine Crawford), inside. Marston fires another shot into the door as it closes.

After Ironside and his team arrive at the hotel, Eve grills the bell captain (Jason Wingreen). Apparently not having much to do, he was watching the elevator involved in the previous scene. It went up to the fifth floor, which Ted had requested. After the doors closed, it then went to the 16th floor, and then came back down to the lobby, still with Norma in it.

The telephone operator can tell Ironside that the call that Ted received earlier was "a local call" (meaning from within the hotel) from "Mrs. Waring's lawyer." Somehow Eve finds out that Norman, the woman who was going up and down in the elevator, is in room 1607 (would the bell captain know this?) along with her fiancé, Jerry Pearson (Robert Reed). When Ironside talks to Norma, he asks if she saw the killer, and she tells him no, because she is blind.

Norma says that she and Jerry got on the elevator in the lobby, but he suddenly got off to give the doorman his car keys, and with her inside, the doors closed. The elevator was going up to the 16th floor where they had their room, and then back down to the lobby. (How did she know the elevator would go back to the lobby? If she is blind, could she push the main floor button? Maybe Jerry pushed it to bring it back from the lobby? This is not discussed.)

Ironside has a brainstorm that he will use Norma as a decoy to catch the killer, because Marston doesn't know that she couldn't see him. Ironside has a screaming match with the Commissioner to approve his plan. Once again, the Commissioner accuses Ironside of being personally involved in the case because of his old pal Bartlett.

Jerry and Norma want to go out to dinner, but Ironside says this is not going to happen. He needs Norma's co-operation to act as a decoy, to show herself and let people know she is co-operating with the police. Jerry is totally opposed to her doing this. Norma says she can't do it, she "lives with fear all the time, fear of things that don't matter to people like you [Ironside]." The Chief agrees with her and says that Eve will be close by to keep an eye on her. After Ironside leaves, Norma hears a lot of noises like footsteps and knocking, though whether these are actually heard in the hotel or are just her imagination is a mystery. Jerry comforts her, but she now says she can't go out the door and changes her mind about co-operating. The next day, Norma, accompanied by Ironside and his team except for Eve, is interviewed on the steps of the police station by local TV station KLOX. She says she saw the killer, and tomorrow she is supposed to provide details to the police artist. Of course, Marston is watching this.

Ed talks to Ted's office in Los Angeles and finds out he was hired by E.J. Waring of Chicago to find his wife, who was traced to San Francisco. This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would someone from Chicago hire a private investigator from Los Angeles? Was Ted famous or something? As well, Ironside says, "Ted only handled big cases, not errant wives."

Having returned from the police station, Norma is dropped off on the 7th floor where she is put in room 716. Jerry is taken to the 16th floor despite more objections. Ironside suggests if he wants to leave, he will have to fight Mark who was involved in a violent incident before he got hired by the cops. A communication system between has been hooked up between rooms 716 and 1607.

Ed contacts Waring (Bill Leslie), who says he hired Ted to get paperwork from his wife, whom he was divorcing. She had to sign the paperwork to relinquish her share in his company, which was half of the business. Ed gets the San Francisco address of Waring's wife Joan (Jeanne Baird).

A box of flowers for Norma arrives and one of the bellboys is assigned to take it to Norma's original room, 1607. (Why would the bell captain allow this -- he knew the room.) He is followed by Marston, who is pretending to be a phone company repair man (but why would this repairman be allowed onto the 16th floor, where there is a cop named O'Malley, who takes the flowers from the bellboy and delivers them to the room). When told about this delivery, Ironside describes this as "one of the oldest tricks in the game." There is an odd shot here where Marston looks at the chair where O'Malley sits in the hallway while he is on guard.

Jerry comes out of the 16th floor room, followed by Marston who likely recognizes him from the TV interview. It seems very coincidental that Jerry would come out of this room at exactly this time. Followed by Marston and oblivious to his presence, the elevator stops on the 7th floor and Jerry goes into the room where Norma is hiding. Marston follows Jerry out of the elevator, still pretending to be a repairman. Ironside is super annoyed because Jerry has broken cover.

But Jerry is not happy with Norma's involvement with Ironside's scheme. There is a discussion between him and Norma, saying things like "He [Ironside] doesn't care about you," and accusing Ironside of using "two bit psychology." Norma says, I"m not scared as much as I was ... but I need Jerry to take care of me." Ironside is pretty brutal, with Jerry still in the room, asking Norma, "What have you done for the last two years except to allow yourself to be led around?" suggesting she should try and take control of her life. Jerry is fed up. He is going home to his apartment to pack and will return to take Norma back to where she lives, which is in Seattle. Ironside threatens Jerry with arrest because Norma is in protective custody and Jerry is interfering with this. Jerry leaves nevertheless.

With Jerry gone, Ironside has a fatherly heart-to-heart talk with Norma. He previously found out that she has been blind for only two months. Jerry was driving the car the night Norma had the accident which resulted in her losing her sight, and he feels responsible for what happened to her. Norma and Jerry came to San Francisco to consult a specialist regarding her condition, but it was determined that there was no hope that she would regain her vision. The music in the background is mawkish. Ironside takes her hand and puts it on the armrest of his wheelchair, saying "this chair is my white cane," suggesting that Norma did not know that he was also "handicapped."

Ed goes to see Waring's wife, who is an attractive woman. She says she talked to Ted, but gave the paperwork to William Chapman, her attorney, who worked downtown close to the hotel. Before Ed leaves, he picks up a photo of the wife's fiancée, who she says she will marry as soon as the divorce is final. The picture is of Marston -- something I could see coming. But this makes no sense.

Back at the hotel, Marston checks in to room 712, just down the hall from where Norma is. Jerry returns, now he is repentant, sorry that he made trouble before. He says, "I got a little out of hand." He talks to Norma, saying that he has been acting like a jerk. He was going to quit his job, then realized "I can't leave towns and I can't quit jobs every time I get worried about you ... I think there's more to life than that."

Marston has ordered perfume which is to be delivered to the 16th floor room at precisely 8 o'clock. When this happens, the delivery man is grabbed, with people assuming he is the killer. Ironside and Mark appear to go up to the 16th floor. Jerry is still in room 716, and he is also summoned to the room upstairs by Marston, pretending to be a cop. When Marston tries to get into Norma's room, also pretending to be a cop, three real cops come out of the room next door and shoot him dead.

In the aftermath, Ironside says that he knows Marston, he was wanted for murder years ago. Ted and he worked on Marston's case together, but the killer disappeared after 10 years. After Marston vanished, another body was identified as his and everyone thought he was dead. Ed talks to Mrs. Waring again, she says she didn't know who she was tying up with, i.e., Marston, who had been safe and respectable all these years.

There is something really hard to accept about this episode. Think about it. What is the possibility of a coincidence that Marston -- a wanted criminal, pursued back then by both Ironside and Bartlett, having disappeared and then reappeared -- becomes the fiancé of a woman that Ted, who works out of Los Angeles, is hired to find. As well, when Ted visited Mrs. Waring, wouldn't he have recognized Marston's picture? None of this nonsense is tied up at the end of the show.

TRIVIA:

  • Robert Reed is a "special guest star."
  • At the end of the show, Ironside refers to Ted as "Ed."
  • The way elevator doors open is inconsistent. When Norma stops at the 5th floor at the beginning of the show, the elevator doors are open around 3 and a half seconds; the doors are completely open about 3 seconds. Later, after the TV interview and they are going up to the 7th floor, the elevator doors are open for almost 10 seconds, and completely open for about 4 and a half. In the States these days (2024), the Americans with Disabilities Act specifies elevator doors must be completely open for at least 3 seconds (longer in some cases) and there are other regulations.
  • The way that notes in the background score pile up a couple of times is highly reminiscent of composer Leonard Rosenman. The score is by Quincy Jones.


S01E10: The Monster of Comus Towers
Original air date: November 16, 1967
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: James McAdams; Writers: A.J. Russell & Stanford Whitmore (teleplay), A.J. Russell (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 49:23

Ironside gets a call from Enzo Rossi (Renzo Casana), an old friend, after there are suspicious activities in the Comus Tower where the Comus Computer Corporation is having an exhibition featuring priceless old European artworks. James Edmond (Michael Forest), in charge of the building's elaborate electronic security system, was knocked out while investigating an alarm, and a guard named Chapman (Harper Flaherty) was murdered, stabbed in the back in a particularly gory manner after the alarm was raised to a higher level.

The killer seems to have walked out of a window far above the ground. When Ironside and Mark arrive at the building, Edmond explains that the central panel of a religious triptych by Medici, which weighs around forty pounds, has been stolen, preumably taken out via the window. Ed, who is also there, says that he has determined that the thief weighed around 180 pounds, was six feet tall and left-handed.

Ironside and Mark go to the office of H.R. Comus (Warren Stevens), the manager of the building, but before they go inside, they are approached by Stella Rossi (Evi Marandi), an attractive woman with an Italian accent, the wife of Enzo. She tells Ironside to come and see her at her apartment, slipping him her address, saying "I was always afraid of this." Ironside gives her a big smile. When she tells him, "Don't trust anyone," he says, "Including you?"

Ironside meets Comus and Owen Simmons (Kevin Hagen), the curator of the exhibition, which the latter put together with Enzo. Ironside says the crime should be solved by Saturday, because he has intends to be at the Sunday game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams. After this, Edmond shows Ironside the security system, which consists of an invisible infrared beam that is generated randomly from different heights along a vertical bar. Simmons sucks up to Ironside, describing him as "legendary."

An investigating cop, Lieutenant Finch (David Hartman, later co-anchor of ABC's Good Morning America) encounters an attractive blonde named Amanda Stillman (Joan Huntington) leaving the building who says she was "working late." She is Comus's "confidential secretary." After witnessing her conversation with Finch, Ironside sarcastically describes her as "the perfect woman." When she gets in her convertible in the parking garage, Vincent Longo (Donald Buka) pops up from the back seat. She tells him, "No one suspects a thing."

Ironside and Mark go to Enzo's apartment, where Mark is interested in Rossi's hobby, closed-circuit TV. Stella, thrusting her cleavage towards Ironside's face, says that the theft of the panel from the tryptich will mean huge trouble for her husband, who pulled a lot of strings to get the exhibits brought from Italy, his native country. She says that the ransom for the panel will have to be paid, which intrigues Ironside, because as far as he knows, there has been no such request made yet. Stella tells him she just assumed there would be such a demand.

Following this, Mark, dressed in coveralls like a Comus Corporation maintenance worker whose name is George, goes undercover in the building and snoops in the security office. Then he lets Ironside into the building, and pulls a plywood ramp out of nowhere which the Chief can use to get down some steps. Having suddenly become an electronics expert, Mark mucks around with some circuitry inside a panel which controls the building's elevators and takes one up to a higher floor with Ironside. (This is all hard to accept.) They are trying to duplicate how two people could have stolen the painting.

Mark has a "sensor" which can detect which of several possible beams in the security system is in use. When the beam is discovered to be close to the floor, Mark pulls out some tunnel-like tubes which allow the beam to be redirected in a manner so Ironside can enter the secure area. These tubes have to be positioned in exactly a certain way to override the beam (see photo). Needless to say, none of what has happened in the last few minutes has been explained and verges on the ridiculous. Earlier, Edmond said "Even the slightest shadow [interfering with the beam] will trigger the alarm," but Mark just throws this device designed to override the beam together like a bunch of Tinker Toys. Ironside then walks (not really) through a scenario suggesting how Edmond was knocked out and the guard killed.

Back at his office in the police station, as Ironside moves characters around on what looks like an electric football game, Eve and Ed arrive and tell him that Amanda Stillman, the secretary, has been "seeing a married man," Longo, "almost every night," and they usually end up at some restaurant called La Corrida, where people watch films of bullfighting. When the team goes to this joint, the couple is there. Stillman is hustled away by Ed, and Ironside confronts Longo, who is currently running an art gallery in Burlingame, a city near San Francisco. Longo, described by Ed as "an old pal" of Ironside's, has a fishy background where he was involved with "high class confidence games in Chicago, [he] graduated to forge Old Masters, and then moved on to rich, older women." Longo tells Ironside he has been clean for five years and to "get off my back."

When Ironside says that Stillman has knowledge of her company's security systems (really?), Longo says he has an alibi for the night of the theft -- he was playing poker -- without Ironside prompting him for this information. Ironside gets to the point, saying he wants the triptych to be returned by Saturday, otherwise he will spill the beans about Longo's extracurricular activities to his wife. Longo says Ironside really "gets down in the gutter," to which the reply is, "Because that's where you live." Longo says he will "ask around."

As Stillman and Longo are driving away from the restaurant later, there is a process shot (projected backdrop) of cars driving behind them. The two of them talk far too much about how the theft was accomplished and their relationship. She tells him, "If you ever make a mistake that I'm not yours, I'll put a bullet in you."

Even later back at the office, Ed and Ironside start to discuss suspects -- and there are plenty of them. A call from Enzo is received, but he drops dead after saying, "I have had an idea who has done this." They go to Enzo's, it's determined that he was poisoned with cyanide ... which Lt. Finch later suggests was "suicide," because aside from the potential scandal of the theft, Enzo was having financial problems. Enzo's wife is not there, having gone out to what sounds like a restaurant. Ironside watches a video which was made with Enzo's closed-circuit TV hobby. It shows that Enzo wanted to shut down the exhibition and return everything before "something else happens," though exactly when this tape was made is not specified (probably during Ironside's previous visit to Enzo's place). Later, the wife has returned and has been sedated. Back at the office, Ironside says that "Rossi died in that apartment, but he was murdered somewhere else."

The next day, Eve comes to Enzo's office in the building, where she finds Comus. (So how did she know that Comus would be in Enzo's office?) She is acting ditzy, pretending to be a survey taker. She's followed closely by Ed who wants an inventory of all the exhibits. (And how did Ed also know that Comus would be in Enzo's office?) While Ed is distracting Comus, Eve is puttering around and she finds a pill bottle from a pharmacy. Of course, nobody sees her pocket this. This sequence is stupidly written and poorly staged. Later, the question is: does the bottle contain cyanide? (WHAT?!?!?) But it's determined it does not.

A ransom demand is soon received for $250,000, which seems kind of low-budget, but then this is 1967 and various principals assemble in Comus's office. He wants to pay the money, Simmons says not to do this because it would be like "paying a reward for murder," and Edmond wants to pay, but bust the people who are responsible when they pick up the cash. Longo is waiting outside Comus's office; when Ironside leaves the meeting, he tells The Chief, "I can't meet that deadline."

Ironside meets Fitch in the lobby of the building and provides an elaborate explanation as to how a pill taken from Rossi's office was used to poison him. Whoever killed Enzo had coated a gelatin pill Enzo took for an ulcer with a varnish-like substance, put the cyanide in the pill and then put this specific pill on top of some cotton in the bottle, so Enzo would be sure to take it. I think what is suggested here is like what are called "enteric" pills these days which don't dissolve until they bypass your stomach acids, thus there was a delay between the time Enzo took the pill and the time he croaked.

Detailed instructions as to how the ransom must be paid soon follow. Edmond has to put the money in the number one elevator in the building, there must be no one else in the building, and no police within a mile of it. Ironside points out something interesting: the previous ransom demand used the term "we," whereas the most recent one, which has just been read, uses "I." Ironside says this means that someone is getting "sandbagged," to which Finch adds, "In other words, the old double-cross." Despite all this, Comus says the ransom will be paid, and Ironside agrees, saying the triptych is still in danger.

At the appointed hour for the ransom, Edmond has the money, and is on one of the top floors of the building where he is supposed to put the cash inside the elevator which will be sent down to a floor where the crooks will grab the money. Ironside suddenly shows up, which is totally counter to the demands that no one else be in the building, especially a cop.

Edmond has a "troubleshooter, all transistor" device which will allow him to see which floor the money is being delivered to. I guess they couldn't just use the normal method of seeing which floor an elevator is on with numbers above the elevator door. Edmond summons another elevator which he and Ironside get into, and monitor the progress of the number one elevator, even though on the "troubleshooter" device, it is in the third, not the first column.

The first elevator stops on the fourth floor, and when Ironside and Edmond arrive on that floor, Edmond rushes to the number one elevator, where the door is opened. Longo is inside in some kind of distress, though there are no signs that he has been shot or stabbed. What Longo utters before he dies doesn't make any sense. Edmond, hearing a noise from the elevator ceiling, is almost going to shoot upwards, but Ironside stops him. Ed is hiding in the ceiling of the elevator and has the bag which contained the money which he grabbed using a hook on a rope after the crook took the money out. Ironside tells Edmond, "Your partner almost pulled it off." Edmond says "I don't know what you're talking about. I'll sue!" (So who did take the money?)

The show ends with an Agatha Christie-like meeting of people in Comus's office. First, Ironside says that the way someone strangled Edmond during the robbery suggested that Edmond put the wounds on his neck himself. The knife used to kill the guard had no fingerprints on it, which were covered up a piece of candy wrapper which was found on the floor earlier, and regarded as of no special significance. The missing triptych panel is found under canvas on the wall of the gallery. Presumably Edmond told someone this since he was arrested, but it sounded like he was going to not talk.

Seemingly without any evidence, Ironside declares that Simmons was Edmond's accomplice, and, in a Perry Mason-like finale, Simmons opens his mouth, saying "Edmond made me do it. He said he'd already done his part." Simmons' "part" was to go to Enzo's office and plant the poisoned pill. Good luck trying to prove all this in court.

What a terrible show! And what does the title mean? There was no "monster"!

TRIVIA:


S01E11: The Man Who Believed
Original air date: November 23, 1967
Director: Tony Leader; Producer: David J. O'Connell; Writer: Stephen Kandel; Music: Oliver Nelson. Time: 47:48.

After the body of Samantha Dain, an aspiring young singer, is fished out of the water under the Golden Gate Bridge, Ironside says she was the victim of "stupidity." Following the assassination attempt on him, Ironside received a letter from her, which said "Living is better than dying." Ironside says he received 1,432 letters in total, which I find hard to believe.

The police medical examiner, Dr. Gwynne (Arthur Adams), says it looks like Samantha committed suicide, but he has not completed his autopsy yet. Gwynne tells Ironside, "Each time we meet, my anticipation grows ... doing an autopsy on YOU." Ironside tells him, "Not a chance ... I'd roll off the table before I'd let you lay a finger on me." This amuses Ed and Mark, especially Mark, because Gwynne is also black, and Mark is having a suppressed laugh at the way Gwynne is arguing with his boss.

Later, the team talks to a guy named John Brenner (Johnny Silver), who drives a lunch wagon. He says he saw the well-known Samantha on the bridge the previous evening, when she "beeped" at him; she was "on the bridge, by the railing." He honked his horn and she "beeped" back. What does he mean by this? Was she in a car or had she driven there in a car and stopped on the bridge? If so, what happened to the car? Was it recovered from somewhere? Was there really a car? There is no answer to any of these questions.

Using toys from a store, the team constructs a model of the bridge which is placed on top of the pool table. This model seems elaborate, including a tower and its cables, as well as an area on the outside of the tower where someone could "hide." Because of this, Ironside is convinced Samantha was not alone on the bridge.

Eve goes to see Samantha's manager, Ray Harrison (George Furth). He says that his client "had a lot to live for," and was a "very real person" who was just starting to make money. She had "the health of a cart horse and the reflexes of a cat." When Eve ups the level of her grilling to ask if murder was involved, Harrison says, "You're a shrewd little police girl, aren't you?" He says there was no reason for anyone to kill Samantha for either love or money: "She was careless with money. She was an impulse shopper, but not masochistic. She chose her men or they chose her casually, but she avoided the really sick ones." He has an indifferent attitude towards Samantha now that she is dead.

Ed eventually gets the details of Gwynne's autopsy, which say that on the night she died, "Samantha Dain was so high, it's a wonder she could walk." "High" means she was doped up with heroin. Thirty months before, Samantha had entered a program in Lexington, Kentucky to detox her body, and was eventually released, considered cured ... but obviously she was not. Prior to going to Lexington, she had made two unsuccessful attempts to commit suicide.

Ironside and the others go to the Psychedelic Daffodil, a club where Samantha got her start and where she was booked before she died for two weeks in exchange for getting out of a seven-year contract she had with the club's owner, Harry Brancussi (Michael Constantine, with a Mafiosi mumble). There is a three-piece band (keyboard, guitar, drums) rehearsing there who we saw at the beginning of the show. Brancussi says that Samantha was "talented" but he just regarded her as "merchandise." He says the name of his club reflects the times. Before it was "Cozy Club," and after that, "Blue Corner." When Mark makes some smart remark, Brancussi tells him to get lost. The combo's pianist, Paul Bridger (Guy Stockwell) says, "Bad Harry, completely unprejudiced. Harry hates everybody."

Bridger is of the opinion that Samantha didn't commit suicide. He was her accompanist for the six years she had performed at the club. He is using the money he makes there to finance his college education; now he is a second year medical student. Bridger says Samantha was happy up until two days ago when she "blew up" at a rehearsal. There was a tape made of this session, but it is missing. Bonnie Lloyd (Barbara Rhoades), the club's resident go-go dancer, gave the tape to Harrison.

When Ironside goes to see Harrison, the manager is edgy, guessing that Ironside doesn't like him too much. He says, "You censure me while sanctifying a dead woman. Samantha Dain wasn't just a pretty psychedelic poster, you know, she was human and female, which is to say she was occasionally treacherous, frequently cruel and always difficult." He says he never got involved with her on a personal level. He turns the tape over to Ironside so he can "unravel" the mystery about her -- "the singing soul of Samantha Dain ... don't get too close to it, it might blow up in your face."

If you look at the reel-to-reel tape handed over by Harrison and compare it to the same tape which Ed is playing back later on a recorder in the office, you will notice that it is not the same in terms of how much tape is on the reels. The take-up reel is also smaller than the one with the source tape, and when Ed forwards to the end of Samantha's singing, he lands in exactly the right place.

The tape has Samantha singing, but also a very revealing excerpt of dialogue: "Oh ... it was you, you could have got me twenty years in jail for what you did. Well, darling, you are going to straighten it out and I mean tonight, because if you don't, I head right to the police. [What sounds like a man here says "Sure."] I mean it, and you can't stop me." The tape runs out shortly after this, which also doesn't make sense in terms of the total amount of tape.

Ironside takes the tape to an educational institution like a university, where there is a "Sound Laboratory" run by Professor Dan Peabody (Cliff Potter). Ironside wants to know about the word "sure" on the tape. Peabody tells him that "voice prints are still experimental" and his analysis of this word "might not stand up in court."

Ironside then goes to a hospital. I have no idea if this is also at the university. He runs into a nurse (June C. Ellis) in the hallway who is a bag. She gives him a bunch of mouth, assuming he is there for getting "physical therapy," but Ironside just wants to see Dr. Maurice Zelman (Alex Gerry). Zelman seems to be familiar with Ironside's case, which is odd, because this is not the hospital in Sonoma seen in the pilot. Maybe he went to this hospital for testing or therapy after he came back to town. When Ironside says that Zelman was treating Samantha for heroin addiction two years and ten months ago with measured doses of methadone, Zelman says he doesn't know what Ironside is talking about -- he was not treating Samantha. (There is no indication where Ironside originally got Zelman's name from, but we will find out shortly.)

Ironside then goes to see Bridger, who is pursuing his medical studies, without us knowing where he is. Is this in the same hospital as Zelman, or at the university, or what? Bridger says he liked Samantha, but "now she's dead." Ironside then says that Bridger forged Zelman's name so Samantha could get accepted into the program in Lexington "without too much fuss." So where did he learn this? From Zelman himself? And how did he connect the dots?

Ironside says that Bridger loved Samantha, but she never loved him back. Bridger says, "She used me." He had a three cornered affair with her, the third "corner" being her habit. Ironside says he "loved ... hated ... envied ... and lost" her. When Ironside asks if Bridger killed her, the reply is that this is a stupid question: "If the answer was 'yes,' I'd have to kill you" (Bridger is holding a scalpel when he says this). Ironside says, "You were looking for a love affair with Samantha and got a whipping. Now don't blame Samantha for your sickness. I'm a cripple, Bridger, but then so are you." (!!!) Bridger tells him, "You would have made quite a surgeon, Doctor Ironside. You cut right down to the nerves."

Ironside and the team return to the Psychedelic Daffodil. Checking the dressing room Samantha used, they have a huge collective brainstorm that Samantha brought heroin from Europe back to the States in her makeup kit where it was disguised as powder (seriously). Based on the tape we heard, she was not aware that she was doing this.

Ironside and Eve go back to the university where Peabody has been analyzing the word "sure" for a day and a half. Peabody had goo-goo eyes for Eve before, but he must be really wasted, because now he drools that he wants to program her voice on the analysis machine. Ironside tells Peabody to pack up his equipment and bring it to the club. It cannot identify whose voice it is, but Ironside said that just the fact that they seem to be using it for this purpose will be a "death sentence" to someone there.

At the club, where people are engaged in dopey dancing and Bridger is playing his keyboard in a totally unrealistic manner like a cat playing a piano in a YouTube video, Peabody has brought along his equipment, which looks very heavy to move around. Harrison is asked in the dressing room to say "sure," and so is Bonnie. When Brancussi is asked, he pulls out a gun, since it was obviously him speaking. He leaves with Ironside, saying, "Come after me, he's going to be a crippled all the way up." It looks like Bridger knows what is going on -- he pulls Brancussi away from Ironside, and falls on the floor with him, fighting. Brancussi is shot, though the gun went flying somewhere nearby on the floor and someone picks it up -- who was that?

Later, Ironside shows up at the club to thank Bridger for saving his life, but he says he knows Bridger was the one who killed Samantha -- she would have been able to tell a friend from an enemy, even if she was high. On the bridge "she must have been with someone she trusted ... with an old friend ... with you ... and you killed her."

Bridger doesn't deny anything. He drags up his past history, which we have heard before, about how he wanted to overcome the negative parenting from his upbringing. He says, "I offered it all to Samanatha, but she had changed, she didn't want me ... I loved her, I really loved her."

Ironside adds, before Bridger is taken away: "And you killed her."

Seriously, this crazy Perry Mason twist ending is all so stupid! No one has dealt with questions like how did Samantha get to the bridge, did she have a big fight before Bridger (is his a name a pun or something?) threw her off the bridge, why would she go with him to the bridge, did she shoot up with some of the heroin she brought back from Europe, etc., etc.!! Good luck in court trying to convict this guy. Is he going to plead insanity because of love?

Some people at IMDb are saying this was one of the best episodes of the series, comparing it to the classic film noir Laura. I don't think so. Aside from a few stock shots and location shots, I found this to be a very claustrophobic show. And its title is dumb, too.

TRIVIA:

  • Marcia Strassman plays Samantha Dain, who is not seen "live" in the show, but in the form of a large cardboard cutout used for advertising purposes. Her character's name is spelled "Dian" in the opening credits.
  • The music behind the opening credits is a big band version of the Ironside theme, which seems at odds with the hippie/folk music in the show.


S01E12: A Very Cool Hot Car
Original air date: November 30, 1967
Director: James Sheldon; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Luther Davis; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:49.

The Commissioner wants Ironside to investigate other policemen in connection with car thefts happening recently. Fewer and fewer stolen cars are being recovered. Ironside is hesitant to do this, saying, "There are enough criminals in the world without my spying on fellow cops." The Commissioner reminds Ironside that he is a "special consultant ... so I am consulting you."

The officer looking into car thefts for the last three or four months is Lieutenant Bill Adams (Bernie Hamilton, later Captain Dobey on Starsky & Hutch). There is a suggestion that Adams is not well regarded. Even Mark knows there is gossip about Adams in the building, that he is "in trouble." Adams says himself, "We need new thinking."

Ironside and his team, Adams, and Sgt. John Bream (Arch Johnson), who also works with auto thefts (Bream's previous history is not explained), go to a car lot, acting on a tip to check out vehicles, but they can find nothing suspicious. Six months ago, the cops were recovering 91% of stolen vehicles; these days it is less than 74%. When Ironside asks Bream for his opinion about what is happening with vehicle thefts, his reply is that he is a "slogger," meaning "one who works hard at boring tasks," who would "like to stay on the force for a while." In other words, he doesn't want to rock the boat. From inside the van, Eve chirps up that "Somewhere in the United States, a car is stolen every sixty seconds, day and night."

Bream suggests Ironside should go and talk to Lieutenant Joe Muldoon (Jay C. Flippen), who was Adams' or his predecessor (I think). When they get to Muldoon's place, he will only speak to Ironside. Muldoon is in a wheelchair, retired from the force and a horribly bitter guy. He refers to "bright shiny college boy Adams," telling Ironside to "give up ... nobody is ever going to solve the auto thefts." Muldoon says considering how long he was a cop, there was only one case he failed on: "I couldn't beat them, that college boy from Africa can't, and you can't, so you're just wearing yourself down."

Muldoon says the thefts are bringing in around a million dollars a month to someone (much more than has been estimated), resulting in "pretty good payouts," and the police department doesn't want this case solved. He was early "retired" after years of good service. As to why he is in a wheelchair, he says "I wasn't retired for health reasons ... I was fine. Men get so mad, so sick to their stomach, about the dirt, the LSD, the things that are going on and the graft in high places, you just don't want to live any more." Muldoon tried to commit suicide, but "tied the knot wrong." Ironside leaves, saying, "It's just too easy to holler 'corruption'." When Ironside asks if Muldoon needs anything, Muldoon says, "Something to believe in."

Leaving Muldoon's, Ironside wants the team, along with Adams and Bream, to check any place in the city that has to do with cars, whether they are "bought, sold, dismantled or shipped." When Mark suggests that Adams is really a good guy, Ironside wonders if this is because of "black solidarity." (!!!) Mark responds, "Is there something wrong with that?" to which Ironside says, "Not a thing."

Back at the office, the team analyzes maps trying to find a pattern with the stolen cars, but come up empty-handed – there is "a total lack of pattern." Ed has discovered that not one business connected with used or new cars has changed hands in the last six months, but one salvage yard was passed on from the owner to his son and daughter when he died. Eve is sent to check out the Dunne family connected with this who sound kind of hoity-toity. Soon enough, Ironside goes to the Mid-City Salvage Yard run by the two kids, Rosemary and Alfred Dunne (Pamela Dunlap and Peter J. Helm), who are serious hippie types. See this excerpt from the show; some of their dialog is pretty amusing.

Computers which look like they are at a university get involved determining that stolen cars less than three months old are the least likely to be recovered, so a system is set up where Ed or Bream will be alerted 24 hours a day if any such thefts are reported. Mark wants to volunteer to apply for a job as a laborer at the Mid-City yard to do undercover work, watching for a new car that is wrecked being towed there. The idea is that the VIN (Vehicle Registration Number) would be taken from this car and then transferred to a new car of the same make and model which is stolen. Ironside resists this idea, but eventually gives in.

Mark's new job is not easy because of the heavy workload and some of the burly workers there are suspicious of him. Cars are picked up and crushed in a hydraulic compactor similar to the James Bond movie Goldfinger. When Mark sees a wrecked near-new Cadillac with only 241 miles on the speedometer on it come into the yard, he alerts The Chief.

Only a few of these Cadillacs have been sold, presumably through just one dealer, and a list of all the owners is sent to headquarters. Adams says it should be tricky to keep track of cars that haven't even been stolen yet. Pictures of the cars are also sent, which seems odd ... and Ironside says there are eleven photos, but we only see seven on the table. One car in particular which belongs to a broker is determined to be "most likely to be stolen," which seems like a real crap shoot.

Stock footage suggests the broker frequently leaves his car at a lot outside a heliport which is at or near the San Francisco airport. However, closer examination of subsequent footage shows the heliport is near Mountainview, California, which is a city about 40 miles south of San Francisco. Wherever it is, Ed is doing surveillance at this location, watching the Cadillac, and sleeping in his car overnight.

The Cadillac in the heliport parking lot is eventually stolen by some guy. Ed follows him, with some bad rear-projection shots. But where are they? Is the Cadillac headed to Burlingame, which is about 17 miles south of San Francisco, because that's where the scrap yard run by the hippie siblings is located ... or is this business somewhere else? They end up on "Mountainview Road," travelling south. But not only is Ed the pursuer, but is also the pursued, because some guy comes up behind him and starts to force him off the road. Ed finally does get run off the road in an area which is mountainous after about a minute and 17 seconds. Fortunately, he returns to the office OK, though his accident seemed pretty serious.

Meanwhile, to determine if someone in the scrap yard is changing the VINs at night, Ironside orders a sound-activated tape recorder. The next day, during quitting time, Mark puts this device, which looks like a small cassette player, inside a metal box in the yard, which doesn't look like a very good idea, since it looks like that box might get thrown into the scrap pile. But when the tape is listened to in the office later, there is nothing on it. Ironside has a brainstorm that this is because of the large magnet used to pick up metal in the yard, which has erased the tape. His theory makes sense, but why would they be using the large magnet at night, they merely have to take the VIN off the smashed car and replace it on the "new" one, assuming that it has been driven there.

The team, cops, and a technician, who looks like Shemp Howard from the Three Stooges, post themselves outside the Mid-City yard listening for sounds with some geeky looking microphone device, while Mark and Adams go into the yard. (But how would they get in, isn't there a gate? Previous views of the yard suggest there is a chain link fence all around it.) This microphone is "very directional" and is used to follow the two men (though how would it know exactly where they are?). The technician says he can use it to scan "the whole yard" if necessary.

The microphone produces various high-pitched noises, which drives Ironside crazy. We see the guys from the day shift who are doing things in the yard, including picking up stuff with the magnet on the crane and moving it around ... not just doing the number with the VINs. Adams and Mark squabble over what they are doing, and the high-pitched noises continue in the van. The two workers from the yard encounter Adams and Mark, and start punching them out, but Ironside has alerted cops nearby, who send in police dogs. (But how do the dogs know who not to attack?)

The big question at the end of the show is "How did they dispose of the hot cars?" Ironside says they moved the cars into the yard (at night) with the crane ... but why wouldn't they just drive the cars into the yard, duh? Alfred, the hippie son who Ironside now refers to as "Rhododendron," spouts yet more banalities. He is in the hot seat now, Ironside says he is guilty of "profiting from crime ... which is violence against society." He and his sister will be charged with being accessories.

When Alfred says "everything we made we gave to good causes," Ironside says, "We give Green Stamps for that." Alfred unintentionally solves the mystery of where the revamped cars went when he blabs "they" (i.e., the criminals) provided him with a rental car. Rather than sell them to new customers, they sold them to rental agencies. An investigation to a place called 24 Hour Rent-A-Car finds out where (some of, I guess) the stolen cars ended up.

The show ends with Ironside saying, "It's a shame to shut them down, they might have become number three."

Another serious question at the end of the show: According to what was said earlier, 100 cars were stolen each month and resold for $1,000 per car, making around $100,000 per month and over a million dollars a year. But are all these cars sold to the rental agency raided at the end of the show? There is a limit as to how many cars can be rented from one place like this in a month, isn't there?

TRIVIA:


S01E13: The Past is Prologue
Original air date: December 7, 1967
Director: Don Weis; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Paul Mason; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 49:50.

Ironside and Mark are present at a party where the center of attention is Tom Stowe (Harrison Ford). Tom first encountered Ironside many years ago after he was caught doing bad things like stealing hubcaps. Ironside said Tom had a choice of either being a "dumb punk" or he could use his brains to succeed in life. Ironside made Tom a bet that he would succeed, and the party is to celebrate Tom graduating summa cum laude from Stanford. A prestigious job with NASA awaits him. Ironside is present to pay up the $5 bet he made.

However, the party is interrupted by perhaps the biggest party pooper of all time -- a cop named Ted (Barry Cahill) who has a fugitive warrant for Tom's father Wally, whose previous name was Frank Tomischek (the spelling may vary). Wally (Victor Jory) is wanted for escaping jail in New York state 19 years ago after being convicted for first degree murder and sentenced to be executed.

Wally was formerly the caretaker at the estate of a rich guy named Chase. He caught Chase's daughter riding on a horse which her father had forbidden her to do and spanked her, after she hit him in the face with her riding crop. As a result, there were words exchanged between Wally and her father which led to blows between the two men. Later, Chase was found dead, shot with a gun which Wally owned and which he had asked Chase to have repaired. Chase's wife walked in on the scene where Wally was standing holding the gun in his hand, having picked it off the floor. As a result, Wally was charged with murder.

Ironside goes to see Wally where he is being held in jail before being extradited. He is resigned to his fate, saying that his big mistake was just being "dumb."

Soon, Ironside goes to New York to talk to Chase's widow (June Vincent). He asks her if she will write a letter to the Governor regarding Wally, asking for clemency, because he has been living the life of a model citizen for the last 19 years. However, Mrs. Chase, though relatively polite when she first meets Ironside, says that Wally's wife has had 19 more years of a husband than she did. Ironside suggests that she is using the law to punish someone who hurt her, which she doesn't take well. She kicks him out of her place, but just before this, Ironside meets Chase's daughter Phyllis (Jill Donohue) who sparked the fight with her father, who concludes her brief conversation by saying "What a brat I was."

Ironside then goes to see Whittier, Chase's lawyer (Bartlett Robinson), who tells him that Chase had made a codicil to his will prior to the encounter with Wally, giving $5,000 each to Wally and his young son. This seems very odd if there were some kind of ill feelings between the two men. This fact was not brought up at Wally's trial, where it might have let the jury decide if there was any special sigificance to this.

Chase's doctor Michaels (John Zaremba) tries to invoke physician/patient privilege when Ironside goes to see him, but eventually admits that Chase was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor, which means that his death was quite likely not from being murdered, but a suicide.

Finally, Ironside visits chief of police Phil Wilson (Walter Coy, uncredited), who, back then, was the cop who investigated what he now describes as "an open and shut case" and gets the paperwork connected with the case from him. Ironside is convinced that the people working on the case didn't do their job, they just prejudged Wally. He says that if Wally was tried today, he would likely be acquitted.

Returning to San Francisco, Ironside visits Wally again to report on his investigation. Wally didn't know about the changes to the will. He says that prior to the confrontation with Chase, his boss "liked us" (meaning him and his family). Wally also says that he ran from jail because he didn't want to be on death row.

The last of an excellent cast of character actors in the show ends with John Hoyt as Malcolm Henderson, legal aide to the Governor of New York, who shows up in California to extradite Wally. After Ironside relates all that he has discovered, Henderson says he will recommend clemency to the governor, but Ironside says that is not good enough ... he wants a full pardon for Wally.

The way the case is finally resolved to the point where Henderson goes for a pardon is ridiculous. There is a photo of the crime scene from years ago with Chase's body in the background and his wife in the foreground. She has her arm up in a way you can see the watch on her wrist. There is a certain time frame as to events surrounding Chase's "murder," but Ironside points out that on the evening before the day of his death, the time had changed to Daylight Saving Time, and the wife had not adjusted her watch. Because of this, the time frame for these events, which include Wally leaving the house to cool off and then return, was thrown out of whack.

This police photo showing the wife and her watch is blown up multiple times which reveals that instead of 9:30, the time was 8:30 on her watch, because she hadn't adjusted it for the time change, so the official time surrounding Chase's death was wrong from the beginning. With this clincher, Henderson says, "I'll buy it."

This is similar to a Kojak show from 1975, S02E20, where crucial evidence, a picture made with a camera of something that was video taped and on a monitor, was blown up to view the fine detail from a very specific ring that one of the characters was wearing.

Wally is off the hook, and the show ends on a positive note. Ironside says he wants "gratitude" for his efforts, and asks Wally to build him some bookshelves and do other carpentry work around the ofice.

TRIVIA:


S01E14: Girl in the Night
Original air date: December 21, 1967
Director: Ralph Senensky; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writers: True Boardman (teleplay), Dean Riesner (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:49.

This is an above average show with only a couple of minor issues. And it takes place in Las Vegas! Ironside has sent Ed there "on a routine trip to expedite some hood" back to San Francisco.

While the paperwork for the transfer is delayed by the hood's lawyer, Ed finds himself in a bar, and he hears music coming from a nearby room. Investigating, he finds Elaine Moreau (Susan St. James) playing a tune on the piano which we will hear more than once during the show.

She tells him, "You're late ... [I've been waiting] all my life [for you] ... maybe it just seems that way ... shall we go?" He leaves with her and the two of them go to a restaurant called Stefan's and then spend several hours together. Around three in the morning, they end up at a house where the two engage in some brief but heavy smooching. Elaine goes upstairs, and shortly after, the sound of a car outside is heard. Ed rushes outside as Elaine is seen driving away from the place. BUT ... How did she get from upstairs in almost no time down to the driveway? Did she jump out a window or something? Is the car she taking one that was already there, or is this Ed's rental (probably not the latter)?

Two hoods have been following the pair, and after Ed watches her driving away in a Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible, they punch him out, accompanied by the usual dissonant music, giving him a concussion. The next day, Ironside and the rest of the team show up in Vegas.

Ed tells them what has happened and there is the first of several flashbacks in the show. He says that Elaine was troubled, "something was very wrong." Mike Hennessey (Mort Mills) from the Las Vegas police wrutleho met everyone at the airport joins them at the hospital, where Ed is soon cleared by Doctor Evans (Craig Huebing) to leave.

Hennessey is in a hurry to return to his office downtown, where there is a major investigation ongoing regarding the recent murder of a local "Mr. Big" named Jim Cardoff (Simon Scott, who also appeared in S01E03). When asked what he knows about Elaine, Hennessey says she is "a singer in town." Ironside is annoyed about Hennessey's sudden departure.

Ed is also annoyed about Ironside's queries regarding Elaine, particularly because she didn't want him asking too many questions, instead focusing on the two of them just having a good time when they were together.

The team goes to the house where Ed was beaten up outside, and find some woman there named Carol Phillips (Laurie Mitchell) who has no idea who Elaine is. When they go inside, Ed notices a picture above the fireplace is totally different than the one he saw when he was there earlier. They leave, but Ed is sure that the place outside the house where the cops found him can be confirmed.

They then go downtown to the bar where Ed first met Elaine. The manager of the club is Jan Carlin (Sarah Marshall), who goes to a back room and talks to Joe Verona (Donnelly Rhodes), saying "I smell cop." Verona speaks to Ironside, telling him that Elaine is "my girl." Carlin says that Elaine, who used to work there as a singer with her piano playing partner Johnny Foster (Steve Carlson), "hasn't been here for months." After they leave, Verona says to one of his thugs named Stulka (George Keymas) that he recognized Ed from the previous evening outside Phillips' house, though Verona was actually not there (Stulka was).

The team goes to the Rodeo Motel, where they are staying. They meet with Millie O'Neil (Joan Staley), a waitress from the bar who overheard some of the conversation between them and Verona earlier. She says that Elaine was in trouble from the first day she walked into the club. "She was young and fresh ... people don't stay like that way in this town for long." She says that Carlin didn't want to hire her, but Verona did, despite the fact that Elaine was engaged to Foster, her accompanist. At one point, Foster said he would kill Elaine before he'd let Verona have her, but Foster was encouraged to leave her after Verona's thugs threatened to break his fingers.

Ironside goes to Stefan's restaurant, where Ed and Elaine ate during their date. The fatherly Stefan (Oscar Beregi), who was very friendly with Elaine when she was there earlier, says she was "really dear to me." The relationship between Foster and Elaine was actually terminated in a back room at the restaurant. Though Stefan didn't witness the threats made by Verona's men, he said that after they left, Foster was a "broken man."

Foster himself is tracked down. He is living in a small apartment which has a piano. Foster tells the team that after he was forced to break up with Elaine, Verona kept him around like a "court jester." Foster witnessed a meeting between Verona and Cardoff where the latter said he was concerned that Verona would want to move up from the "number two" position in his organization and take it over. In order to prove his loyalty, Cardoff forced Verona to let him screw Elaine (or so it seems)!

Back in the present, we find out from Hennessey that Elaine has been found dead in a nearby lake. When Verona is brought there (I dunno why they wouldn't have taken her body to the morgue), he freaks out. He starts blabbing about how he ordered Stulka to knock off Cardoff. Stulka also starts blabbing, saying that Elaine witnessed this execution, so she had to be killed too. The dialog at this crucial point in the story leaves something to be desired.

As the story ends, Verona and Stulka are busted, and Ed is sad. Ed tells his boss, "You should have known her." Ironside replies, "Yeah, I guess I should have," as Elaine is heard singing on the soundtrack. What happens with regard to Foster, who knows about Elaine's death, is left open-ended.


S01E15: The Fourteenth Runner
Original air date: December 28, 1967
Director: Don Weis; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writers: Donn Mullally (teleplay), Leon Tokatyan (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:51.
As the show begins, long-distance runners are racing (or maybe practising?) in some mountainous area, accompanied by propulsive, dissonant-sounding music. This is connected with an international track meet being held at Stanford University. One of the men, number 601, is the blonde Russian, Yuri Alexeyovich Azneyeff (Philip Chapin). He seems to be the eighth of eight runners; I have no idea what the title of this episode means. He is at the end of the line, but suddenly has a huge burst of speed and passes everyone else. He gets so far ahead of the others than they cannot be seen behind him. A blue Ford Econoline pulls out from the side of the road and the back doors of this van open as Yuri approaches it from behind. The suggestion is that he gets into the van, but we do not see this happen.

Next scene is the Commissioner's office. Ironside meets two Russian KGB types who are freaking because it's been eight hours, and there is no indication of what happened to Yuri, who is "more than a runner, [he is] a hero to the Soviet people." The Russians are Peter Zarkov (Steve Inhat), in charge of the track team, and Igor Varenya (John Van Dreelen), the athletes' manager. When Zarkov, who is the mouthier of the two, is critical of the SFPD response to Yuri's disappearance, Ironside is quick to reply: "In your country, of course, police work is far more efficient. When the person drops out of his environment, I'm sure you know exactly how to put your finger on it." Anticipating how this may blow up, Zarkov requests an immediate truce, which Ironside agree with.

Ironside later meets in cloak-and-dagger fashion with Marlon Davis (Ed Asner), who he knows from before. Davis is the regional head of the "SIA," which I guess is a euphemism for "CIA." Mark drives the two of them around in the van while Davis tells Ironside that Yuri works for his organization and extreme caution must be taken while tracking him down. There is a spy from the U.S. working in Russia, one of Yuri's contacts, who will be in trouble if Yuri's cover is blown. Ironside says he will have to find Yuri "while balancing a cracked egg on my nose." Davis tells Ironside to be wary of Zarkov.

Meeting with the two Russians, Ironside throws out some theories about Yuri's disappearance, but they are interested in solutions, not opinions. Eve later shows up with a huge pile of clippings from the San Francisco papers. Ironside says they have to go through this pile looking for non-athletic information about Yuri: "Any and all personal facts ... his friends, his hobbies, his love affairs." Eve immediately finds an article about how Yuri found a girl friend at the Olympics ... and by coincidence, she happens to be living in San Francisco (duh!). The blonde Irina Novas (Ingrid Pitt) remembers that time as "beautiful," but "it seems a lifetime ago." A member of the Communist Hungarian team, she had defected after the Olympic games and she only saw Yuri once after she met him.

Ironside's visit to Irina is interrupted by Mark, who says that they should go to Devil's Slide, which is an actual place about 19 miles south of San Francisco on the Pacific where there are sheer cliffs dropping to a "giant whirlpool" in the ocean below. When they arrive there, they find some clothes which look like Yuri's and a note written in Russian which Irina translates for them. This note sounds like a suicide note, but when Zarkov and Varenya show up, Zarkov reads it. He says it sounds phony, "an amateur American dramatist's idea of Russian poetry." After the Russians leave, Ironside wonders if Yuri is just playing dead to buy himself some time.

Later, it looks like Irina is leaving town, but she is being followed by someone. Ironside meets again with Davis in a lumber yard, telling him that they are "running in circles." Ironside recommends that Yuri should be encouraged to get in touch with Davis, but Davis says they have tried to contact the defector with no results. We cut to a bar, where some guy comes in and reads the classified personal ads in a newspaper he is holding. One of them gets his attention: "Roscoe: Call home immediately. Your girl is in danger. Bessie Ann." This makes absolutely no sense now, though it will later. Davis meets Ironside again and says the attempt to contact Yuri is like "beating a dead horse. As far as the agency's concerned, he's been scrubbed ... he's dead, has to be," and the case is closed.

Returning to the office, Ironside tells the team that Davis was scamming him -- that Yuri is still alive, in hiding and a defector, and that the SIA is no longer interested in him, because he supposedly died at Devil's Slide. But as Mark says, Davis washing his hands of anything to do with Yuri is an attempt to "call off the fuzz." Ironside says, "We don't work for Marlon Davis," therefore they will continue with the investigation to find Yuri based on his disappearance and fact that Irina is now also missing.

Ironside wants Ed and Eve to visit all the small newspapers in town and get all editions from the last week. A huge pile of these is obtained, and Ironside finds the personal ad for "Roscoe." He says that Roscoe is Yuri's code name. WHAT?!?!? Since when has this been discussed earlier in the show? Ironside is shown calling one of the papers which contained this ad, but we don't see what happens, and what could they tell him anyway, aren't there privacy issues involved?

As a result of this call, Ironside goes to the bar where the guy was reading the classified ad earlier. A call is received for Ironside via the bar's pay phone, and it is Yuri, who has disguised himself as a "Latin-American," using some hair dye and by ingesting some chemicals which change his skin color, sort of like John Howard Griffin used when turning into a black man, a story recounted in the book Black Like Me. They go back to Devil's Slide, where Yuri wants to meet only with Ironside. Ironside says when he is finished he will flash his pen light for Mark to bring the van back and pick him up. Yuri is there, but how did he get there? Does he have a car now, or did he take a cab? Ironside tells him that an analysis of the clothes Yuri left at the location before showed traces of the chemicals used to dye his skin, and there were other clues.

Ironside says that Irina will be used to lure Yuri, who people now think is dead, back to "real life." Yuri says he is tired of being the "man in middle." When Yuri leaves, saying he is fed up talking to people like Davis, who are always making him promises, Ironside cautions him, "Never see Irina again."

Yuri goes to a low-budget room (#23) in the Grant Apartments where he has a key to enter and finds Irina inside. When they attempt to leave, Zarkov and the others are waiting for them when they open the door. (But how did Irina get into the room?) Yuri's phony moustache stayed on pretty good when they smooched. (By comparison, Zarkov's moustache, equally phony, looks phony.)

From this point on, the show gets kind of dumb.

Yuri and Irina, tailed by Ed, are taken by the Russians to the "Costa Libre" consulate. According to Davis, who has joined Ironside in the van, this country, "close friends of [Yuri's] government [obviously a euphemism for Cuba] ... look after the business interests here of several other Caribbean nations of similar persuasion." Davis adds, "We can't touch them there."

A hearse pulls up outside the consulate, and Yuri is moved out of the place wrapped up like a corpse on a stretcher, after having presumably been sedated. Ed has left his car and is standing right beside the hearse as the body is loaded into it. The body is taken to a mortuary where there are Russian musicians playing during a funeral service for whoever is in the casket. Ironside arrives at this place quickly. When he sees Zarkov, he says, "I like to collect exotic funeral services." After the casket is removed from the chapel, there is a strange noise, which is the sound of the casket and its contents being cremated. Zarkov totally freaks out, because somehow he wanted people to think that the casket contained a "diplomat" and it was not supposed to be cremated. (So who checked the box ordering cremation on the requisition for the funeral?) Davis suggested there was a diplomat in the casket when he and Ironside were on their way to the funeral, though Davis has taken a powder, and never came into the chapel. (This is becoming more and more confusing.) Someone, likely Ironside, has made a total fool of Zarkov by making it look like he was responsible for cremating the Soviet hero Yuri ... maybe.

Back at his headquarters, Ironside tells Irina that she will have to play dumb when she is in public, acting as if Yuri was killed and cremated. He was taken out of the casket as soon as it was moved out of the chapel (but was he drugged?). Ironside says they pulled off a trick worthy of Houdini. After Irina gives him a kiss, Ironside tells her "as soon as the situation cools, we'll get the two of you together." The ending is corny, Ironside predicting this will happen by the 14th of the next month, which is Valentine's Day (augh).

TRIVIA:


S01E16: Force of Arms
Original air date: January 4, 1968
Director: Tony Leader; Producer: Paul Mason; Writers: Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts, & Warren Duff (teleplay), Warren Duff (story); Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:50.

The show opens with Les Crane, a real television journalist known for his "confrontational" interview techniques, asking questions of Marcus Weathers (Gene Raymond), a multi-millionaire who is the leader of "The Second Force," a right-wing group of concerned citizens who "don't intend to hand over our country to the forces of lawlessness and crime without a fight."

The symbol of Weathers' group is a Nazi-like bolt of lightning held in a male fist. Weathers describes this as "a symbol of vigilance," but he further explains, "We don't want violence. We want justice. Let's just say that as number two, we'll try a little harder." Later in the studio, Crane says, "Mr. Weathers went on to explain that The Second Force did not intend to operate outside the law, but to aid and augment the activities of existing police structures."

When told that the police do not want nor need help from Weathers and his group, Crane is told, "The way things are going, I'd say someone needs to help them ... crime rate going up, disregard for authority, murderers being turned loose to roam the streets ... you name it, we've got it."

Alongside Weathers is his chief of staff Roderick "Buck" Dennison (Frank Gerstle), who Weathers describes as a "giant in the realm of security, a man who founded his own nation-wide detective agency, a man who has devoted his entire life to the fight against crime" and who was quoted in a national magazine as having "a collection of dossiers on [his] fellow citizens, more than the FBI."

Ironside, who finds Weathers and his organization to be repugnant, is seen watching this interview at the office. When Ed describes Weathers as "a phony," Ironside says that "On the contrary, he believes what he says, that's why he's dangerous."

Suddenly, without any explanation, Ironside and his team are seen at an accident site at night time, where Dennison's car has gone over a cliff and Dennison has been killed. Dr. Gwynne (Arthur Adams), the police medical examiner, later tells Ironside and The Commissioner that Dennison was dead before the crash, having suffered a cerebral concussion from a heavy blow. There were also lividity issues.

Ironside tells The Commissioner he wants the case, and soon the team is busy investigating at Dennison's hotel room, coming up with a lot of clues including the name "Annabelle." Ironside goes to Weathers' house, where a bunch of reporters are being told, "This wasn't just a murder. This was an organized, pre-meditated assassination." Weathers says that the people behind Dennison's killing are those who "want to see us fail, the people who don't want law, or order, or justice in our country."

Ironside, who was in the next room when Weathers delivered this rant, says it was "a compelling speech." Weathers says that the staff and facilities of The Second Force are at Ironside's disposal, but he is disappointed in Ironside's response to Dennison's death: "I've put together the finest equipment and the best brains that money can buy. I have one purpose: to make this a safer society, and you insist on refusing my help when we're both on the same side." Ironside replies, "I don't want to be on your side ... Your organization is independent, secret, responsible to no one ... private armies are too dangerous. Some countries have learned that the hard way. I don't want ours to be one of them."

This tense conversation is interrupted by Weathers' wife Susan (Diane Brewster), who is on her way to get her hair done. Eve, who is accompanying Ironside, goes with her, ostensibly to get a ride back downtown. Ironside says he wants maximum co-operation from Weathers in terms of providing information about his ex-chief of staff's private life.

The man who has taken over Dennison's job is Jim Connolly (Harold J. Stone), an ex-police officer, who Weathers says resigned from the force. Ironside retorts, "Resigned? He was dismissed! Too many of his arrests came in with broken jaws." Ironside says this represents the difference between his organization and Weathers': "The police force gives a redneck the gate; the Second Force gives him a promotion."

Eve and Weathers' wife are seen driving in San Francisco with really bad process shots showing what's in front of and behind the car. Eve notices that they are being tailed by someone, who Susan says is Victor Kramer (George Murdock). He typically follows her at her husband's request for security reasons. When Susan arrives at the beauty parlor, Eve departs and Susan goes inside, but almost immediately goes out the back door of the place and drives away in another car. (Was the car provided by the manager [Mario?] of the salon?) Eve has been anticipating this and follows Susan in a cab.

When Susan eventually goes into an apartment building, Eve is stumped as to how she can get into the place, but someone tells her through a speaker, "If you're looking for Mrs. Weathers, she's in apartment 3A." Susan says through this speaker, "There's nothing to be afraid of, Miss Whitfield, we must talk to you." When Eve arrives at the apartment door, a guy, later revealed to be Jeff Hanson (Linden Chiles), opens it. Susan appears, and says, "We realize there's no point in hiding any more. The police are the only ones who can help us."

Ironside visits the Second Force offices in a skyscraper, where there are plenty of computers and a Second Force logo is seen. He has a few choice words with Connolly ("You liked playing Gestapo [when you were a cop]?") and meets Thomas Flagg (William Lucking). Connolly says the equipment, which Ironside refers to as "Dennison's dream," cost almost a million dollars and already contains two hundred thousand names, which Ironside says can be used for "intimidation" purposes. When Ironside wants information about people who might hate Weathers' guts, 32 file cards are produced. Ironside's name is prominent on one of them.

Eve phones from the apartment where she has had a chat with Hanson and Susan. Ironside goes there and finds out that Hansen is a Second Force dropout, from before the organization even had a name. As well, he and Susan have hot pants for each other and have been carrying on an affair for some time. Hansen "saw what was happening" with the paramilitary organization which included "armbands, then uniforms ... and then I walked away."

Based on information provided by these two, Susan says that Kramer, the chauffeur, may be able to provide information on who knocked off Dennison. (This is not elaborated on at all.) Ironside makes Kramer an offer he can't refuse: co-operate with him or he will spill the beans about the affair to Susan's husband. (This seems very sleazy.) Kramer says he honestly doesn't know who killed Dennison.

Ed has found what "Annabelle" refers to – the name of a motel. Dennison checked into the place on the evening of his death. The motel desk clerk, Henry Brink (Cliff Norton), is a quirky individual.

Then we see a poker game at which Kramer, Connolly and Flagg are present. Kramer lights a cigarette with a book of matches from the Annabelle Motel, which makes him want to call Ironside on The Chief's pre-arranged number. But why would Kramer be at this card game – just because he is an employee of Weathers, like the other two? Ed shows up with warrants for Connolly and Flagg's arrest, but Kramer is not there.

Predictably, Weathers is outraged that two of his men have been busted. He rants at both Ironside and The Commissioner in the latter's office. He says he will sue Ironside and the police department for libel and slander. Weathers says that Ironside is "out to destroy the Second Force, wipe it out. Why? Because has a neurotic hatred for us, because he's an embittered, vindictive man who's sorry for himself, who'll do anything to get back a little what he had in public life before he became a cripple." The Commissioner says "that was contemptible." Weathers is leaving in a huff, when Eve shows up, saying that Kramer has been found in Weathers' car, dead, at the same location where Dennison was killed. Ironside tells Weathers his organization has gotten away from him: "Someone inside your organization is playing you for a sucker, trying to take over. We better find that someone before he sends you over a cliff."

Later, Ironside gets a call from Susan Weathers, who says that her husband is freaking out since Kramer's death and Connolly has been assigned to guard him. All through this conversation, I was thinking "Is her husband listening in on this call?" Ironside tells her to leave the French doors at her place open, and later he shows up, and goes through these doors (there is no mention that he has a warrant to do anything at this point). Weathers and Connolly are in a room nearby.

Ironside makes a noise, which brings both Weathers and Connolly into the room where he is. He takes Connolly's gun away and pockets it, but then Susan comes down from upstairs and says she saw someone outside on the terrace. Ironside goes to investigate and finds Hansen, who points his gun at the Chief. When Hansen tells him that he doesn't seem surprised, Ironside says, "It did occur to me that a dropout might think of dropping back in."

Coming back in, Hansen orders Connolly, who is smiling, to start the helicopter -- Weathers' private helicopter, still outside on the lawn, which we saw at the beginning of the show.

Weathers asks what does Hansen want, he replies "The Second Force."

Hansen tells Weathers to get over by the stairway and Ironside says, "I wouldn't argue, Mr. Weathers. He's a determined young man with a wire or two hooked up wrong."

I am going to switch to a video clip of what follows.

After this, Connolly returns as the sound of the helicopter is heard outside. Hansen says he has been a big help, then he shoots Connolly, but the gun contains blanks and powder burns appear on his shirt. It seems to me a VERY BIG DEAL that when Hansen disarmed Ironside on the terrace, he took Ironside's gun (which had blanks in it), then pocketed his own gun and used Ironside's. (Ironside pocketed Connolly's gun, which had bullets in it. What would have happened if Hansen had not pocketed and used his own gun? Ironside did not see that Hansen put his gun in his [Hansen's] own pocket – but perhaps Ironside could see the difference in guns when Hansen was waving his weapon around.

Connolly tells Hansen, "You played me for a patsy" and punches him, with Hansen flying into a chair. Connolly then runs outside, where Ed is in the helicopter and a cop is nearby to arrest Connolly ... but isn't that Ed's voice which is heard saying "Hold it there, Connolly," seemingly from outside the helicopter?

Ironside has the final word to Connolly: "You should have made a career of the first force, Jim, it had a better future.

This ending is a real hodge-podge, with Ironside delivering a horribly complicated Perry Mason-like last-minute-of-the-show explanation of everything we want to know. Do people really have the capacity to deal with so much information like this in such a short period of time? The acting of Lindon Chiles as Hansen at the end of the show is pretty low-key for someone with such grandiose plans. However, we have only seen this character for a few seconds prior to the finale, and probably just considered him to be a red herring. The whole "Second Force" is kind of a joke considering its supposed popularity and Gene Raymond as its leader Weathers is mundane, to put it mildly. It is pretty obvious in retrospect that Hansen was the "bad guy," since there were really not too many other options as the show approached the 40-minute mark. This show's script is an exercise in frustration … it would be better to watch selected excerpts and then cut to the end.


S01E17: Memories of an Ice Cream Stick
Original air date: Janaury 11, 1968
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Sy Salkowicz; Music: Quincy Jones. Time: 47:52.

After Mike Benny, who, according to the Commissioner "headed up every important racket in this city," is knocked off, Ironside is interviewing potential suspects at Benny's apartment. One of them is Sam Noble (Mel Scott), who was one of the last people to see Finney alive. Noble has a lengthy criminal history, and just got out of prison where he says he was "rehabilitated."

Noble visited Benny that morning to pick up some money owed to him. When Noble leaves the interview, Mark follows him. The two of them hail from the same neighborhood, and Noble used to give the kid Mark money for candy or ice cream bars (hence the title). Mark's nickname in those days was "Clanger." (The two of them don't look that much different in age, there is no birthday for actor Scott I can find.)

When Mark meets Noble later by coincidence in a restaurant catering to black people, a couple of cops come into the place and shake down the two men, because Noble resembles a suspect from a nearby grocery store stickup. Mark is pissed that he was subjected to this treatment, just because he was with Scott and is his friend.

This leads to some heavy philosophical discussions between Ironside and Mark. Ironside cautions Mark not to hang around with his old friend and Mark doesn't like being told about who his friends should be. Ironside says it would be a good idea if Mark didn't associate with Noble at all – he was in tight with the rackets before he went to jail, they took care of him when he was in jail, and the money Benny owed him was a payoff for a job. But how did Ironside know all this stuff?

Detective work determines that the two guys who knocked off Benny were hitmen from New York City who were in and out of San Francisco within a few hours. Willie Busch (Jack Kruschen), who was Benny's assistant and protégé, and who was told by Benny he would have some kind of position in the organization, is nervous because another local gangster named Al Mollins wants to be the number two man and take over. Busch is considered to be too weak to hold the top spot. Busch fingers Mollins to Ironside after some pressure and outside the office, Noble confides similar information to Mark as if he is doing him a favor.

Ironside actually apologizes to Mark for the harsh words he yelled at him regarding his old friend, and Mark also has regrets. Ironside says he doesn't want to ruin memories of Mark's life which were happy. We also learn some trivia about Mark's background – that his father was in jail and he hadn't seen his mother for years when he met Ironside.

Later, Mollins is knocked off. Ironside investigates at Mollins' place, and he tells Mark to kill time until he is finished. Mark goes to Sam's rooming house (how does he know where this place is?) and is surprised to find his old pal looks like he is considering skipping town and also has a lot of cash in his suitcase. Noble forces Mark at gunpoint to drive him around in his car (did he rent it from somewhere?). Noble was playing both sides of the fence – after tipping off Mark about Mollins earlier, he went to see Mollins and tell him that Ironside and the cops were after him. When Mollins gave him $1,000 for this information, Noble saw how much more money was in Mollins' safe and killed him. Noble's fingerprints were reportedly all over Mollins' place.

An APB is put out for Mark and Noble, but Mark is forced to call the office and demand the APB be lifted so they can escape (but who knows to where). The call from a pay phone (415-555-7372) is traced and the cops show up and bust Noble. Meanwhile, Mark just gets into the car with Ed and Eve and they drive away – wouldn't Mark have been required to stick around as a witness?

Not a bad show, though there is a corny ending, some process shots and the music seems like stock.


S01E18: To Kill A Cop
Original air date: January 25, 1968
Director: Tony Leader; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Donn Mullally; Music: Stock. Time: 49:33.
At the beginning, Ed is assisting two motorcycle cops at the police station who are booking a hothead named Frank Vincent (Pernell Roberts). He is charged with "being drunk in a moving vehicle, hit and run with damage to a parked vehicle, resisting arrest, being drunk in public and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon [a flashlight he was using to beat on one of the officers' helmets]." Vincent is bad-mouthing the "lousy cops" and attacks them, ripping Ed's jacket. (When Eve fixes this later, she describes herself as a "den mother.")

Later, Briggs (Richard Van Vleet), one of the two arresting officers, is shot in the back twice and killed on his own doorstep after Vincent is bailed out by his wife. Ed gets mighty interested, wondering if Vincent is a "cop hater" who is responsible for this. Ironside tells Ed to let Homicide do their job, but Ed says he has a "gut reaction" and has to be there when they pick up Vincent as a possible suspect. Ironside says, "Ed, anything you have to do ... you do."

Ed and another cop go to pick up Vincent, who is at a church wedding, but when Vincent is confronted by them, he runs away. He is pursued and eventually captured, later claiming under interrogation that he was "scared." Ed peppers him with questions like "Where did you hide the gun?" Vincent's wife Helen (Anne Whitfield) arrives soon, along with his lawyer, Everett Brandt (Parley Baer). Both of them are making an issue of how Ed and other cops were "rough." The wife has already met with her city councilman who has been "talking with Commissioner Randall."

Using his usual impeccable logic, Ironside reviews the case with Ed, who insists that Vincent has some connection with Briggs' murder. Ed's mood doesn't improve when Homicide releases Vincent with "no case." Ed tells Ironside, "If a computer could do this job, they wouldn't need me. What I'm paid for are my instincts, the nerve endings that go hot and cold when I'm looking at a killer. The day comes when I can't smell guilt, retire me." These are Ironside's own words. The Chief says, "Not bad."

After Connell, the second arresting cop who dealt with Vincent (played by stuntman Hal Needham), is blown up in his own car with dynamite, Ed visits Vincent's restaurant, the Texas Chili. Ed is really pushing things, and Vincent gets irate after Ed suggests that he could buy guns and dynamite "on the underground." Attempting to throw Ed out of the place, Vincent almost sets himself on fire from the stove. Vincent and his lawyer meet with the Commissioner, who decides that Ed should take a two week leave of absence. Brandt describes this as a "whitewash."

Ironside tells Ed going to the restaurant was a major mistake: "You reacted to the siren sound of your own ego." He gives Ed a blast, and when Eve acts like Ironside is being too heavy, he tells her, "If this is too rough for you, go out and buy a new hat or whatever intelligent thing you do to calm your nerves." (!!!) However, in conclusion, Ironside tells Ed, "You were quite probably right," and if two cops have already been knocked off, Ed is probably in line to be the next victim.

Both Ed and Eve hang around the neighborhood where Vincent's restaurant is located, and he eventually confronts Ed, saying, "I'm gonna get you and I'm gonna love it." Too bad there are no witnesses to this.

Vincent suddenly decides to go out of town on a "business trip" to cool off, and Ed tails him, accompanied by the usual "tailing music." They end up in Bayville (a fictional town) in Mendocino County. This is a serious job of tailing, since this location north of San Francisco would require at least a couple of hours to get to. Not only that, some of the tailing has only Ed's car following, with one really obvious set of headlights behind Vincent's car.

When Ed arrives in this rinky-dink town, back at the office they have discovered that Vincent has a record in places like Boston and Baltimore which involved things like assault on police officers, for which he did time. I don't know why they couldn't have checked this before, because Vincent told them earlier that the only problems he had with the law were some minor infractions.

Ed finds that Vincent has a "love nest" in Bayville, where his blonde mistress, Marian Lord (Ruta Lee) lives. She tells Vincent, "I'm a woman, not a playmate." Marian runs The Blue Marlin bar, which is close to her house. When she comes there with the intention of trapping Ed, he tries to chat her up, not a good idea, because Vincent soon appears with a gun, having been watching from Marion's place. Ed barely manages to escape, leaping into a boat nearby which results in a very bad pun from Vincent about "rocking the boat." Ed dives into the water and Vincent shoots at him. Web pages have various theories about how far down the bullets would go into the water in a situation like this.

Vincent high-tails it back to San Francisco, where Ironside has already figured out that the Mauser gun used to kill Briggs is hiding somewhere in the church where the priest told investigators that Vincent hadn't been to confession for a very long time. After another two-hour drive, Vincent arrives at the church, and we find out he was hiding the Mauser used to knock off Briggs in the back of a religious statue. He aims at Ironside and Mark, who are both there, but they have already removed the bullets and Vincent is busted.

TRIVIA:

  • The copy of the San Francisco Dispatch with the story about Connell being blown up, where it looks like at least the opening paragraph actually refers to Connell, has other items on the front page: Restricted load ban modified on main roads; State backs tax resale in Creek County; Prepaid taxes reach highest mark in history; and Annual percentage gain shown in industrial report. Pretty boring stories!
  • When the Bayville cops come to The Blue Marlin looking for Ed after Ironside phones them, they know a lot of details about Ed's appearance, though Ironside didn't give any of these details during his conversation with their chief, whose name is Roger.


S01E19: The Lonely Hostage
Original air date: February 1, 1968
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Paul Mason; Writer: Norman Katkov; Music: Stock. Time: 50:00.

This show starts out with Fred Hickman (Robert Lansing) coming out of the Pacific State Bank. It is dark outside, looking like evening, and there don't seem to be any lights on in the bank. Is he an employee working late or something? Lansing is carrying a briefcase. As he rounds a corner, he runs into a young cop, whose name is Larry Reilly (Charles Brewer).

The cop says, "Knockin' off kind of early tonight, aren't you, Sarge?" (So we know Lansing -- who puts his case in his car, which is parked at the curb -- is a cop, or military guy or something.) Lansing says, "Leave-after-dark jobs are murder -- throw some old clothes in the car and get back to work." Reilly tells him, smiling, "You sure it's not some of the merchandise?" Lansing says, "I wouldn't do that without cuttin' you in, kid. Better hurry up, you're going to be late for roll call."

Reilly grabs Lansing's arm, and says, "Listen, Sarge, you put me in kind of a funny situation ... you really shouldn't be takin' any bags out of the bank." (Why not? Maybe this bag is just his own personal stuff.) Lansing says, "You rookie cops are always trying to make a big arrest, aren't you ... now beat it." Just then an alarm from the bank goes off, and Reilly moves as if to pull out his gun. Lansing says, "Don't do it, Larry" and knocks him to the ground. When Reilly finally pulls out his gun, Lansing shoots him with his own gun, then gets in his car and drives away.

There are plenty of questions in the show's first two minutes. Some of them are answered in the next scene which takes a week later. In the office, Mark is reading the headline on the San Francisco Dispatch out loud: "Rogue cop eludes police for seventh day," whereas the actual headline on the paper is "Rogue cop object of massive manhunt." Lansing's character is Detective Fred Hickman. "The detective had a part-time job at a bank as a relief watchman ... [he] took $150,000 in unmarked bills." The cop he shot was a member of a family of cops. Ironside said that Hickman was "good, and getting better, brave without being foolish, intelligent which means he could learn."

Ironside soon gets a phone call from Hickman, who wants to give himself up, but only if Ironside comes to get him, without any other cops as backup. Mark drives Ironside out to some abandoned location, and Hickman gets into the van. But on their way back to the station, Hickman pulls his gun out of his briefcase and says they are going to go the other way.

As the trip begins, we hear exposition about why Hickman robbed the bank. He has been on the force for 12 years, he has one citation and one medal, and is paid $142.97 a week. His first child developed some medical condition which required expensive treatment, and eventually died. It took Hickman four years to pay off all the bills.

When the Commissioner finds out about Ironside's solo effort to bring Hickman in, he is furious at Ed and Eve, whom Ironside swore to secrecy. After the Commissioner calls Ironside on his mobile phone, he knows something is fishy when Ironside suggests he is on his way back to the station. The Commissioner puts out an APB. At a roadblock, the van is stopped, but Ironside from inside the van barks at the cops who stopped them to let them pass. After this, the cop who spoke to Ironside says, "He isn't always this nice."

From this point on, the van is seen driving on what look like back roads, not highways or freeways. Mark disconnects the gas gauge, even though the tank is almost full, and they pull over to some rinky-dink gas station in what doesn't even look like a small town. Mark slips the attendant, a geezer named Sam Layton (William Fawcett), a matchbook where he has inscribed "Hickman call police," but Layton's eyes are bad and he cannot read this. This deception is quickly figured out by Hickman, and Mark is lucky he doesn't get knocked off, probably because they need someone to drive the van. Hickman calls Mark "smart apple" (i.e., "smart ass") twice.

Hickman has revealed more of his escape plan, that he wants to flee to Central America -- Guatemala, Costa Rica or San Salvador -- where he can pay off the local sheriff $100 a week from the money he stole to keep his mouth shut. He also tells Ironside, "You hate my guts, you never stopped trying to fire me," which doesn't jibe with what Ironside said about Hickman earlier.

After driving around on yet more back country roads, Hickman and his two hostages arrive at a house in the middle of nowhere, which is where Hickman's wife lives. (Is this where he lives too, though, or are they separated?) Hickman's young second child, Tommy, lives with his wife. It's hard to know what the wife's name is ... at various times during the rest of the show, Hickman calls her Jenny, then Jane, then Jeannie and then Janey. (Didn't the show have a continuity person?) The wife has arranged for a charter plane to pick them up from a nearby lake on the pretense that her husband is ill and has to go somewhere (like Central America, I guess) to see a "specialist."

Meanwhile, no doubt acting on orders from the Commissioner, Ed tracks them down as far as the gas station where Mark was almost knocked off, but there is no indication how far this is from Hickman's place. There is even speculation on IMDb that Hickman's place is in "Tahoe". (I don't think so.) Eve ends up at Reno Air Charter ... but is this really in Reno, which is close to Tahoe? It is a 4-hour drive from San Francisco to Reno, though I guess Eve could have flown there. Some guy working at this charter company tells her that a woman has made arrangements to fly herself and her husband, which means Hickman. I don't get it ... why couldn't Eve just have phoned this company instead of going all the way to Reno (if that is what she really did)?

Anyway, at Hickman's place, things are tense, because the wife didn't know that her husband had shot another cop, who might die. Ironside lays some heavy trips on her, especially when Hickman and Mark go outside to move the van so it cannot be seen from the nearby road. When Mark later tries to escape through the front door, Hickman beats Mark so badly that Ironside says that if they don't get a doctor, Mark will die. The wife wants to call for a doctor, but her husband just pulls the phone wires out of the wall. She is seriously conflicted by her husband's plans; Hickman keeps yelling at her to stop listening to Ironside.

The ending of this hostage situation is really far-fetched. There was a kid's toy on the floor which the wife almost tripped over when the three guys arrived at Hickman's place. Later, Ironside picked it up, and took some part out of its inside on the pretext of fixing it (the toy was broken). He also grabs what looks like a needle from a sewing kit and some thin piece of wood from a nearby fireplace when no one is looking. As Hickman and his wife are arguing, Ironside does a MacGyver-like move, fashioning these three things into a gizmo with a blow dart which he shoots into Hickman's back when the latter is turned away from him. With Hickman totally surprised, Ironside then reaches into Hickman's briefcase which is close to him, and pulls out the gun in there and points it at Hickman. All of this is hard to accept.

No idea how long it takes before Ed or someone else arrives at the house to finally bust Hickman, or whether Eve is involved in any of this, having returned from Reno or Tahoe or wherever (??).

The end of the show is "cute," with Ed and Ironside throwing around this large exercise ball and Eve is feeding some ice cream to Mark, who is lying in bed recovering from his wounds. News is received that Larry Reilly, the shot young cop, will recover.


S01E20: The Challenge
Original air date: February 8, 1968
Director: Tony Leader; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: John McGreevey; Music: Stock. Time: 47:53.

This show has an interesting premise, but it eventually goes totally to hell. Once again, I think something was left out or cut out of the episode.

On a Tuesday evening, Ironside is playing chess with his friend, psychologist (not psychiatrist as it says at IMDb) Carl Anderson (Cec Linder). Linder was Felix Leiter in the movie Goldfinger, and a Canadian to boot (perhaps there is some connection to Raymond Burr here).

After they finish their game, Anderson wants to show Ironside works by five San Francisco artists in an adjoining room, and to guess (this is the "challenge") which of those people is "in an extremely dangerous state of mind ... destructive, homicidal. The least shift in his or her psychological balance could very possibly lead to murder."

When Ironside asks, "Which one?" Anderson is evasive, saying "That's my question." Ironside is annoyed: "Chess is a game, homicide isn't." Anderson tells him, "You can't arrest someone for what you think they may do," saying that Ironside will have to guess, "at least for the time being."

Soon after this, Anderson is stabbed to death in the room housing the artworks, and Ironside regrets that he let Anderson con him out of figuring out the name of the killer. Anderson's adjoining office has been trashed; Ironside says that possibly someone was looking for his research notes, which "could be incriminating."

Ironside first talks to Mrs. Meacham, Anderson's housekeeper, who found his body. She says that he was "depressed" and "quiet" the night before. She never spoke to him of his work and had been employed by him ever since his wife died. She had recently given him notice, because a more suitable position had opened up elsewhere. Eve notices it looks like Anderson was playing chess the previous evening; one of the pieces – a red bishop – is missing.

Brian Turner (Tom Simcox), an academic who was Anderson's assistant for many years, shows up. He says he saw Anderson the previous morning when they discussed an article he had written for some journal. Turner says he flew to Los Angeles after this and returned yesterday evening. He phoned Anderson around 9:30 when he got home, but got no response. (A broken clock in the trashed room is seen stopped at 9:30; the glass from this clock's face is broken.) Turner says he had little to do with Anderson's project studying artists and their art. Instead, he was working on his Ph.D. thesis which is a study of a compulsive gambler.

Two of the five artists, a plaster sculptor and an "op artist," are currently out of town, leaving three possible suspects:

  • Mike Sellino (Nicholas Colasanto), a hot-headed individual, shows up almost immediately, yelling at the top of his voice, saying that a "dame" wants to buy one of his artworks currently being held as evidence and won't come up with a check until there are some changes in it. Ironside says Sellino is not taking anything, which just enrages him even more. Ironside gets Sellino, who has suspicious cuts on his face, to admit that played chess with Anderson in the past and he last saw him three days ago. Yelling more, Sellino says he will go and get a court order to release his artwork.
  • Ed goes to see Rhea Prentiss (Sue Ann Langdon). She is a ditz who spatters multiple colors of paint while standing on a balcony onto canvases on the floor below while wearing a see-through raincoat and bikini. She is creating Jackson Pollock-like paintings while listening to loud recordings of trains, thunderstorms, rockets blasting off and earthquakes. When Ed tells her Anderson was murdered and she has no reaction, he says she doesn't seem surprised. She replies, "Life is full of surprises." She says her paintings have "no message ... no meaning ... they just are."
  • The third artist is Ann Kingsley (Coleen Gray). She says the last time she saw Anderson was on Monday. Her art consists of realistic pictures of her young son, who drowned a year and a half ago while she was painting at the beach. (We don't find out about this until later.) She is mentally unstable.

Eve has discovered that there are eight checks missing from Anderson's last two bank statements. The checks were all made out to cash, a total of $3,282. Ironside asks Eve to check with a local clearing house to see if they can locate the checks, to see who endorsed them.

Ironside and Mark go to see Sellino in his studio, having found out that in 1956 he was arrested for knifing a man in a bar fight. He served time for this in San Quentin where he trained as a welder, a skill which he now uses in creating his "artworks" which use scrap metal and pieces of wrecked cars. Sellino is not happy to see Ironside again, and says that he has "paid his dues" for his one mistake. Ironside throws several accusations at Sellino, suggesting that he had reason to kill Anderson. When Sellino goes to get a cigarette out of his jacket which is hanging on the wall, we can see that the red bishop is also in his pocket. I don't think Ironside can see it from his angle nearby.

Sellino admits he lied, he was in a fight the night before last, that's where he got cuts on his face. (But so far we have not heard what Sellino was doing the night before, when Anderson was murdered.) Sellino takes a phone call – a judge has signed an order giving him possession of the artwork at Anderson's. After Ironside leaves, we see Sellino drop the red bishop into the center bore of a spoked car wheel.

Paul Bragen (Noah Keen), another psychologist whom Ironside has requested to check out the art works to see if he has any ideas about the killer, shows up at Anderson's, but Bragen says you could get three psychologists to examine this kind of evidence and they would come up with three different opinions.

Ed and Eve have found out there were two calls made from Anderson's office the previous evening, one was to Rhea Prentiss at 8:27, the other at 10:50 to a cab company that was dispatched to Anderson's place, at a time when Anderson was presumed to be dead. (Did technology to determine the times of phone calls exist like this in 1968?) The clock on the wall, which previously was seen on the floor with its front smashed, is now back on the wall in good condition, and still showing 9:30 as the time.

Ed goes back to see Rhea again, and she acts like a nymphomaniac towards him. She says she didn't talk to Anderson the night before, since he interrupted her shower. However, she says that the housekeeper Meacham was "madly in love with him," and he treated her like a "slightly inferior robot." Rhea also tells Ed why she been inspired to make her paintings – because her Aunt Jennifer insisted that she always be "clean," wearing white clothes which had to be kept in a pristine state all the time, and spattering paint all over the place is a form of revenge.

This is where the show starts to get complicated in a nutty way.

Turner shows up at Sellino's place and tells him he thinks his work is a "big put-on," describing him as "a pig." Turner says he knows that Mike used to take a chess piece home after playing with the professor, "a psychologically interesting habit pattern." Sellino admits he took the red bishop home with him when he played chess with the professor (the night Anderson was killed?), but Turner says he couldn't take it back to Anderson's the next morning, because suspicion would fall on him because of Anderson's death. Turner says he wants the bishop back and he will make sure it "turns up around the house." Sellino says "What's in it for you?" Turner is about to leave and Sellino tells him, "I'll play." After this, Sellino is murdered ... but who found his body? Pieces of paper which look like they are from Anderson's check book are also discovered in the glove compartment of one of Sellino's junk cars by the cops.

Kingsley comes back to Anderson's (I think at Ironside's request – or did she just show up there?) where she talks to Ironside, saying that she was at the beach earlier. Her memory of what's happened in the last while, since she left the beach, is very faulty. This seems to be later in the evening after Sellino was killed. Ironside is questioning her, and she finally clues in to why he is doing this, that he suspects her of killing Sellino and/or Anderson, which she says doesn't make any sense. Is something missing from the show here? Kingsley says "We do kill people sometimes, even when we don't want to." She asks Ironside if she can leave, he says yes, and she goes into the next room where her purse is and she finds the red bishop in her purse wrapped in a Kleenex.

So how did this chess piece get there? Did Turner murder Sellino, somehow find the red bishop that he had hidden very well in the wheel and then plant it in Kingsley's purse? We have not seen Turner in Anderson's place in the last several minutes. There is no explanation for any of this stuff.

Rhea shows up in a few minutes with her "lawyer," who turns out to be some guy who is taking pictures of her for publicity purposes. Ironside tells this guy to get lost. Ironside asks Rhea where she was between 5:30 and 7:00 (at least we now have a time frame during which Sellino was presumably killed). Rhea acts like a total screwball, but she says she wasn't seeing Sellino, who she describes as "the Oakland junkman." Ironside is totally fed up. But as soon as Rhea leaves, Kingsley comes out of the next room freaking out, saying "help me ... put me away ... punish me." She gives Ironside the chess piece.

Kingsley is put in protective custody, but Ironside says she didn't kill Anderson and Sellino any more than she killed her own son. Ironside also doesn't think Rhea had anything to do with the killings – her art is of the nature that "anything goes." He says that he is convinced that Sellino is the one who killed the professor based on his artworks ... he was "twisted, distorted, out of joint ... In my mind, there's no doubt about it ... from the beginning I've made the mistake of assuming the person Carl spoke of [but did he speak of anyone specifically?] had to be the one that killed him."

Ed shows up with the missing checks, all accounted for, but we don't get any specific details about them. Instead, the members of the team are asked for their opinion. Mark: "The professor didn't sign them, that's why they were stolen." Ironside tells Eve to contact people in Reno, Las Vegas and Tahoe. So who are these people? Cops? Security people connected with some casino(s)?

Eve says: "We're ruled out the artists, and now it's a crime to cover up a forgery ... so it has to be BRIAN TURNER" and Ironside nods "yes." "He's a highly intelligent man outsmarting himself, the exaggerated ransacking of the professor's study to make it seem it had been by someone who didn't know the house, smashing the clock and setting it back to 9:30 so his 9:00 flight from Los Angeles would give him an alibi." (Since when has someone checked on the time of the return flight?)

Ironside uses Rhea to phone Turner (who has been spending a lot of time in Anderson's house) and tell him that the professor told her some things the night he was killed that could be of interest to Ironside and the police. She mentions the paper Turner was working on about the compulsive gambler, saying that he might want to work on another one about the "compulsive forger" or perhaps "the compulsive killer." She tells Turner to come to her place to discuss blackmail terms.

Turner goes to the filing cabinet and pulls out a letter that Rhea sent to Anderson. Soon he shows up at Rhea's, where she is painting to the sound of airplanes dive-bombing. Turner turns up the volume and approaches Rhea, it looks like he is going to strangle her, but Ironside pulls the plug of the reel-to-reel recorder, stopping it, and suddenly we see that it is not Rhea wearing the see-through raincoat and bikini, but Eve. Turns out the reason Turner was looking at Rhea's letter was so he could forge her signature on a suicide note. (This is about the only logical thing that has happened for the last several minutes.)

Ironside's final words to Turner are "Book him."

TRIVIA:

All three women who could be suspects in "The Challenge" had a previous connection with Raymond Burr:

  • Sue Ane Langdon (Rhea Prentiss, the ditzy painter) - 3 Perry Mason episodes: The Case of the Scandalous Sculptor (1964), The Case of the Crying Comedian (1961), and The Case of the Avenging Angel (1966)
  • Coleen Gray (Ann Kingsley, who paints her dead son) - P.J. (1967 film); 4 Perry Mason episodes: The Case of the Wandering Widow (1960), The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1962), The Case of the Fifty Millionth Frenchman (1964), The Case of the Fanciful Frail (1966)
  • Virginia Grey (Mrs. Meacham, the housekeeper) - Crime of Passion (1956 film)


S01E21: All In a Day's Work
Original air date: February 15, 1968
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Paul Mason; Writer: Ed McBain; Music: Stock. Time: 49:53.

This is kind of a standard episode for any cop/detective series which has a rookie member concerning their "first kill." In this show's case, it is Eve's. The episode is very good, probably because the script was by crime and mystery writer Ed McBain (real name: Evan Hunter).

The show begins with Ironside and the other three leaving a movie theatre. The movie, according to the theater's marquee, is a suspense thriller, Murder at Twilight. On posters, it says "No one has ever guessed the ending." They have been kicked out because Ironside was revealing "who did it" in a very loud voice three and a half minutes into the film. (It was the gardener.) This film is a production of Mason (as in Perry, or perhaps the show's producer Paul) Dubin (Charles S. Dubin directed 9 episodes of the show) Pictures. There may be also an allusion here to the Perry Mason TV shows, which were notorious for their "surprise" endings.

There is some discussion about going to "the fights" and Eve suggests that Mason ... er ... Ironside wanted to go to the fights all along, that's why he got them all kicked out of the movie.

Suddenly from nearby there is the sound of an alarm, because a jewelry store nearby is being robbed. Ed and Mark left a few minutes ago to get the van so Eve pursues the two robbers. When one of them shoots at her, she shoots back, killing him instantly.

What follows is a very dramatic show, full of stern glances and pronouncements from Ironside, huge pauses in the dialogue and Eve wanting to quit the force. The show is helped in a large way by the outstanding acting of several character actors.

The mother of the killed robber, Billy Matling, who was a 17-year-old kid, shows up at police headquarters. Jeanette Nolan plays her. She is bitter and unco-operative, cursing whoever killed her son, seemingly not knowing it was Eve. She says "I don't talk to murderers. No!"

Later, when Eve starts reacting very badly to this, Ironside tells her -- revealing some trivia about himself -- that he shot a 26-year-old guy threatening to kill him with a knife when he was married and had three kids. Ironside says if Eve can't deal with her job, she should "get out." He says she is not responsible for what happened, she had a job to do and she did it honestly and to the best of her ability. Eve says, "It hurts."

Working from a phone number connected with Billy, 986-0022, Ironside sends Eve to talk to one of his friends. She is Nancy Lewin (Lorraine Gary), a woman who is 12 years older than Billy, who used to bring her part-time work which she did at home. She describes Billy as being "nice" to her, a "very decent kid." However, she gets annoyed by Eve's questions, which she finds "insensitive," and Eve leaves. (Nancy describes herself as "not pretty" -- not true, she is attractive.)

Ironside and Mark then go to see Billy's mother at her apartment, which seems to be really pushing things. Ironside doesn't hold back, telling the mother that she has to "take some of the blame" for the fact that her son was killed. He points out that she has a color TV, an expensive stereo system and a sewing machine, which neither Billy nor the mother could afford; in other words, they were stolen goods.

Ironside says the mother should have discouraged her son from giving her things like this: "Aren't you just as responsible as the officer who justifiably pulled that trigger?" Although the mother says, "I won't help you ... not ever," before Ironside leaves, she finally breaks down and tells him the name of Billy's older partner, which was Harry. She says she would return all of the stolen stuff if it would bring back her son. Ironside says he believes her, and that he is sorry.

At the shooting range in the police station, Ironside hits the target with near-total accuracy, but Eve aims only for the target's shoulder. Ironside says she should do better because she took "the FBI course," to which Eve replies she missed the heart area on purpose. Ironside says this is a very bad idea.

Ironside sends Eve and Ed to Billy's former employer, who gave him part-time jobs. This guy says that the kid was ambitious and "had guts." He "worked like a horse" to make $40-$50 extra money each week. When Ed wonders if Billy needed more money than this, the employer says, "You don't fool me, you two. I read the papers. Now, if he was mixed up in that last night, it was a mistake. Billy was a good kid. And you got no right going around shooting good kids!" Would Eve really have been identified in the papers as the killer already?

To keep the show from getting too long, Ironside uses the services of Smiley (Walter Burke), a quirky informer who can be relied on to find out what you need to know from the local crime scene.

Eve is still despondent over the killing. Ironside asks her if Billy was older, would it make a difference? He says that Billy was a criminal and she was doing her job. She says that she is useless to the team and her inability to shoot may cost someone their life: "I love police work, I've never thought of doing anything else." Ironside glowers at her.

Meanwhile, Smiley has discovered that Billy's partner was named John H. (as in "Harry") Keswick, whose file was right on top of the pile in the office. Smiley drives a huge 1960 Ford Fairlane, which seems odd. But he makes $40 from Ironside for his tips, maybe that explains this. You would expect to see Smiley back in future episodes, but this is his only appearance in the series.

Smiley has got some info which advances the plot considerably. Keswick can supposedly be found at a poker game that evening in room 312 at the Whitely Arms Hotel, a fancy building with an outdoor elevator. When the cops arrive at this place later, Keswick is not there, but one of his pals, Arte Waring, is. After applying some heat to Waring, who has a record, Ironside arranges for Waring to contact Keswick who will pick up a suitcase at Golden Gate Park, presumably filled with stuff to help him when he gets out of town.

The drop at the park is arranged, and the team is waiting. When Keswick shows up, he starts shooting at Ironside, who has been hiding in some bushes with Eve. She returns fire and wounds the robber, who is then busted. There is no reading of Keswick's rights, by the way, and the guy blabs away about how Billy shot some guy in another robbery. I predict this case will not go well for the prosecution when it gets to court.

Back at the office, Eve launches into a massive rant to Ironside: "I wasn't fooled for minute in our positioning. You figured that Harry would break, that he'd run for a gate where he'd probably parked his car, you figured that he was desperate enough to try and to shoot his way out instead of serving a life term, and you figured once I saw you in danger I would forget about my own problem and become a policewoman again. All of which goes to show that you have no consideration for me as a person, a human or a woman ... and all you care about is whether or not I am an efficient police officer. Well, I'm serving notice here and now that this is my last case, it's completed, I saw it through. Goodbye to all of you and I hope I never see any of you again. (looking directly at Ironside) ESPECIALLY YOU.

During this, all the men say nothing, they are all looking off in the distance or at the ceiling.

But mere seconds after she leaves in a huff, Eve comes back, saying she wants some "rum crunchy" ice cream – which she asked for at the very beginning of the show after they left the movie theater. There is a brief discussion as to where they are all going now, and it looks like their destination will be the horse races.


S01E22: Something for Nothing
Original air date: February 22, 1968
Director: Robert Butler; Producer: James McAdams; Writers: Anthony Terpiloff & Stephen Kandel (teleplay) & Anthony Terpiloff (story); Music: Stock. Time: 47:49.

At the beginning of the show we see Ironside, who is smiling, having a night out with the members of the team at Lafitte's Restaurant, where the featured act is the singing duo of Tommy and Verna Cusack (James Farantino and Susan Saint James). Mark actually gets to sing a couple of lines of the popular tune "Downtown."

Tommy has a big problem, because he has rung up $32,000 of gambling debts at the horse races. He is visited by Luther Zahn (Jan Merlin), the oily collector for local crime boss Roy Faber (Vincent Gardenia). Aside from Zahn's unbelievably slimy manner, his two trademarks are white shoes and pearly white teeth. Faber, who lets others do his dirty work, wears a left eye patch which is a different color every time we see him.

After Zahn goes to the Cusacks' apartment where Verna is alone, she is freaked out enough to go and see Ironside, though there is no indication of why she would know him. Susan Saint James played a singer in S01E14, but that was a totally different person. Ironside is interested to hear about Zahn, knowing that he works for Faber, who Ironside has been trying to put away for eight years and who is not only into loan sharking but also peddling drugs and other unnamed bad stuff.

Ironside eventally gets together with Tommy. He wants Tommy to ingratiate himself with Faber and eventually testify against him, which will involve a lot of risk. Tommy meets with Faber in the back of the latter's car, where he is told, "You're on the hook, there is only one way off, that is to co-operate with me." Tommy will be in debt to Zahn, not Faber himself and Zahn will forward the payment to Faber, thus keeping everything at arm's length. $30,000 of Tommy's debt (no word on what would happen to the remaining $2,000) will be "paid" if Tommy helps Zahn with some upcoming caper, which turns out to be a bank robbery.

Tommy tells Ironside about this in another meeting. In one week, he will be taken to a bank and deposit money to his own account at precisely 10 minutes past 11. (Ironside actually says this.) This is 10 after 11 at night, which doesn't make any sense. Are there banks which stay open this late? I don't think so. Ironside and the team figure the amount of money to be deposited would be substantial, narrowing it down to the proceeds from an upcoming San Francisco Giants/Los Angeles Dodgers double-header at Candlestick Park where the evening's deposit in the "Bay Citizens Bank" is estimated to be $250,000 at least.

However, the time frame for this robbery is changed from a week later to the next evening. We are soon at 10 after 11 on some deserted street, probably on the Universal back lot, where an armored car pulls up in front of a bank-like building. What are the armored car guards going to do, put money in some night depository? Maybe this is just a dry run for the robbers? I don't think the deposit will be the money from the ball game.

Tommy is told by Zahn, "This is where you get out, walk the rest of the way to the bank." He gets out of the car, holding what looks like some paperwork. So what is Tommy's "job"? Will the armored car guards give him the money and then Tommy will deposit it in the bank in his account, considering the bank probably isn't open? He doesn't even have a gun. This is so dumb.

After Tommy gets out, Zahn and the two other hoods in the car put on these plastic face masks, but, without any indication that something is wrong, Zahn suddenly says "I don't like it," and decides to flee the scene. Something is wrong. Ed and a cop are shadowing them from nearby and Zahn has seen them. Zahn's car races away, and another cop car appears, with the result that the car with Zahn and the hoods cannot escape, and their car smashes into the front of a building. Talk about bad planning!

In the next scene, Tommy is waiting at police headquarters to speak to Ironside, even though assistant district attorney Paul Corey (Paul Mantee) is browbeating him. Faber comes into the room and sees Tommy, and offers to pay his bail. Presumably Faber was there also to get Zahn and the other two hoods bailed out as well?

Soon after this and Faber has departed, Ironside arrives and finds Corey still haranguing Tommy, saying he is going to charge him with being an accessory before the fact involving criminal conspiracy. Ironside says he made a deal with Tommy and overrides Corey who says, "You can't talk to me like that," something which Ironside corrects quickly: "I just did."

Ed is assigned to be a bodyguard for Tommy, who starts to have trouble getting work, even from sleazy topless joints. He and Ed return to Laffite's, where a new act has been hired because the owner Harris (Laurie Main) doesn't want any trouble from Faber. While the new guy takes a break, Tommy picks up his guitar and delivers a heartfelt song to the restaurant's patrons. After he and Ed leave, the two of them are jumped in an alley by goons from out of town who Faber has hired.

Beaten up, Ed and Tommy return to the Cusacks' place. Ed then leaves to go downtown to see if he can ID the people who attacked them, potentially a big mistake because he is leaving the Cusacks alone, and then Tommy leaves Verna alone by herself to boot. Ironside brings Verna down to the station, unknown to Ed and Tommy, avoiding a catastrophe.

Tommy is on the fence about whether he should testify against Faber as per the previously worked-out deal, but after Faber shows up at the station and starts lambasting Ironside as a cripple and shooting off his mouth that he, Faber, is untouchable for all the bad things he has done and can't be dragged into court for, and, not only that, offering Tommy a bribe right in front of Ironside (!), Tommy decides to take the big step.

The show ends with Eve whipping up meatballs, which Ironside doesn't want to eat until she says that she made them in combination with chili, so Ironside says he will try this combination "just this one time."

This show is OK, aside from the bank robbery business. This whole section once again makes me think that the episode, like others, was overwritten and something had to be edited out and rewritten without too much thought ... or maybe there were issues with music rights?

TRIVIA:

  • There is an interesting montage of horse races and betting tickets being ripped up in both color and black and white seen with Tommy singing the tune "Even When You Cry." This is the same song heard when Tommy returns to the restaurant after no luck getting work. According to IMDb, this song was used earlier in S01E11, "The Man Who Believed," and was written by Quincy Jones, Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman.
  • The songs "Downtown," composed by Tony Hatch and a mega-hit for Petulia Clark in 1964, and "The Flower Children" by Marcia Strassman are not credited at the end of the show.
  • Ed tells Eve, "You should have gone to culinary college instead of the police academy," but in the pilot episode, a big deal was made of the fact that Eve did not go to the academy.
  • I thought it odd that Vincent Gardenia as Faber was not in the credits at the beginning of the show as one of the stars.


S01E23: Barbara Who
Original air date: February 29, 1968
Director: James Sheldon; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writers: Sy Salkowitz; Music: Stock. Time: 49:51.

Ironside has a big smile on his face for most of this episode. His help is requested by Barbara Jones, who was a nurse's aide at the hospital where he spent time after he was shot (or was it? -- see below). She is played by the very attractive Vera Miles. When Barbara comes to visit Ironside at the office, he tells Eve and Mark to get lost.

Barbara has come to see Ironside because she thinks someone tried to run her down with a car the night before: "He barely missed me." When he seems confused about her reply to a question about why someone would want to kill her, she tells Ironside she is suffering from a total loss of memory; "Barbara Jones" is a name that was given to her. She doesn't remember anything that happened before she got this new moniker. The music behind this conversation is creepy.

Over lunch, Barbara tells Ironside that when she was found on the street by the police more than a year ago, she didn't know her name, and she wasn't in good shape -- badly beaten up. There were no labels on her clothing or any other identification. She was taken to the hospital, but no one ever showed up to "claim" her. When she was to be discharged, she was given a job as an aide in the hospital as well as her new name. She asks Ironside for his help in determining who she really is, and he says of course, he will do this.

Ironside immediately launches inquiries, and gets Jim Hennessy (Mark Roberts), a newspaperman, to bring a folder of clippings concerning Barbara's case with articles from when she was originally found that were reprinted by numerous papers, along with photos. She also made appearances on late-night talk shows, all with no results.

Jim says he considers Barbara to be like a lost suitcase -- if she isn't claimed within a certain time frame, he will do that himself. He says he will try and give stories about her another chance, adding details about her recent near-accident.

Ironside and Barbara go to a hospital, which is run by a Catholic order. I don't think this is the same place in Sonoma where Ironside spent time in the pilot, but Doctor Banks (Robert Patten) recognizes Ironside from when he was "there" with a bullet in him. The doctor was in charge of emergency the night Barbara was brought in and he followed her case. He acts chummy with her, and Ironside comments, "To know Barbara is to love her"!

Banks discusses Barbara's condition, saying she had a concussion, fractured ribs, plus abrasions on her face, arms and legs. She recovered from all of that, but psychiatric help including narcosynthesis didn't help to determine anything about her past. He tells Ironside Barbara doesn't have hysterical amnesia, but brain damage, and there is virtually no hope that the damage can be repaired. Banks says, "She responded well to treatment – but not too well to courtship." (Geez, another guy with hot pants for Barbara.)

Ironside takes Barbara to the house of the police officer Petrizzi (Johnny Seven) who originally encountered her. His wife Shirley is played by a near-unrecognizable Marion Ross. Barbara was found in an industrial area, "hurt bad, like maybe someone had beat her up" and could barely stand.

Ironside and Barbara go to the area on Orange Street near Baker where there is a distribution center for large trucks delivering goods. Barbara speculates that she was dumped there, a fugitive from a white slave gang or some gangster's moll who knew too much. Ironside doesn't think this is very funny.

When Barbara is dropped off at her place after this, the music is romantic. Ironside doesn't go inside because of the steps, but shortly after this, Barbara can be heard screaming as some guy attacks her in her apartment. The music is now dissonant as Mark rushes in, and the attacker runs out. After this, they take her to Eve's place to hide.

Lying on Eve's couch with Eve and Mark out of the way in the next room, Barbara tells Ironside, "Bob, I so want to be somebody you would be proud of," but then corrects herself: "Have I gone too far?" Ironside replies, "We both may be getting a little ahead of ourselves." Barbara says, "There was a time when I was so frightened and lonely, worried I thought I was slipping over the edge of sanity ... watching you [in the hospital] helped me more than I ever helped you. I fell in love with you then and I didn't know it ... That wheelchair doesn't frighten me." Ironside tells her, "Barbara, there are problems," as the camera zooms in on his face. She says, "Why should we be any different from the rest of the world?" (!!!)

Ironside contacts Hennessy again and arranges for a newer story to be generated mentioning the recent attack on Barbara in her apartment, with the implication the attack was by someone who was trying to murder her. Ironside sends Ed back to the truck terminal to ask around and see if anyone saw her dropped off prior to being originally found (remember, this was a very long time ago). The reception he gets from the truck drivers he speaks to is peculiar, they are suspicious, because his comments aren't particularly subtle. Ed tells them to "Talk it up, all over the terminal."

Later, Barbara and Ironside are all dressed up to go somewhere, and we get to see Eve in a low-cut dress. Eve knows something is happening between the two of them, and she wants her boss to be happy. Barbara is having second thoughts, though ... she wants to cancel the whole case. Ironside says that's impossible, someone is trying to kill her, and they have to find out who it is. She hugs him, draping her arms over his shoulders from behind, saying she just wants to be with him, and not having anything spoil it.

Ned Morse (John Pickard), the truck driver who had contact with Barbara over a year ago, comes to the office. He said he was "scared," and didn't know what he was getting into, but he says Barbara is "the one." Morse says he was at a truck stop and some guy came up to him and said he had a sack which he wanted dropped in the middle of the desert for $500. Morse figured there was "a stiff" in the sack. When he came to dump the sack, he found out Barbara inside it was still alive, though she was in very bad shape. He didn't want to dump the body in the middle of nowhere, because "that would be murder." He took her back to San Francisco and dumped her off there. She was found and taken care of.

The truck stop where Morse picked Barbara up is tracked down to Marytown, a small burg near Rawlins, Wyoming (which really exists). Morse remembered another nearby town in the same area, Craig, Colorado, which also exists, which is connected to Rawlins via highway. A trip from Rawlins to San Francisco via Interstate 80 would take over 15 hours. That seems like a long time for Barbara to be sitting in the truck. Why didn't Morse just drop her at some hospital on the way back to the coast?

Ironside, Mark, Morse and Barbara head to Rawlins by plane. When they meet Sheriff Harley (Alan Baxter), there is a big surprise, he knows who Barbara is -- "Lois" -- and she is wanted for the murder of her uncle, Joe Meeker. She is the wife of a local guy named Vic Richards (played by Philip Carey, Richards himself says his name is "Dick") and has two daughters, Leslie and Tracy. The sheriff doesn't like Ironside throwing his weight around, but he is willing to listen. Barbara's husband shows up, but she doesn't recognize him or her children, who are outside.

The sheriff says it was suspected that Barbara was dead, but since she was not, she is a major suspect in her uncle's murder. Barbara leaves with her husband and meets the kids.

What was originally suspected that happened with Uncle Joe -- who was old and mean -- was he was robbed and beaten to death in his own house, perhaps by a tramp passing through, who also abducted Barbara, who was then killed and buried. Joe was a nasty guy who never liked anything Barbara or his cousin Billy did.

Cousin Billy (Kiel Martin), who just happens to be in town, and just got back from a trip to Las Vegas, is brought to the sheriff's office. When Billy is asked if he got along with his uncle, he says no one got along with him. The Sheriff doesn't beat around the bush, considering both Ironside and Barbara's husband said it is very unlikely she killed the old man, and asks Billy if he killed his uncle in an argument. Morse is brought into the room and, seeing Billy, says, "I never thought I'd see him again after he gave me that $500." Billy suddenly starts to blab that Barbara saw him kill his uncle; "that crazy old man, he made me kill him." He then attacked Barbara and beat her up very badly.

At the end of the show, Ironside says farewell to Barbara. She says, "You gave me back my name and my past, I suppose I should feel grateful." Ironside tells her, "You'll have to give it time." She says, "I don't know how I can take up a married life with a stranger. I don't know them [her children] either. When I look into their faces, I know they're mine, I can't turn my back on that. He's [her husband] waited for me all this time, worried sick, never knowing, never hearing, having faith in me." Ironside says, "You loved him enough to marry him, you were very happy together."

They smooch while her husband is waiting for her only feet away!

This episode largely makes sense, though cousin Billy's sudden confession in a couple of minutes at the end of the show is hard to take. I predict this case will be difficult to deal with in court because no one read Billy his rights, especially since the sheriff made a big deal about Ironside advising Barbara of her rights soon after she appeared in his office.

The whole murder of the uncle has a certain "white trashy" aspect to it. What were the circumstances under which Barbara saw Billy kill the old man? Barbara seems to be a pretty respectable person, aside from the stigma of having disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Did Billy read about Barbara a year or more ago and just recently decided to take action, assuming he was the one trying to run her over (and how would he know where she should be at any certain time?) and also murder her in her apartment? I don't think Billy read about Barbara during the recent rehash of her case in the papers, because him trying to kill her was the subject of the recent news reports.

Anyway, there is more of this soap opera ... tune in later for the second and third shows of season three. Barbara tells Ironside as she leaves him, "I may come looking for you some day," and he replies, "I'll be there."

TRIVIA:


S01E24: Perfect Crime
Original air date: March 7, 1968
Director: Charles S. Dubin; Producer: Paul Mason; Writers: Norman Katkov (teleplay), Leonard H. White (story); Music: Stock. Time: 47:51.

A group of students is attending a lecture by Ironside at Bay College in the office of Dean Adam Gabriel (David Lewis). Some of the students at the lecture are members of the school's rifle team, which is expected to go to the Olympics. Early in the show we see a woman riding around campus in a Jeep using a megaphone, urging people to support the team.

Considering Ironside could be considered to be a representative of "the pigs" (i.e, the cops), the students seem very polite to him, which is odd, because this is the "radical sixties." Later, when Ed and Eve are investigating on campus, students are mostly interested in talking about "pot, our involvement in Vietnam and police brutality."

As the lecture wraps up with mention of the concept of a perfect crime, Ironside is handed an anonymous message which the dean has received. It consists of letters and words cut out of newspapers, usually seen in kidnapping ransom notes: "Dear Chief Ironside. You are wrong, The perfect crime is possible. I will prove it." Ironside responds to the gathering that there is no such thing as a perfect crime, only imperfect detectives. The people commiting the crimes are human, and humans make mistakes ... then they are caught. "No matter how brilliant you are, you will be caught; I promise you."

As Ironside is being wheeled to his van, someone from above -- what looks like a turret on the roof of the administration building -- aims a rifle at him and then shoots Byron Shelley Crawford III (Paul Hough), who has been discussing philosophy with The Chief. Byron is hit in the arm. It is later determined that the sun was in the shooter's eyes and the distance was about the maximum for a .22 rifle, which is what was used. The shooter would have had to be "a marksman."

Larry Wilson (Ron Russell) who wants to graduate summa cum laude, is kind of a hyper individual. Larry's girl friend is Peggy Fortune (Brenda Scott), who is 20 years old. Her mother got a gold medal in shooting at the 1948 Olympics when she was only 22 years old, and Larry tells Peggy she is obsessed with beating this record. He apologizes for this remark, but Peggy is upset, because she loves her mother.

They are interrupted by Jonathan Dix (Peter Deuel a.k.a. Pete Duel) who is outside the building. Peggy says she doesn't like Jonathan, who is Larry's roomate: "He's a user, he's using you to make himself seem witty, smart, and make you look small. You're not small, Larry." Larry says Jonathan is his friend, and when he first came to the college, Jonathan helped him: "I don't think I would have made it without him." They head out to the rifle team's practice, but before they leave, Peggy locks her closet, which has a rack in it with several guns.

Roger Simmons (Shelley Novack) is the captain of the rifle team. Jonathan is being a jerk, throwing various questions at them, climaxing with "Is the assassin among us?" Roger dislikes Jonathan's smarty-pants attitude, especially when Jonathan points a rifle at him. But Larry reminds them they all came to practice their target shooting. Peggy scores pretty good, Roger is near-perfect, but Jonathan makes several shots in a vertical line, not very good.

Later, Ironside is in the dean's office, analyzing these targets. He says that he was expecting the anonymous perfect crime person to shoot poorly, but "he's too smart for that." Ed and Eve join them in the dean's office. They are complaining about all the footwork they have been doing. Ed says after interviewing people they were all "too busy cramming for their exams to pay any attention to the surroundings." Eve reports that none of the members of the rifle and skeet team has a record with the juvenile courts or the police. She tells Ironside the people they talked to think he is a "very cool cat" and one of the sororities has voted him the detective they would most like to be captured by. Five out of the 16-member rifle team were at Ironside's last lecture.

Suddenly, bullets shatter a window in the office and Eve is hit, but considering the angle at which we see the sniper shooting, I would be skeptical that this person would see Eve from above, unless the bullet ricocheted somehow.

The Commissioner is disturbed by this turn of events, and recommends that the college be shut down, something which the dean has already taken care of. But Ironside says this is a bad idea, that the sniper will just take his talents to the city of San Francisco, because the person wants to make Ironside the audience for the perfect crime.

The backgrounds of the main suspects from the college team are examined carefully, but don't reveal anything particularly disturbing. Ironside says they are dealing with "a brilliant, cool, calculating, not-quite-normal mind ... We're not dealing with a madman, but with an extremely but brilliant Machiavellian mind."

When they find out that Larry Wilson received a .306 rifle some time ago, which was presumably the gun that shot Eve, they are quick to interview him. Larry responds very badly to their questions, saying that he got rid of his rifle by pawning it because he needed money, and he lost the pawnshop ticket. Jonathan, who prior to Ironside's arrival was giving Larry a bunch of smart mouth about his lifestyle, gives more of the same to Ironside, who says that Jonathan is also a "leading suspect, right near the top of the list."

Ironside, Ed and Mark go through a the Agatha Christie-like list of all the suspects. The injured Eve returns to the office, despite Ironside's objections. She says that Peggy's high school teacher confirmed that Peggy has always been determined to beat her mother's Olympic record. Ironside insists that Eve should go home and relax, but she brings up the case of Ironside himself who was crazed with finding his killers after he was seriously shot.

Back at the college, where the rifle team is still practising, despite the place being shut down, Larry wants to know from Peggy what happened to his .306 rifle that he gave to her about 3 months ago. She doesn't know, it just disappeared. He totally blows up at her.

When the team gets Larry's medical history, that doesn't help his case. Around the age of 8, he was in therapy for 3 years because he killed another kid while they were playing with his father's gun. But suddenly news is received that Jonathan has been shot.

Turns out Jonathan's wound isn't that serious, but Larry is a big suspect and he has disappeared. Ironside goes back to the campus for a "talk with the dean." After this, Ironside returns to the van, and somehow he is switched with a dummy. The dummy is shot (this whole procedure seems very dangerous as far as Mark is concerned). Ironside makes it to Larry and Jonathan's room just in time before Jonathan makes it look like Larry was the shooter and committed suicide. Ironside confronts Jonathan: "You've lost." Ed and Mark overpower him.

Back at headquarters, the case is discussed. Jonathan had hot pants for Peggy and wanted to knock off Larry. Jonathan was the best shot on the rifle team -- Ironside said he knew this because Jonathan intentionally screwed up the target shooting test. After Larry gave the rifle to Peggy (it was never pawned), Jonathan tracked it down and stole it. Jonathan also rigged up a timing device so he could shoot himself. (Huh? When and how did someone find out about this?)

Mark tells Ironside there is a simple way to avoid cases like this in the future: "Stop giving lectures."

TRIVIA:

  • Larry is seen driving his MG sports car.
  • This show has its good points, though Pete Duel's demeanor is so obnoxious, you would like to punch him in the face.
  • There is a big wooden box in Peggy's room, which contained a present of a rifle (I guess) from her mother. The mother's address is merely Mrs. Marie Fortune, Antwerp, Belgium and Peggy is merely Peggy Fortune, Bay College, San Francisco, CA. Are these addresses sufficient?
  • When Jonathan tries to hustle Peggy near the beginning of the show, she tells him she has to wash her hair. What a burn!
  • The ages of some of the "students": Pete Duel, 28; Brenda Scott, 24; Shelly Novack, 24; Ron Russell, 24?


S01E25: Officer Bobby
Original air date: March 14, 1968
Director: James Sheldon; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writers: Brett Halliday & Bill S. Ballinger; Music: Stock. Time: 47:51.

This episode is pretty good if you don't think too hard about it.

Ironside is at the airport, waiting to go to Los Angeles to the National Police Officers' Convention. He says he hasn't missed one in 25 years. A stewardess starts to take him from the lounge to the plane because of his handicap (he will be the first one on) when the plane outside is destroyed by a bomb.

An investigation into the bombing begins almost immediately. Over 100 passengers would have been killed. Two people did not make the flight: Harry Clinton and Mae Evans. The bomb is traced to Clinton's suitcase. But personal information like his address and telephone number were both phony.

Later that evening, Ironside and the team are going home and in the van they find a crying baby boy. This is odd – why would the truck be left unlocked (not only that, Mark looks through the open window), and is there anything that would identify it as a police vehicle (I think not)? There is a note on the windshield that looks like it was written with lipstick: KEEP MY BABY UNTIL

The baby is crying until Ironside holds him, something which will be repeated in the show. They all go back to the office. Ironside starts to deal with Juvenile Hall to send someone to take over care of the baby, but they are understaffed. Of course, this just makes Ironside annoyed.

Ed goes to an address for Mae Evans which they got from the airline, an apartment (#307) where an empty playpen can be seen. Ed just misses some guy who was snooping around the place. Ed finds a picture of the baby with his mother.

Back at headquarters later, the baby is being well looked after, certain supplies having been obtained like food, disposable diapers, a bottle with milk and so forth. Ironside micromanages virtually everything – the temperature of the kid's milk, the kind of food he wants to eat, the temperature of his bath water and so forth.

Without saying where he got the information (probably at the apartment), Ed says that Mae Evans (Nancy Malone) is an employee of Falcon Airlines, whose plane was the one blown up, and the baby's name is Bobby. When Ed asks the Chief if anyone used to call him "Bobby," Ironside says, "Not recently." Ironside suggests that someone with a grudge against Bobby's mother may have planted the bomb; it's not like someone wanted to do him in.

Myra Brinker (Jeanne Cooper), a uniformed juvenile officer, shows up to take Bobby away. She is a harsh by-the-book bitch who is primarily interested in filling out paperwork. When she tries to leave with Bobby, Ironside yells at her, "If you take one more step towards that door, I'll have you arrested for illegally detaiming my material witness." She leaves without the baby, saying she will report Ironside.

Ed goes to talk to L.A. Laserman (Russ Conway), a boss at Falcon Airlines. He says that Mae Evans was originally Mae Stallings, a stewardess who used to work out of Chicago. She had been married to a Harry Evans, but was divorced from him. Ed talks to another stewardess named Wallace (Sharon Harvey), who used to work with Mae.

Wallace suggests Mae was at the airport last night around 6 p.m., but suddenly decided to take a vacation with some time that she had coming to her. It is not explained why her name was on the passenger list, or if she was still in her job uniform when she made this decision. Wallace says "she simply made her own reservation." (It seems very odd that Mae wouldn't have given notice before coming to work.) Would this mean her name was still on the list from when she was in the crew? I doubt if she would have left town without her son (and who was looking after the son at her apartment while she was working?). Why was her son not at her apartment when Ed was there earlier?

A call is received from Brinker, because someone is contacting her office, inquiring about the child. The call is transferred to Eve, and Bobby's mother is on the line, pretending to be a reporter from the San Francisco Dispatch. Though she is calling from a pay phone, she suddenly freaks out because even though she is in a booth in some public building, she recognizes her ex-husband (Paul Carr) walking around. He was the guy who was snooping around Mae's apartment earlier who Ed just missed running into.

Ironside figures out a way to make Bobby's mother come to them. He calls a press conference, saying that Bobby needs a blood transfusion, and using some medical-related information from his mother's employment records, adds this to the conditions needed to prolong Bobby's life. A front page story appears in the Dispatch with the headline "Abandoned Waif Needs Blood."

Information is received from Chicago concerning Mae and her ex-husband. His name is Harry Higdon, and a year after their marriage, he made a bomb extortion attempt on a bank and received "seven to ten ... not in stir, but in a psycho ward," thanks to his wife's testimony. Higdon has obviously been released from the hospital ... or did he escape?

Brinker shows up again with a show cause order from Juvenile Court, but Ironside pulls out paperwork of his own from Superior Court, a petition for temporary guardianship of the infant which overrides Brinker's order by several hours. Bobby's mother arrives while this is going on as someone who wants to donate blood. She doesn't identify herself as the baby's mother, and eventually leaves after pussyfooting around, but Ed follows her. Ironside later describes her as a "nervous wreck" who couldn't co-operate in a plan to help nab Higdon. Ironside persuades The Commissioner, who is having a typical freakout, to let him deal with the case in his own way.

Mae goes to a hotel room (#720) rather than her apartment. Higdon is nearby in a restaurant. He buys a jacket from some guy, who is actually a cop. When Higdon goes to Mae's hotel room wearing this red jacket, there are two cops waiting for him as well as Ed. Suddenly Ironside shows up as well. Higdon pulls out a stick of a dynamite, but Ironside disarms him of this, a very risky move, after calling Higdon a "loser."

Ironside knows that a stick of dynamite on its own can't do much damage, it needs a cap to set it off. But doesn't Mark then pick a cap off the floor where it was dropped?

At the end, Bobby is reunited with his mother, who gives Ironside a kiss. She tells the team that her new husband (Bobby's father) is an officer with the Marines in Vietnam. Mark makes sure Bobby has a little black doll which was given to him earlier, and Ironside squeezes a toy fish which he leaves behind. The music is sentimental, and Ironside looks sad. But he ends the show by saying, "At least now we'll have a little peace and quiet around here"!

TRIVIA:

  • As Higdon waits in a cafe near the end of the show, outside it looks like a San Francisco cable car is passing by. I don't think this is a process shot, and it doesn't look like a San Francisco cable car, more like one of the tourist buses from the Universal Pictures tour. According to Wikipedia, these tours started July 15, 1964.
  • The number on Higdon's mug shot is 143637.
  • A special hotline is set up for people who want to donate blood to Bobby after the press conference: 986-0710.
  • As the airline boss picks up the phone to summon the stewardess to talk to Ed, the cord drapes over the phone in an peculiar way.
  • From IMDb, it looks like Bobby was actually played by twin brothers: Bill and Ron Grosland.
  • In addition to appearing in 1603 episodes of The Young and the Restless, Jeanne Cooper appeared in 5 episodes of Perry Mason: The Case of the Corresponding Corpse (1958), The Case of the Lucky Legs (1959), The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1962), The Case of the Nervous Neighbor (1964) and The Case of the Vanishing Victim (1966).


S01E26: Trip to Hashbury
Original air date: March 21, 1968
Director: Tony Leader; Producer: Paul Mason; Writer: Norman Jolley; Music: Stock (Special Music by The Hook). Time: 47:53.

At the beginning of the show, some cops are raiding a house in the Haight-Ashbury area known as "Freddie's Pad." Freddie is played by Cliff Osmond, a towering (6′5″) guy (no relation to the famous Osmond family) with a scraggly, unkempt beard, wearing an oversized vest and dark glasses and using an antique wheelchair. The cops are trying to locate a runaway girl who may be in the house. But there are already some issues:

  • Ed and Eve are included in this group of cops. Do they have "normal" duties like this? I thought they were part of Ironside's team and that only.
  • Why do the cops care about this one missing girl? Surely around that time (late 1960s) there were hundreds, if not thousands, of missing kids who came to San Francisco to be part of the hippie scene. Why does this girl get special treatment? Are her parents someone important? Did they make a donation to the police department or something?
  • It doesn't look like there is a ramp for Ironside to get into Freddie's (he isn't there now, but will be later).
  • In the opening and subsequent scenes, the cops have no interest in the fact that people are smoking and consuming various substances. Was there such a lax attitude towards this by the "fuzz" around this time?

Freddie's is full of doped-out types who are dancing to the sounds of a rock group called Hook, a real group consisting of Bobby Arlin (guitar), Buddy Sklar (bass) and Craig Boyd (drums) who are mentioned in the end credits. Outside the place is a car painted in a bizarre manner with all sorts of colors, and a mailbox with "LUV" on it.

When Ed gives Freddie a ticket presumably connected with harboring a runaway girl, Freddie says, "I don't let any teenyboppers in here." Eve and the male cops, all of whom are wearing suits, and some of them (not Ed) wearing hats, start checking girls in the place against a photo with no results. Ed and Eve go to the place's second floor, which they have to access via a rickety elevator. When it works, to Eve's surprise, she says "they must have paid their bills last month." Ed says, "Freddie charges $3 to his freakouts, and the ones who live here kick in on the rent." They say the attraction of the place is "L-S-D, S-T-P, P-O-T and S-E-X."

Upstairs, Eve finds the girl they are looking for, 15-year-old Patty Larsen (Stacey Gregg), who gives Eve a bunch of mouth. Suddenly, there are screams from another room, and Eve finds Ed wrestling with Barbara Chase (Susan O'Connell), which is also witnessed by Patty, who says, "It really is true, isn't it? You hear about cops, but you never really believe it. Are you going to beat me too?" Ed's face is badly scratched up.

Barbara is taken to the hospital. She is making a noise about "police brutality." It turns out that her father is Eldon Chase (William Windom), one of the biggest attorneys in town. Barbara's face is bruised. The father arrives at the hospital, and tells Barbara how shocked he was that she was at Freddie's: "Why would my daughter want to degrade herself that way? When did she begin to lose her self-respect?"

Barbara says she wanted to find out why people lived "that way" and help them. She says she has been reading books on psychology ... "the study of human behavior." If she could convince just one of the kids to go back home or quit taking drugs, "then it would all be worth the experience." When Eldon asks if someone from the home beat her, Barbara says that it was "that cop. ... he accused me of being on drugs, tried to get me to tell him where Freddie kept his 'stuff' ... he decided he was going to force it out of me. So he hit me ... and kept hitting me and hitting me." She tells her father that she went to Freddie's alone because her friends were afraid to go there. She swears that all she is telling her father is the truth. As we shall find out later, this is a bunch of bullshit.

Ironside is at the hospital soon as well, and the exchanges between him and Chase are relatively civilized. Barbara went to a judge a few years before, asking that her father have custody of her (she earlier suggested when talking to her father that her mother was a lush). Eldon tells Ironside that as long as she has been under his care, she has never lied to him and he doesn't think that she lied to him when she gave him the spiel in her room a few minutes before.

The doctor looking after Barbara (Victor Creatore) says that based on her X-rays, he has determined that she has a "lineal skull fracture," and he doesn't like the looks of it. Eldon goes back into his daughter's room, telling Ironside words to the effect, "I'll see you in court."

The Commissioner is soon freaking over the poop storm which will break in the local press over the accusations against Ed. He grills Eve, who is very precise on what she saw, but tells her this won't stop people from thinking that one cop will have another's back. After Eve leaves his office, the Commssioner tells Ironside, who has been witnessing the conversation, that he will have to suspend Ed, but Ironside says he should not do this because the evidence is "pure baloney." Ironside wants 72 hours to prove that Ed is innocent of the charges.

Back at Freddie's, Ed recreates what happened. The phone in the room was off the hook, there was someone else in the room, and he picked up Barbara to help her. After a few seconds, she suddenly went crazy and started fighting with him. Ironside said a jury won't believe Eve who was witness to what happened, they have to prove that Barbara was lying.

Ironside talks to Freddie, saying "You're the head freak for this carnival, you know what's going on." Freddie does manage to provide one interesting detail, coming out of his brain fog for a second -- that Barbara's father showed up about a minute after his daughter was taken away in an ambulance. Ironside said this doesn't make sense, because Chase lives at least 20 minutes away from the place. Ironside soon gets a call via the phone in the room and the news is not good -- Barbara went into a coma, and despite some surgery to remove a blood clot, she died.

There are huge headlines on the San Francisco Dispatch the next day: GIRL DIES: POLICE SERGEANT ACCUSED ... Hippie 'Police Brutality' Charge Now 'Murder': Sgt. Brown Released on Bond.

Ironside decides to talk to various people. One of the hippies at Freddie's, whose name I think is Tag (Michael C. Ford) recalls Barbara as being "a stone drag ... a square who's trying to be cool." He didn't hear anything from the room upstairs because of the din of Hook playing acid rock, and when asked if he knew anyone who wanted to harm Barbara, Tag says, "Who'd want to beat on a square like that?" Later, Ironside says after talking to people from the house, they have learned something valuable: "Nobody noticed anything, because there was nothing special to notice. Whoever was with Barbara had to be a familiar face, someone who fitted in, someone who the hippies had seen before. We're no longer looking for a stranger or a first-timer."

Back at the office, Ironside asks Patty questions, but she is uncooperative. Chase shows up while Patty is still there, having been summoned. Ironside asks Chase who phoned him from Freddie's the night of the incident, and Chase says it was "a young girl" who said that Barbara was in trouble. When Ironside asks Chase if he knows why his daughter went to Freddie's, Patty speaks up, "Go on, tell him, mister, I bet it's a groovy story, and I bet you bought every word of it."

When Chase tells Patty, "I trusted my daughter ... I'm sorry if you didn't have the same relationship with your parents," she yells at him, "Who didn't? What makes you think my parents weren't just as stupid as you are?" Chase looks shocked at this. Patty continues, "What good are parents, anyway, when they don't care enough to find out when their kids are putting them on ... what's wrong with a little checking ... Or is it too much trouble? When I think of the wild stories that my dear square mother and father used to swallow ... I told them the same lie four times in a row, and did they believe their little cookie? You bet they did. I used to pray that they wouldn't ... just once ... time after time, I left the gate wide open for them. One phone call would have done it ... one lousy phone call."

Chase tells Ironside that his daughter spent a lot of time with David Wilson (David Macklin), a clean-cut boy. There is an odd cut here from Ironside's office to Chase's home or office, where David appears and talks to the two of them. Chase is still wearing his overcoat. David wonders why Ironside is investigating the case, because "Barbara told you what happened, it was all in the papers." (This seems odd, why would this information have been released to the press, and who released it?) David says he "couldn't believe" that Barbara went to Haight-Ashbury, and that she had never been there before to his knowledge. He says "We were together all the time," but when Ironside says "Except that night," David adds, "Well, even then, I did bring her home early [What is he talking about? This is totally wrong.]. I'm not surprised she didn't tell me anything about that, she knew what I thought about those creeps at Hashbury." David says he knew about Barbara's interest in psychology.

Ironside says they think that Barbara "phoned somebody from Freddie's, a close girl friend possibly." (Ironside is just guessing here. Later at the office, he says, "I refuse to believe that there is a teenage girl alive who doesn't have one special girl friend she tells her deepest, innermost thoughts to, someone she sees every day, can't wait to get home from school to talk to her on the telephone.") David says, "She'd call me if she'd call anybody." David says he knows what Ironside is up to, he wants to drag Barbara's name through the mud to clear Ed's name. Saying that he loved Barbara, David leaves, upset. As Ironside leaves, Chase tells him, "I'm not going to let you off the hook." This is the last time we shall see Chase in the show, by the way, at 31:32.

Ironside goes to the Belmont Hall Private School, which Barbara attended. Joan Patridge (Monica Lewis), the principal there, says when Barbara attended the school, she never accomplished one thing she could be proud of. She had bad grades, which forced her to drop her academic course. Partridge suggests a lack of self-respect would have perhaps been the reason that Barbara was hanging out with hippies. She gives Ironside a list of Barbara's friends which may be useful to him in his quest to find out who she phoned, but she says it may be difficult to get information from the students, who have a "code of silence."

Ironside gets a wide variety of comments from students, including "she was my very best friend," "she was a neat chick," "I didn't really like her, she was always hanging around wanting to copy my homework," and "I tried to help her, I felt sorry for her." He then talks to her whole class, saying, "It's inconceivable to me that some of you, who were so close to Barbara, could know so little about her." He makes a big pitch for them to call him on his private phone: 431-5997.

Ironside then tries another approach. Partridge explains this to the students: "In view of the fact that Haight-Ashbury has become a definite part of the scene, and because it has generated such a compelling curiosity among our young people, we have decided that first-hand information of this phenomenon should be included as part of your edudation." The students from Barbara's class are bussed to Freddie's Pad, where they hang out.

The hippies and the students mingle, and there is passing of flowers, face-painting and someone even offers Mark a joint, which he refuses. In the room which is totally filled with smoke from drugs, Terry (Judith Brown), one of the students, in fact the one who said that Barbara was "my very best friend," is seen talking in a corner to Tag, who described Barbara earlier to Ironside as a "square," suggesting that both Terry and Barbara were no strangers to the place. Ironside notices this.

Back at the school, Terry, confronted with her deception, tearfully talks about Barbara, that she and Barbara started going to Freddie's about 6 months ago "just for kicks," but Terry freaked out and stopped. Barbara kept going there. She would sneak out of her house, sometimes multiple times a week, and stay at the place overnight until early the next morning. (This jibes with what one of the interviewed students said, that she thought Barbara, who couldn't "cut it" with her courses at the school, came to school sleepy because she was up all night studying.) Terry says that Barbara phoned her to come and join her the night of the confrontation with Ed, saying the guy she was with, who was tripping around with STP, had started beating her. Terry then phoned Barbara's father to come and rescue her. The guy attacking her was known as "Prince Valiant."

Back the office, Ironside figures out this "Prince Valiant" guy probably wore a wig at Freddie's, and Eve says "More wigs are sold to men than women." With the help of Partridge, Ironside and his team snoop in lockers in the school (did they get a warrant?), and find a styrofoam mannequin head in one of them. Ironside, Mark and Ed go to Freddie's where this guy is in the same room upstairs. (I totally don't understand how they figured he would be there.) Mark "unofficially" breaks into the room. The guy they were looking for is high on something, the visuals are all distorted. And who is this character? I could see this coming ... it is DAVID, Barbara's clean-cut boyfriend, wearing a wig. David tells Ironside his face is "crawling with evil, just like Barbara's."

The show ends during a thunderstorm. Eve is reading a letter from Patty Larsen saying how good things are, now that she is back together with her parents.

Although it would seem that Ed is off the hook, I think it might be possible, given that Chase is a very good lawyer, to suggest that the beating that David gave Susan would not have killed her, but when Ed was wrestling with her, that might have exacerbated her injuries. Alas, we will never know, because we never saw Chase again after the conversation with Ironside and David.

TRIVIA:


S01E27: Due Process of Law
Director: Dick Colla; Producer: Cy Chermak; Writer: Don Brinkley; Music: Stock. Time: 47:51.
Original air date: March 28, 1968

This show starts out promisingly, but deteriorates badly towards the end.

Mark is at a wild party thrown by his friend Archie Bass (Dwayne "Dobie Gillis" Hickman) who just got out of the army. Despite the locale being San Francisco, the people are generally well dressed, booze is flowing, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of drug use.

Mark is with Helen Tobin (Janée Michelle), seemingly a "nice girl" because he has promised her folks that he will have her home early. Before this can happen, he gets a call from Ironside who summons him back to work. Mark offers to take Helen home, but she says her place is "out of the way" relative to his office, so she will stay at the party. Mark says he can't leave Helen there because "I don't know any of these people," but Archie looks like he will take care of things.

Ironside, who has been in a meeting with the Mayor, arrives 3 hours and 17 minutes late after Mark returns to the office. Ironside tells him that headquarters just called to report Mark's date has been found dead in a public washroom in Golden Gate Park. When the two of them arrive at the park, not only is Helen dead, but there is a hypodermic needle found beside her body on the floor. Mark says "somebody must have pumped [the drugs] into her." He is understandably shocked, but not as much as Helen's father (Roy Glenn) who also shows up. He lays into Mark, saying "is this the way you take care of a girl?"

Mark returns to Archie's place, which is in a shambles. He and a couple of other stragglers, including Pogo Weems (David Carradine) don't believe Helen was murdered. Archie says that when Helen left the party, she was "higher than last year's taxes," i.e., she was very drunk. Archie can't immediately remember who Helen left the party with, but he and JimmyBracken (Ron Pinkard) think it was Connie Goshen (Carol Booth) and "her muscleman," Joe Fenway (Burr DeBenning). Two cops show up, one of whom is Ed, who tells Mark to get back to the office ASAP.

The Commissioner is fuming because Ironside is working to solve the murder of Mark's girl friend, whereas his expertise is needed to help the Mayor with anti-crime legislation. When the Commissioner threatens to remove Ironside from the case, Ironside suggests if that happens, he will remove himself from the Mayor's committee.

The medical examiner's report was that the level of alcohol in Helen's body was "abnormally high." She died from an overdose of heroin. Eve has discovered that Fenway injured his back when playing pro football and became addicted to morphine when he was in the hospital. He was cured and released 14 months ago, and now works as an instructor at the Bay City Health Club.

Mark is already getting hotheaded when told that it will take a couple of hours to get a search warrant to check out Fenway's place, yelling at Ironside that Fenway is a "murderer." And Ironside is already fed up, telling Mark, "I promised to help you and I will, but with your kind permission, I will handle this case my way."

Saying, "Yeah, in slow motion," Mark storms out of the office and goes to Fenway's. Crappy rock music plays in the background, bringing back memories of the party the night before, along with visions of Helen's dead body, and Mark kicks Fenway's door in. He finds a box of hypodermic needles in a dresser, with one missing. Ed suddenly shows up at the door and is disturbed by Mark's presence in the room. Ed rattles off a list of things that Mark has done wrong which will totally jeopardize the case.

Brought to the cop shop, Fenway says he left the party with his girl friend Connie and Helen about 2:30 a.m. Helen was really "smashed," so they walked around for a while for "some air." Later, they put Helen in a cab and sent her home. Things don't get better when Mark slugs Fenway in the face in the presence of his lawyer Everett Brandt (Parley Baer), when Frawley blurts out "If she was grabbin' a hit once in a while, it was her own idea."

Ironside gives Mark yet a stern admonition: "You want instant justice, write your own Constitution; you want made-to-order miracles, take your business somewhere else." After Mark leaves in a huff, Ironside tells Ed that if he was in Mark's shoes years ago, he would be equally outraged and outspoken, but orders Ed not to tell anyone that.

Ed goes to the taxi company to talk to the driver who gave Helen a ride that morning. Eve finds out the hypodermic needles were manufactured locally by the Omega Pharmaceutical Supply Company, and you need a prescription to purchase them. Fenway is not a customer of any place that sells these needles. Ironside wonders if Dr. George Sable, M.D., the staff physician at the health club is worth investigating.

Mark just cannot leave well enough alone, and returns to Fenway's place again, where he finds Fenway dead. Just as he picks up some club-like device which might have been used to kill Fenway, Connie, Fenway's girl friend, shows up at the door,and screams as she sees Mark with the club in his hand. Back at the station, when Mark tries to speak to Ironside, he is ignored.

Connie is brought to the police station, and Ironside grills her in the interrogation room. Connie says she called Fenway, because he hadn't shown up for work. She called him from the Cosmic Bazaar, a "head shop near Telegraph Hill" where she works and she "has a pad in the back."

When Ironside asks her to account for the needles in Fenway's dresser, she changes the subject. Ironside says that "one of those syringes" was the murder weapon," but how does he know this? Is he just guessing? Ironside says, "Pushers have been known to get people drunk, start them off, they create their own demand." I kept asking where was Connie's lawyer, did she get apprised of her rights, etc.?

The interrogation over, Ironside tells Mark to get a lawyer, because he is an "excellent murder suspect." He reviews the case against "hotheaded Mark Sanger": "Thanks to you we have no evidence and we have no clues as to the killer!" when Mark asks, "Where is my lawyer?", Ironside says, "When it applies to you, the system is pretty good, isn't it?"

When Ed talks to the cab driver who says he picked up Helen the previous evening, we can see the cabbie's mouth moving, but not what he is saying. What follows is a gimmicky conversation between Ironside and the Commissioner which takes place in multiple locales, but it is edited in such a way that it looks like they are talking continously. The Comissioner says that given the fact that people from the press are freaking out over this story, Ironside's "important civic project" he is working on with the Mayor may be in jeopardy.

Eve has discovered that Dr. Sable keeps his medical supplies in a locked cabinet, and he has the only key, but a carton of syringes was missing. There is never any explanation as to how this might have happened, other than some speculation. The cab driver told Ed that he took Helen right back to Archie's party. Connie returns home, and while the "head shop" where she works is at street level, and she said earlier that she had a "pad in the back," it looks like her "pad" is actually upstairs above the shop. As she goes up the stairs to her place, she is grabbed by someone with red hair (a clue if we have been paying attention).

Ironside and Ed go to Archie's place, where Mark's pal recalls Helen leaving with Connie and Fenway, but he passed out and was in "Blanksville" when Helen returned to the party and he has no idea what happened for the rest of the evening. Archie doesn't know who of the people at the party might be a dope addict, and is very apologetic.

Back at the office, Ironside says that Connie has been kidnapped by the killer, based on the fact that when they tried to contact her via her job, she was not there. (But aren't they making a big assumption here?) Eve has a list of people who were at the party – where did they get this list? No one could remember what was going on! While it sounds like earlier there was some attempt to find out who was at the party, according to Archie, it turned into a "king size wingding" where "everyone in San Francisco dropped by some time during the night". Archie passed out and Mark said at the beginning of the show that he didn't know the people there: "these people were all strangers."

If we go back and study the beginning of the show, Pogo came in while Mark was on the phone to Ironside and Mark didn't even see him. Shortly after this, Fenway and Connie were going to leave as Mark was talking to his girl friend near the apartment's front door, also getting ready to leave. There is some suggestion later that Pogo's arrival had something to do with these two departing, but there is nothing to prove this.

Mark didn't seem to be paying attention to Fenway and Connie, and Archie convinced them to stay. Yet (to jump back to near the end of the show) Ironside starts yelling very loudly at Mark to remember who came into the party around this time and Mark remembers a lot of stuff, like Pogo coming in and Pogo's name, even though he was nowhere near the front door at the time. Suddenly Pogo's name is the hot topic, with Eve knows that his name is on the membership of the health club, another fact which is meaningless.

Anyway, Pogo is the red-haired guy who has kidnapped Connie. He wants to give her a fix ... and the fact that Connie was only drinking soda pop at the party and also sucking on a candy while being interrogated earlier is significant, because heroin addicts can get sugar fixes (this is a fact -- check Wikipedia and other WWW pages). But nothing is said about this in the show, duh!!

Connie is conflicted about whether she needs the drugs. She acts chummy towards Pogo, but then slaps the needle out of his hand, and he belts her in the face. Suddenly Pogo hears the sound of the Ironside team outside and grabbing Connie, heads for the roof of the building.

Because this room (presumably Connie's) is on the top floor, the team is alerted as to where the two of them have gone, which leads to a dumb finale with Ed, Eve and Mark busting Pogo on the roof. He was hiding with Connie in some area which seemed to be over the edge of building.

Despite Ironside almost having had an aneurysm, telling Mark "One more blunder and I'll file you under 'obsolete'," the show ends with Mark forgiven for being such a jerk, and resuming his usual duties of pushing Ironside around.

TRIVIA:

  • Archie's place is at 2717 Colby Drive
  • Various information on the box containing needles Mark finds at Frawley's is blacked out.
  • It is seen raining, sometimes very heavily, or it has just been raining during much of the show.
  • There are several instances of "crappy rock music" heard during the show, including at the very end, where it seems to be in Ironside's office.


S01E28: Return of the Hero
Original air date: April 4, 1968
Director: Ralph Senensky; Producer: Paul Mason; Writer: Robert Pirosh; Music: Stock. Time: 47:51.

The show opens in a courtroom. We have seen a huge newspaper headline in the San Francisco Dispatch: WAR HERO ON TRIAL. Under this, it says "Ironside Forced to Testify Against Old Friend." (Would it really have had a subhead like that, i.e., would he be forced, and is Ironside really that well known in San Francisco?)

The "hero" is Captain David Larkin (Gary Collins). He was a cop with SFPD who worked with Ironside in homicide for two years "before he went back into the service" to fight in Vietnam. Larkin is on trial for first-degree murder because he is alleged to have shot his cheating wife to death as well as Frank Bryson, her lover, at Bryson's Esquire House apartment.

Ironside carefully answers questions put to him by the no-nonsense District Attorney (Joe Turkel), including the fact that, despite not officially working on the case, he was the one who found the murder weapon at the bottom of the elevator shaft in Bryson's apartment building, and it was later identified as Larkin's gun. It seems odd that Ironside would have been investigating in this capacity, presumably in the basement of the building, given his mobility issues.

The trial soon ends, and Larkin is found guilty, which causes an uproar in the courtroom, not only from Larkin himself, who leaps to his feet and starts yelling, but from three paratroopers from Larkin's former outfit who have been attending the trial. Like Larkin they are dressed in their military uniforms: an unidentified Sergeant (Ron Hayes), Kali (Ned Romero) and Mace (Charles Wood).

When Ironside goes to visit his pal in jail after he is sentenced to death, Larkin has difficulty facing the fact that he was likely drunk when he showed up at the murder scene. It is not said whether he used this alibi in court, presumably having not testified in his own defense as was his legal right not to do. Insisting that he is innocent, which Ironside says he believes, Larkin is bitter: "I was framed, and you were the prized chump."

Back at the office, as the team starts trying to figure out how to get Larkin off the hook with a new trial, either by "mitigating circumstances" or "new evidence," Ironside gets a threatening phone call: "I'm going to kill you ... start sweating." He dismisses the caller as a "kook," but goes to see Paul Rutledge (Hank Brandt), one of the two witnesses from the trial who saw Larkin at Bryson's building.

Rutledge is an investment advisor. On the night of the murder, he was at Bryson's apartment discussing business with him when Mrs. Larkin showed up, after which Rutledge left, but not before he saw Larkin "stop at Bryson's door" (though not enter the apartment) and recognized him. Rutledge says he has a "photographic memory," having seen pictures of Larkin connected with the military. Rutledge himself is a reserve officer "with the engineers."

Rutledge interupts his conversation with Ironside to make a phone call to someone who his receptionist says has been calling multiple times. It results in another threatening message, which Ironside overhears: "I want to kill you ... you and the others who got Larkin, all five of you: you, Gerber [the doorman at Bryson's building], the D.A., Judge Carlyle and Ironside. Start sweating, Rutledge."

Tracking down the number which Rutledge called (415-781-0712), Ironside and Mark discover that it is a pay phone. Mark says something odd here: "Maybe the idea was to get you here so he could get a shot at you. He knew you'd trace the call." But how would Ironside have known this location, because when he got his own threatening call, there was no call display. This phone feature did not exist until the late 1980s. And how would the person have known that Ironside would have been visiting Rutledge at a specific time and would have overheard the call, or gotten the phone number from Rutledge?

Interestingly, Ironside knows the three paratroopers from the courtroom are all staying in the Alexander Hotel, which is right across the street from the phone booth. There was a suggestion in Ironside's courtroom testimony that he was playing poker with Larkin and the three Army men recently, perhaps at this location. Ironside goes and talks to the Sergeant, who is hostile, saying "you turned in the gun, you got [Larkin] the gas chamber." When Ironside says the voice on the phone sounded like it was muffled through a handkerchief, the Sergeant suggests Ironside have his handkerchief analyzed by the police crime lab, which doesn't make any sense. Later, the Sergeant and the other two men are seen in an elevator which is ascending very slowly on the outside of a building. The Sergeant tells them, "Don't ask me what I've been doing, and I won't ask you."

At the office, Ironside gets another disturbing phone call. The judge was killed when a bomb planted in his car went off. Security is increased for the others, including Gerber, the doorman (Gavin MacLeod). Gerber lives where he works, and two cops are supposed to be protecting him, but some person comes down into Gerber's room in an unusual way, between the curtain on a window and the inside of the room. This person, who is wearing military-style clothing and boots, has a threatening talk with Gerber in the bathroom of the apartment while the two cops supposed to protect him are watching a boxing match on TV in the living room. Shortly after this, Gerber goes to see Ironside, suggesting he was wrong about IDing Larkin who was supposedly seen in the building. This would result in a charge of perjury, among other things. When Gerber also wants police protection, Ironside tells him to get lost.

After Ed is assigned to replace one of the cops guarding Gerber, another bomb goes off, this time in Gerber's bathroom, and the doorman is killed. An inventory of Gerber's effects seen after this shows he was going to Mexico City, and took a previous trip there using a passport under the name of Philip Evans during the trial on Friday, June 23 (this day was a Friday in 1967). Although the next plane to Mexico leaves in one hour, Ed heads to the airport (obviously there are no security lineups), and he goes to the hotel where Gerber stayed during his short trip. Some babe from the hotel offers to be Ed's translator as he tries to track down what Gerber did when he was there.

When Ed returns to the office, he has a deposit slip from the Banque de Mexico in the name of Philip Evans on February 28, 1968 for $10,000. Note this date does not match the one in the previous paragraph, and there was no information about the deposit mentioned in the inventory of Gerber's effects, though it does suggest that he was paid big bucks to say that he saw Larkin at his building the night of the murder.

Ironside has his first brainstorm, that he and his team are "dealing with two separate forces here: One force is threatening people to change their testimony, and the other is killing people who might change their testimony ... One of them [the paratroopers] is thrashing around in the dark, hoping he might stumble across something that will save his friend, the other, who might or not be a paratrooper, is determined that Larkin's verdict will not be changed." This second person is killing people connected with the case, "to cover up killing the witnesses."

When Ed drives Rutledge home soon after this, a second cop checks out Rutledge's garage first, but while he is doing this, Rutledge conveniently steps several feet away and is grabbed from behind and threatened, probably by the same person who was putting the heat on Gerber earlier. Later, Rutledge tells Ironside that the guy who grabbed him said "Tell the D.A. that you're not sure you saw Larkin. Tell him that you've been on the verge of a breakdown, and you've been imagining things, and that could have been one of the things. And don't tell anybody about tonight. Because if you do, it'll be the last thing you tell anybody." (This seems like a very long threat compared to the time that Rutledge was standing off to the side while the other cop checked out the garage.)

Rutledge tells Ironside he has advised Bryson since February of 1963. Ironside says if Bryson was involved in some shady business activities and also fooling around with a married woman whose husband had just returned from Vietnam (how would someone know all this stuff, and why would the issue of "morality" here make any difference?), one of Bryson's business associates might have had a reason to kill him. Rutledge suddenly remembers that Bryson got involved with Eastwood Gas, a utilities company, where there was some hanky-panky involved, and he invested around half a million dollars, which was "over his head." Rutledge had advised Bryson against this investment.

When Ironside wants to know everything about with this Eastwood case, especially anything which might have been connected with bribes or blackmail, Rutledge opens up a filing cabinet in the wall, which explodes because of a bomb in it. Later, it is determined that the explosive in the filing cabinet was nitrostarch, a relatively low-level type of explosive which is "used for explosions at army training camps." When Ironside visits the recovering Rutledge, he asks if Rutledge knows about nitrostarch. When the answer is no, Ironside wonders why, because Rutledge -- who was in the army -- said he has a "photographic memory." Ironside says the use of nitrostarch might mean that "whoever put it there didn't want you to get killed, which suggests that he possibly might be a friend of yours."

When Ironside further asks about "that new directional bomb, the Claymore," and Rutledge again knows nothing, Ironside says that "as an engineer officer, you must have [heard about it]." Another memory lapse? Ironside also suggests that there was some monkey business with investments that Bryson made earlier in their dealings where Rutledge had jerked Bryson around and as a result, Bryson wanted Rutledge to bail him out of the Eastwood fiasco, which Rutledge didn't want to do. Ironside says, "That's something we can easily check out about by fine-combing contracts and tax returns."

The clincher in this discussion is that the threatening message supposedly from someone on the pay phone Rutledge called when Ironside was visiting earlier that Rutledge let Ironside hear, suspected to be from one of the paratroopers, was actually on a recording/playback machine. Ironside called the phone company who said that Rutledge had rented such a machine from them, and Ironside calls a number which is seemingly connected to such a machine, though not the one Rutledge used, I think. Ironside left a message on a machine like this: "This is Ironside. When you made that phone call, Mr. Rutledge, you didn't dial the number your secretary gave you. You called a recording device, probably attached to a private phone upstairs." WHAT?!?

Rutledge opens a drawer containing a gun with the intention of using it to shoot Ironside, but this is foiled and Ed and Mark rush in to bust him. The ending is "cute," with the team going to a baseball game.

Having reviewed some earlier episodes of the show where things started to get totally crazy like this one, I jumped to this show, the last in the first season, hoping it would be more "normal," and found that it was just as bad as the earlier ones, with this crazy Perry Mason-like writing where the plot went totally off the wall and a person you least likely suspected to be the "bad guy" was the one who really did it. Rutledge is a very bland villain, not some mastermind who could have contrived this huge scenario, including breaking into Larkin's house and stealing his gun which he then planted at the bottom of the elevator and on and on...