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50th Anniversary Viewing Revisited
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The Mod Squad
"Willie Poor Boy"
Originally aired November 18, 1969
Wiki said:
Pete befriends a young man caught in a robbery after learning that the suspect is illiterate.
Linc and Pete are heading to a warehouse where a friend of Linc's named Masters (Bobby Johnson) works as a night watchman, to pick up a chess set that Masters has carved as a birthday present for Julie. (Yeah, contrived, and they had Linc lampshade it.) Meanwhile, the warehouse is robbed by a pair of thugs. Masters struggles with one of them (Dan Travanty) over his gun and it goes off, and that thief escapes when the Mods burst in. Pete catches the other (Joe Don Baker) upstairs breaking into the coin compartments of vending machines. In the ensuing chase, the thief jumps over some boarding into an empty elevator shaft despite warning signage and falls to the bottom. The thief is carrying ID identifying him as Willie Turner, with his likely partner, George, listed as an emergency contact. (His name is George, get it?) Greer brings Pete in to identify Willie while posing as an uncooperative parolee. Willie secretly calls George, who comes to the hospital and dons some scrubs to see him, but is spotted with him and makes a run for it from the Mods and security. He escapes by changing back into this street clothes and calmly walking out.
Pete visits Willie at the hospital to try to gain his confidence, and Julie comes in posing as a nurse asking him to sign something. When he stalls by feigning illness, they bring in Dr. Albee (Wesley Lau), who wants to test his eyesight, and it comes out that Willie, who hails from the rural South, can't read, which is a source of embarrassment and anguish for him. Back at Linc's pad, Greer and the Mods have a brief After School Special moment on the subject of illiteracy, and Pete becomes Willie's advocate, wanting to see him given a chance. He and Linc go to the owner of the vending machine company, Braden (
Stanley Adams), to convince him to give Willie a job to work in exchange for dropping his charges, while they teach him how to read and write for his court appearance, as a demonstration that he just needs to be given a second chance.
Pete introduces Willie to Linc, who's said to be studying to be a teacher. (Not sure offhand if that's a cover or the truth.) The lessons commence in Willie's hospital room as they familiarize him with the sounds of the letters of the alphabet...I can't help thinking that they missed a great opportunity for a
Sesame Street crossover. Staying true to form, they keep mum about what they're doing to Greer, who hopes that having Willie around will give them a chance to nab George. The classroom moves to Linc's pad, while George wanders the streets and tries to evade the police. Willie is allowed to take a walk during one of his lessons and goes to a dive bar where he somehow knows George would be. George is trying to talk him into skipping bail when Pete comes in, and George recognizes him from the hospital chase. After Willie leaves, while being watched by Linc, George evades Pete by going to the restroom and escaping out the window.
After the commercial, we learn that Willie has slipped through their fingers too. But the Mods are hopeful that he learned something and will show up for his hearing...and he does. The judge (Arthur Peterson) expresses his belief that flexibility is called for in Willie's situation, and the hearing commences with Willie slowly writing his name on a chalkboard while Greer and the Mods nonverbally cheer him on. While everybody's congratulating him after he succeeds, Braden slips and mentions that the Mods are cops--or "hound dogs" as Willie refers to them--and Willie thinks that he's been used and storms out. Willie goes back to the warehouse with George to steal some getaway money, the Mods arrive, and another warehouse chase ensues. This time Willie stops at the shaft because he can read the sign (like he wouldn't have learned his lesson from the last time anyway), while Linc takes down George. The Mods get in some words to George expressing their confidence in Willie.
In the coda, Willie's looking for a better job, and teases the Mods by pointing out a Keep Off the Grass sign that they're violating...and they keep walking on it anyway, as part of their walk-off.
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The Mod Squad
"The Death of Wild Bill Hannachek"
Originally aired November 25, 1969
Wiki said:
Julie poses as a singer at a wayside inn as the Squad investigates the death of a fading country-western singer.
At the Paradise Inn, the title character (Sheb Wooley, who gave us "The Purple People Eater" and the Wilhelm scream) is performing while a patron (Will Mackenzie) makes a call from a booth to report that an unnamed party's death is on. Wild Bill turns the stage over to his guitarist, Bob Travis (Murray MacLeod), and drunkenly tries to drag the waitress, Dolores (Tyne Daly), out to his truck, but she breaks free of him. Driving off in a huff, he swerves wildly while chanting a spoken-word song...until his steering gives out and the truck goes down a gorge, bursting into flames. (This isn't the main event, it's just foreshadowing.)
In the Mods' police lot briefing, Greer assigns Linc to use the woodie, which is finally acknowledged onscreen to be on its last legs, but is said to have one job left in her. (And this is what they call
telegraphing.) It comes out that Julie plays guitar and is familiar with Wild Bill's work, so she goes, with Pete as her brother, to the inn to audition as a singer...performing a song by renowned country legend Carole King, "Now That Everything's Been Said" (from a 1968 album of the same name with a group called the City)...but then, Travis was singing a song by Poco. Clearly this episode was meant in part to give us some of Peggy Lipton's singing, which sounds very not live. We learn that Bill was the co-owner of the inn with the proprietor, Bubba Johnson (James Griffith); and Bob flirts with Julie, with which Dolores clearly isn't pleased.
Nevertheless, while showing Julie her cabin, Dolores opens up with some exposition about potential suspects, including her estranged, abusive husband who's in the Army, Carl; and her more recent fling, Bob; and shares that she's with child, though she won't specify by whom. Pete watches with amusement as Linc drives into town to demonstrate everything that's wrong with the woodie to the local mechanic (Arthur Malet), and ends up backing into a support post of the overhang so that he can stay to work off the damages. Elsewhere, phone booth guy drives up to a hot dog stand and, when he makes some disparaging comments about Wild Bill being on the radio, is incredulous to learn from the proprietress (Ida Mae McKenzie) that Hannachek is the one who died in the truck.
Linc chats up the mechanic about when he used to play with Wild Bill. (No, this didn't go anywhere.) Pete then brings him to eavesdrop on a phone conversation Travis is having about having "the stuff" and wanting to get rid of it. Pete distracts Travis so Linc can search his room, where he finds a block of "stuff" that's wrapped like marijuana, but seems to be ordinary pipe tobacco; he and Greer figure that somebody on either end of the deal is being had. As Julie, now decked out in cowgirl gear, is about to go on, she learns from Dolores that Travis was involved in a big deal that would have had him taking the truck out the night that Wild Bill was killed. Julie contrives an excuse for Pete to come onstage so she can tell him, and he follows Travis to his deal with phone booth guy...who uses the alone time in a shed to sucker punch Travis and drops a live grenade. Pete dives in and tosses it under something, but Travis is blown out of the shed and severely injured.
Dolores visits Bob--now conscious--while Greer and the Mods listen from another room via a mic. She tells him that the baby isn't his and he tells her that the guy who tried to kill him is from his home town, then abruptly passes away. Greer intercepts a call from phone booth guy, in another phone booth, who's asking about Travis. He and the male Mods go outside to confront him, the suspect pulls a gun, shots are exchanged with Greer, and Greer gets him first. The suspect says what sounds like "car...paid" before passing, and they find dog tags on him identifying him as James Decker, a PFC on leave.
The case now apparently considered to have gone cold, the Mods are fixing to leave when Carl Abernathy (Tim O'Kelly) drives to the inn to see Dolores. When they're alone, he gloats about Travis being gone, eventually even admitting to having done it, and tries to use it as leverage to get her to get back together with him. On the road, the Mods realize that Decker's last words were "Carl paid," and they turn around. Back at the inn, Dolores confesses that the baby is Carl's...which means that Carl killed Travis for nothing, because Carl was working under the assumption that it was Bob's. The Mods drop back in and he pulls a gun on them. They try to bluff him into giving up because everybody knows about him, and he uses Dolores as a shield to get to his car and speeds off. Pete and Linc pursue in the woodie onto a narrow, hairpin-turn, hillside road. The woodie gives out on them, they bail, and it meets its end going down a gorge, bursting into flame.
We learn in the coda that Carl was picked up by the highway patrol...because this episode was really about killing off the woodie. While Greer has nothing good to say about the wagon, the Mods have him take them out to the spot where she went down for a small pseudo-service...
Woulda been better if the woodie had given them its last while helping them to accomplish something, instead of going down in failure. And Pete and Linc's stunt doubles are the real heroes on this show.
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Because he's afraid of Tate? Wants out of illegal pharma?
Thought it would make him look guilty or he could get off on his own or something like that. So his accomplices would have an excuse to kill him.
Wait a minute. TV cops went on vacation and didn't get involved in a murder or drug trafficking or something? Who wrote this?!
Julie: And then we found their secret underground lair, fought off all the guards, and saved El Presidente!
Greer (fondling rose): Uh-huh...
Super-powers also exist in the Modverse.
Smitty did the same thing.
So she's moving to Canada.
I was thinking of saying that!
Because he suspects something is wrong, or just because he's overprotective?
I was more of the impression that he didn't just want to leave her alone, and she is the type of person who needs borrowed mansions and secretaries and stuff...kinda high-maintenance.
Lisa was flying the plane solo, right?
Yeah.
You're anticipating my questions.
I'm learning to. ("Better rewind, he's gonna ask.")
There's a lot of hot property in this show.
It may have even been the same exterior as Pete's family home, I'm not sure.
"Banner weakling! Hulk hate Banner!"
Puny Banner.
Hmm. Elaborate suicide, or did she think she was killing Ginny?
That seems to answer that, and yet there have been indications that she's aware of her condition.
Probably a little of both. She was not entirely well even when she was Ginny.
So... the split personality predated the trauma that caused the split personality?
The death of her parents was the original trauma.
She can't call him herself?
Greer kinda said that, in a nicer, more encouraging way.
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