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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 82378" data-attributes="member: 57984">A good comparison between Season 1 and Season 2 can be gleened from watching S1's "Blast" with Robert Vaughn as Pepper's dance hall boss alongside S2's "Generation of Evil" with Robert Vaughn as Pepper's Vegas dance hall boss.That says it all.But I'll keep typing anyway...In this new one, David Opatoshu plays an aging gangster whose graying hair keeps getting darker and lighter depending on mood (this is the '70s, remember, era of pet rocks, lava lamps and mood rings). Opatoshu's grandson, Greg Brady, is kindapped in the first scene and the squad moves in to find him, the only choice allotted to them is having Pepper jiggle nearly naked in Nevada on the strip in Vegas -- the Los Angeles hotel ball room we've seen in so many shows and movies doing an adequate job of mimicking a more downmarket Las Vegas casino lobby. (Is it the Ambassador Hotel??) A tad more stock footage of Sin City would have been nice.While Pepper uses her powers as Most Attractive Woman Ever Born, muted as they may be for Season 2, to woo and weaken casino owner Robert Vaughn (I always re-cast him in my head with John Forsythe, but that's just me) the mobster who they suspect kidnapped Greg Brady, Pete and Bill try and keep tabs on fidgety Opatoshu in California who himself keeps taking phonecalls from the kidnappers at a public phone under a huge clock whose "Bulova" brand name has seen its "L" and "O" turned into "E" and "Q", respectively, in order to avoid giving anybody's product a free plug... Although I don't know anybody who ever bought a watch from "BUEQVA", but whatever.In Vegas, Pepper joins a revue where the girls wear glittery one-piece outfits and wave colored kerchiefs (which are probably a signal for "help!"). Angie Dickinson once complained in a Season 1 DVD audio commentary that her go-go moves in "Blast" were "awful!" compared to the other girls with whom she shared the stage -- girls who really could do it and do it well. But in "Generation of Evil" they apparently decided to avoid this problem by hiring dancers who can't seem to dance almost at all... At the very least, they're dreadfully out of sync.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/generation_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 782px" />Eventually, after getting the stereotypic Italian mother-running-a-bistro to dump spaghetti on Pete's head as a distraction, Opatoshu escapes surveillance and makes his way to Vegas where Joe, acting as bartender, pulls a gun on him and forces casino security to help him remove the hood from public view.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/generation_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 769px" />As Pepper watches their sting operation about to go up in smoke, she uses Vaughn's executive phonebooth in the lobby to trace the origin of the calls he's been taking there from the kidnappers. Unfortunately, somebody behind the camera thought having a ditz on the other end of the line who's thrilled that "the police want me to run a tracer!" would help sell the plot contrivance they have in store when, against instructions, the ditz calls back and bleats away for "Sergeant Pepper Anderson -- she just used this phone!!" into the ear of none other than Vaughn himself, blowing Pepper's cover immediately... It's a stupid vignette; such a mistake on the part of the phone operator would have been far more believable if she'd simply been a semi-gruff, all-business, been-there-done-that-and-I-don't-care kind of person. But instead, they give us an Aaron Spelling moment.It's hard to believe this entry was helmed by Corey Allen, who would become one of POLICE WOMAN's better directors; but it's his first episode, and the set politics were weird in Season 2, so we'll just have to forgive him.What's so odd about what they've done to Pepper this season is that we're denied her seductive purr even when she's playing a hooker or a showgirl! Okay, they toned down her inflection during expository dialogue in the squad house -- but she has to be made to seem less whore-y even when she's playing a whore?!?<img src="http://www.sitcomsonline.com/photos/policewomanangiedickinson.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 614px" />And that trademark purr was important. What the producers and network executives didn't seem to understand about Angie Dickinson (and her detractors no doubt didn't care) was that the sexy thing and the tough thing in Angie comes from the same place in her brain: suppress one and you lose the other... That enigmatic purrrr, so controlled and deliberate and so present in Season One, wasn't merely a "sexy" thing from Angie. It had a consciousness. It had an irony. It was the moral compass of the show. That purr told you everything about what Pepper was thinking, what she wanted the bad guys to think she was thinking, and the inherent contradictions between the two.That purr provided the dramatic tension, deepened the subtext, guiding and correcting essentially every scene she was in.That's some purr!But no more. The purr was gone. Excised from Angie's performance, even when slutting around in a slinky 'screw-me' get-up.Anyway, the closing scene in "Generation of Evil" is much poorer, weaker than it should be: now that the grandson is safe in a L.A. hospital, Opatoshu can't understand why Greg Brady rebuffs him because "your love almost killed me, Grandpa" and then wanders off down the hall hand-in-hand with his girlfriend. And when Pepper turns to the confused mobster and offers the would-be chastisement, "You lived your life your way -- now your grandson has to live his..." the line falls flat because Angie is now being coached into delivering all such dialogue apologetically, nervously, like she doesn't really mean it.Then, she and Crowley turn and walk down the hospital corridor together to get their freeze frame.If she'd delivered the same line in the same scene the previous season, the stinging rebuke would have resonated down the hall after them. But no more.---------In "Double Image," Catherine Burns goes on about how "ugly" she is, who, along with her girlfriend who looks like Linda Day George (but isn't), is shaking down some mob guy (Dane Clark) over homemade 8mm sex films..."Double Image" also has the kind of California seaside locations which seem so 1976. They must've done them a lot that year.Pete Royster gets some of the best -- and only -- personal scenes he would ever have of the entire series, as he falls for Burns' character, despite her being an extortionist whose partner was murdered via a butcher knife. Their mutual bond is presumably based on being funny-looking but oddly appealing.Except that she's bat$h!t crazy. Which messes up their scene, baby.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/doubleimage_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 761px" />There is a nicely leisurely flavor to this installment and much of the end of Season 2 which is kind of relaxing, the series' inner conflicts from mid-season having been gotten through (how successfully is a matter of opinion). The show no longer seems to be actively suppressing its star, but it -- and she -- is different than what it once was. Perhaps it's just a sense of resignation.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/doubleimage_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 758px" />At any rate, it's easier to watch. Even though Pepper's beach bluff bout with a faceless thug results in yet another "saving" via Crowley despite his having been kicked down a dune moments earlier.Richard Shores is given the "Music by..." screen credit, and yet he didn't write one note of it.--------Then there's "Mother Love" with guest star Donna Mills, refining the babynapping skills she will have perfected almost a decade later in KNOTS LANDING.She gave birth to a baby girl 6 months ago, and post-partum denial has been tough. She swipes the baby away from its current mother (who foolishly left it with Mills in a mall shoppe) with the intention of reconnecting with her soon-to-be-released-from-prison main dude and the father of the infant...<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/motherlove_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 759px" />Nothing wildly dramatic happens in this by-the-book story except for redneck Mills stabbing her trampy housemate and then pushing her equally redneck hubby off a cliff when he attempts to extort 15,000 dollars from the grieving adoptive parents in exchange for the return of the child. Hubby's fall manages to be both shocking and a little funny. Especially when they later find his body aloft in a tree at the base of the cliff.The squad chase her around a winding mountain road. And then Mills stops running once Pepper and Crowley manage to get in front of her. Which doesn't entirely make sense, but it's time for the episode to end.---</blockquote>

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