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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 82381" data-attributes="member: 57984">The grand finale to Season 2 is a two-parter entitled "Task Force" (everywhere on the Internet and on the DVD packaging, the show is listed "Task Force, Cop Killer" but I'd never seen that until a couple of years ago -- perhaps that was the title on the original script, but it never appears on screen).It's about an italian opera singing morotcycle cop who, predictably, falls for Pepper. James Darren is cast as Rick Matteo, and one wonders if Aaron Spelling was watching this in reruns when he decided to add Darren to cast of impossibly cheesy T J HOOKER in the '80s. Or if NBC came up with the idea of putting some metal between the legs of Erik Estrada after viewing this, the episode so smacks of spin-off intentions (and I think it was indeed considered as such).Cop-happy Elvis Presley seems like ideal casting, but Colonel Parker would never have allowed it.As two-parters go, it's really not bad, giving POLICE WOMAN a badly needed jolt of energy just as the hit-and-miss frustrations inherent to the second season grind to a halt. Like many two-part segments in TV during the '60s and '70s, there is only enough plotline to really warrant a single episode, but "Task Force" seems to validate the extra length by having just enough chutzpah, cuddling, biker menace and lots of shots of cycle-cops riding thru the streets of 1976 L.A. accompanied by a partly new score by Morty Stevens which sounds like some military thing an American highschool band would play at Homecoming.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/taskforce_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 758px" />The plot follows Pepper's inadvertent enlisting in a new female-friendly biker cop unit formed to ward off civil suits after she's duped by the evil feminists on the force into signing a petition. (Crowley, misogynist oinker 'til the end, seems highly amused that one of Pepper's fellow police women actually has a lawyer who's a woman).There's a lot of excitement as the new co-ed unit congeals, with many scenes of off-hours group comradery and "natural" macho repartee which today seem insufferably trite; it's harmless, if a bit retro-pathetic.Matteo (Darren) saves Pepper's life from a stupid near-fatal sky-diving plunge in the very first scene! That's how you know they'll be a couple. Indeed, he's soon serenading her by the pool, instructing her on proper chopper etiquette, canoodling by the couch since there's no fireplace in Pepper's apartment.This once all seemed so nostalgically romantic in a '70s way. (I tended to associate it closely with that episode of STARSKY & HUTCH's Season One in which Starsky finds the girl he'd had a crush on in middle school who'd grown into a famous model before winding up an alky on skid-row and a victim of petty thieves who aim to kill her as a witness to their crimes... The episodes aired weeks apart in Spring 1976 and were both heavy on the romantic Hawaiian-sounding guitar in the musical score).<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/taskforce_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 754px" />Then there's Bobbo Olchin (Don Stroud, in his third and fourth appearance on the show) a Manson-like biker gang leader, one whose black leather jacket sports the logo "Hell's Pussycats," more ominous for its cuteness, and who is assumed to have kidnapped the teen daughter of a California industrialist and either killed her or, worse, turned her into one of his shameless whore-devils.One has to remember that this aired at the time when HELTER SKELTER (the original, then-shocking TV movie revisiting the 1969 Manson family murders) and Patty Hearst and the Symbianese Liberation Army and other '60s radicals on-the-run were the objects of big, creepy, scandalous media focus post-Vietnam and post-Watergate (and something alluded to again in the top-notch "Tender Soldier" episode of POLICE WOMAN early in Season 3).And through it all, there are various subplots of the fetishistic sort that POLICE WOMAN liked to toss in back when such stuff was still considered risky television fare, including Charles Haid (pre-HILL STREET BLUES) caught by James Darren whacking outside Pepper sliding glass door (which leads alternately to an apartment walkway, an enclosed patio, or an open woods dependant on story needs). You know Haid is a loser because he's fat, lives with his mother Rebecca Wentworth, he failed to make the cut during the biker unit training quiz, and everybody's nice to him because it's T.V.And after Officer Matteo is later run down in a sidewalk phone booth (a crash he couldn't possibly survive in real life) by a wildly painted van, the search for a motive leads them to recall Haid's night-spunking of Pepper's window; Pepper enlists the aid of the department psychologist, played with her usual uninentional campiness by Dr. Joyce Brothers in one of several appearance in the series, who informs the beautiful Sergeant Anderson that "... any sexual perversion is that serious!". Armed with this insight, Pepper and Crowley then interrogate a sobbing Haid who comforts them with the assurances that he had been in the bushes masturbating to Pepper and not to James Darren. And everyone is relieved, 'cause that's almost normal.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/taskforce_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 758px" />Now that puts the suspicion back on the criminal biker gang and Bobbo Olchin's ex-lieutenant, Comet (played Gerald McRaney who displays a smarmy sex appeal soon lost with his youth) as to who may have run down Officer Matteo and also shot to death another cycle cop who went nosing around the gang's hideout at Sugar Ranch (more shades of Manson imagery).Eventually, Pepper finds the long-lost, kidnapped teenaged heiress who's now drugged-out and homicidal and snickers like a rat very effectively; the girl has become Lady Renfield. There's a good, slightly creepy scene at the ranch when the girl pulls an axe on Pepper, and Our Lady of Bacharach spins around -- weapon drawn -- with some competence before the inevitable slapping down at gunpoint by a man, her immediate penance for showing any ovarian-fortitude at all.Remember, this is still Season 2.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/taskforce_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 771px" />Anyway, the weather is gorgeous and feels so very Spring 1976 (okay, technically it was filmed in February... but it's California).They place Pepper on a motorcycle and the cops chase her and then something blows up, leading to Pepper's bedside rejection of James Darren's various proposals. And there is a nice, light-hearted moment at the hospital elevator when Bill still thinks Pepper is headed to Italy with Matteo which is basically ruined by some pretty dodgy vocal looping.But it was a good way to close the year.BTW: "Task Force" won an Emmy nom for sound-mixing (all those "vrrooom-vrrooomm"s, I guess, because the vocal dubbing is atrocious).<img src="http://www.adammcdaniel.com/AmselArt/Amsel_TVG_PoliceWoman.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 549px" /></blockquote>

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