User Reviews

This is a very busy and fast-moving episode. Most of it takes place in San Diego so a nice change. As stated by another reviewer, the start of this outing is ridiculous. A grenade being tossed into that confided space gets everyone. Anyway, Joe's friend Roy Elkins (Robert Munk) is wounded and mutters the word "Joyce". Joe checks out the victim's, war hero Nolan, life. Likely suspects include his soon to be ex-wife Barbara Nolan (Melendy Britt), his ex-girlfriend JC Casey (Judith McConnell), his father-in-law, Julian Mallory (Lyle Bettger) who runs an aircraft company that the victim worked for, and the company lawyer Ben Lorenz (Robert Patten) who was once engaged to the wife until Nolan stole her away. These leads go nowhere although someone throws a grenade at Joe who tosses it along and a car gets the worst of it. While Joe is at the girlfriend's place, he notices a man loitering outside. He goes out there to confront the guy, but he is gone. Joe notices there are fingerprints on a car's hood that the man was standing by. As he examines the prints, a sniper shoots at him and kills the car's windshield. Lt Tobias reports the prints are not on file anywhere. Peggy tells Joe that Mallory's company has an investor who is the criminal Lou Morgan (Eugene Peterson), an old acquaintance of Joe. Joe sees Lou and his right-hand man Schaeffer (William Bryant). Lou is just a friendly investor in ailing businesses. Sure. Lou warns Joe to move along, nothing to see here. Joe now meets Colonel Edgar Ewing (John Milford) who hated Nolan because he lost a leg while flying on a mission in Vietnam with Nolan and blames him for his wound. Another suspect. Joe flies in Mallory's company new airplane with company pilot Ralph Stoner (Dabney Coleman) who is flight testing the airplane. Joe gets to show off his pilot skills. Joe later goes to his car which we see has a grenade tied to the driver's door. Just as Joe reaches for the car door, he spots the guy who was loitering outside the girlfriend's place. He chases the man and grabs him at gunpoint but is hit over the head by an unseen assailant and then the two guys escape. When Joe goes back to his car, the grenade is gone. Joe finds out from Roy, his elevator friend, that the word is not "Joyce" but "joystick" and Nolan was saying it just before the grenade went off. Joe goes back to the aircraft company and ends up thwarting a trap set by Stoner and his mechanic (Charlie Picerni) and ties them both up. He takes the plane and, using Stoner's map, he flies into Mexico and lands at a dirt strip. He meets bad guys to do a heroin pickup and the drugs are in the pilot's control stick and it is installed in the plane to beat any police search. One bad guy gives Joe the stick, but the second guy gets out of the truck, and it is Schaeffer, Morgan's man. He pulls a gun on Joe and Joe grabs the other bad guy and pulls him in front of himself to be a shield. Right then, for one of the few times in this series, the police arrive in a timely manner and save Joe. They even shoot Schaeffer. The LA police could learn something from the Mexican police. Then Col Ewing shows up with mystery man with no fingerprints on file. It turns out he is a Treasury agent working with Col Ewing to shut this pipeline down. Also, Col Ewing is the unseen assailant who slugged Joe when Joe had captured the treasury guy and those two had removed the grenade from Joe's car. Schaeffer is the one throwing grenades around and Nolan got the first one because he found out about the drug pipeline and tried to cut himself in.

The cast is fine. There is so many of them that some are limited to one scene. Robert Reed is the rotating police lieutenant this week. As is true in most episodes, his job is to provide information to Joe and stay out of the way. Peggy works her usual phone magic to report that the criminals had bought into the aircraft company. In my review of episode 5-9, I state that the actress Maidie Norman played two different characters in back-to-back episodes, and I had never seen that before. Now I've seen it twice. Grace Albertson plays a doctor in this episode and in the last episode, Broken Mirror, she played a nun who gives vital information to Joe. Charlie Picerni is a company mechanic and, since Charlie is a bad guy 90% of the time, I knew he was involved in the scheme. Much like Paul Carr and John Vernon, regardless of the plot points, they will be the bad guys in the end.

As always there are some logic lapses here. A few have been pointed out by others. I'll add to the list. How did Joe know the mechanic was behind the door? He knew there was a trap coming but he sure figured it out in a hurry. Who was the sniper? The initial thought was it was the guy hanging around outside the girlfriend's place but since he turned out to be a treasury agent, it isn't him. Logic says he was sent by bad guy Lou Morgan, but that character hadn't been introduced yet. When Lou Morgan is introduced into the story, he says he owes Joe a favor and tries to warn him off the case. Odd behavior on Lou's part. For lack of a better answer, I guess it was Morgan but can't say for sure. Col Ewing's backstory is not relevant to anything important but a few comments. He lost his leg in Vietnam and was medically retired. That means he was a colonel on the mission that wounded him. Yet Nolan was the mission commander and giving the orders. That means Nolan was a colonel senior to Ewing. Two colonels on one mission. No. Also, Nolan was in the process of attacking civilians. I realize it is a plot device to boost Nolan's "unlikeable" factor. However, the attack is a war crime and since Ewing didn't try to stop it and did not report it, that makes him an accessory. Why is Joe's friend an elevator operator? Did they still have that job in 1972? When you think about it, Joe didn't need to be at the drug pickup spot. Ewing and the Mexican police were already there so they must have had a heads up from someone. Who? I have no idea but not Joe as they never could have beaten Joe there. After capturing Stoner and his mechanic, Joe could have reported his suspicions to Lt Tobias and Tobias could have passed them along. Last observation: the full-on camera shot into the plane's cockpit is very plain. There is a giant bare board behind the two pilots, and we see no controls. Must be saving money.

Joe doesn't get paid again. He did break up a drug ring so that's something. The Treasury Dept probably loves him. Maybe he gets a reward from them. Maybe a good guy plaque or something. This is an above average outing that you should see.

Dabney Coleman is usually going to be the bad guy and he is in this episode. Why is he flying the plane without wearing headphones? There would be too much noise. At the end of the show there were several bad guys involved in the drug ring.

The grenade in the elevator at the beginning would have killed both men. No one would survive it, yet one man does. That makes no sense. It also happened too quickly for the two men to say much to each other. But the man who died muttered out "Joyce." before he died to Mannix's friend Roy Elkins who survives but is in a coma for most of the show muttering "Joyce."

The grenade was overused in this episode. I disliked the scene where Joe is in a parking garage and someone tosses a grenade at him. Joe has super human reactions and manages to toss the grenade at a parked car before it explodes. This scene was not necessary. If you want to kill someone the last thing to do is attract attention. Get a silencer and shoot them in at night away from crowds. A grenade is going to attract the police and a crowd of people after it goes off. Good luck escaping the scene.

I got tired of hearing "Joyce" throughout the episode. The editing is sloppy. Joe captures Dabney Coleman's Ralph Stoner and his thug. Then suddenly, Joe is taking off in the small airplane. This is a bad transition.

Why would the police allow Joe to fly to meet the drug operatives? This is a police matter. Joe would not be cleared to take off. There was no need for him to go there because the Mexican police were there.

John Milford as Col. Edgar Ewing is a bright spot. I enjoyed his performance. I also liked the scene where he met with Mannix at a beach side bar and you could see several bikini clad women in the background.

The episode has a lot of good acting performances, lots of plot holes and lazy editing.