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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 82362" data-attributes="member: 57984">“Don’t Feed the Pigeons” starts out at the police station, a little old lady -– or television’s raging falsetto stereotype of a little old lady -– devastated that bunco artists have swindled her out of her life savings, reports the crime to the squad. Pepper knows that this is likely a death sentence for the old lady, if things follows their usual pattern.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 772px" />In the Partridge Family’s redressed house, two patrolmen with badly dubbed voices break in on the insistence of a neighbor (Jeanette Nolan, who herself has made a career out of playing ragingly stereotypic little old ladies) only to find the geriatric corpse of another victim lying under her pet parrot.Pepper, Joe and Pete try to explain to the surviving daughter about how the “pigeon drop” scam works: fake old ladies meet on a park bench, pretend to find a wallet full of money and lottery tickets, and convince a real old lady to empty her bank account in order to match the funds and then collect on a reward... It all sounds pretty stupid, but that’s why they target the vulnerable elderly... The daughter (Arlene DeWitt) points out that her late mother didn’t fall for the crook’s routine, but Pepper informs her that the killers got access to her mother’s bank account anyway, and even stole a brooch off her body.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 783px" />The gang stake out a local park and monitor several such occurrences while deciding what action to take against the con artists.The park really does look nice: sunny, green, church bells tolling on the hour ...<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 783px" />Pepper stops the two female scammers in the park and threatens to scream for a nearby patrolman (Joe Styles, in a uniform) if they don’t hand over the bundle they’ve just looted off another aging patsy. Envelope in hand, Pepper writes her name on the parcel, dumps it in the nearest mailbox, and is taken by the nasty ladies to their leader, hunky Benny Bates (Erik Estrada, pre-CHiPS) in ‘70s gold chains and disco shirts unbuttoned to his navel; Pepper demands entry into their little operation, and when her overtures at partnership are refused, one of the two girls is mysteriously busted on a parole violation and a hole is left in Benny’s team. Dee, the surviving bunco babe (Vonetta McGhee) balks at the idea, but Benny, charmed by Pepper’s moxy and sex-appeal, agrees to take her on.Suspicion regarding their partner’s recent arrest is present. But not enough.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 773px" />Pepper allows Benny to drive her to her “adult” motel room, rebuffing at the door Benny’s advances under the pretense that she’s not interested in a man “who nickels and dimes little old ladies” and then suggests something homoerotic about him going home and “rubbing two sticks together” but I’m not sure what it meant. Entering into the motel room once Estrada drives off, Crowley asks Pepper, “Who writes your dialogue?” and she responds “Whoever it is, remind me to send him a check...” which must mean Ed de Blasio brought Angie something nice from New York and compensation keeps slipping her mind so he’s putting it into the script. But then, who knows?Perched upon a water bed, Crowley suggests he visit The Church of Otto Otterman, run by Otto Otterman (Henry Gibson, post-LAUGH IN, in what seems an unnecessary cameo). And not-so-pious Sister Clara (Joyce Jameson, sitting in for Joan Blondell) is tapped to help the squad scam the scammers.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 782px" />Sister Clara, unable to hide her relish for a set-up, almost blows her cover repeatedly by going off-script once the pigeon drop goes down. Pepper coughs, Dee looks rightly suspicious, and Pepper calls it off “before Dee does too much heavy thinking” and then cleverly blames Dee for the failure before storming out, demanding that Benny “call me when you know what you’re doing!!” Meanwhile, Crowley soothes Sister Clara’s guilt over her own incompetence with the sympathetic concession that, “It’s difficult for you to go straight, I know that..."<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_6.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 763px" />This time, the Criminal Conspiracy Unit turns to Jeanette Nolan for assistance, the show refusing the impulse to put Angie in support hose and a powdered wig (at least until next year’s “Night of the Full Moon”). A willing victim, dithery Nolan hands over the bank account supplied to her by the cops, and, having collected the tidy sum during their latest pigeon drop, Pepper rips the missing brooch off of Dee’s collar and leaves her in the dust of her big, black luxury car.Appalled, Dee naturally calls Benny Estrada from a pay phone to inform him of recent events; Benny hops in his vehicle pronto and, en route to the park, passes Pepper. A decent chase ensues through the streets of L.A. as the pair goes canal bridge hopping, ending up with Pep crashing into a parked car and Benny grabbing the loot away from her through the open passenger window, Benny then chased on foot by Pepper’s male choral trio. He falls three stories from a wooden banister for little reason except it’s time to end the scene.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/pigeon_7.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 773px" />Back at headquarters, facing murder charges, Dee expresses concern only for herself as per her criminal personality. Pepper and Crowley get a freeze frame in the hallway after he informs her that she’s going to turn him “into a basket case” what with her feminine emotional involvement and whatnot.(For those keeping score, in '70s tradition the “Music by” title card has little to do with who wrote it: Richard Shores gets screen credit, but the only musical cue in the entire episode he composed is the freeze frame. Such practices were outlawed by the guild by 1981).----------Roughly midway thru Season 2 is the seemingly blandly-titled “The Hit,” one of those David Moessinger written & directed episodes like S3’s “Bait” which aim for a darker tone (although S1’s “Ice” hardly fits that description).On a rooftop during a routine surveillance, Pepper and Crowley catch Pete and Joe listening to a local boxing match on the portable radio. Tony Harper knocks out his opponent, but two mobsters –- real life ex-cops Eddie Egan and David Toma –- aren’t pleased as they watch the fight from that same walnut living room where all well-moneyed POLICE WOMAN crooks seem to live (with the usual lack of effort to disguise it). Egan, California bookmaker Jack Ballard, had made a million dollar bet on Tony Harper that Harper would take a fall in the ring, and now that Harper has refused to comply, Ballard calls in rumpled hit man Benny Hummel (Harris Yulin) to knock off the fighter in retribution, Hummel posing as a yard man with a loud lawnmower who shoots an irritated Harper at dawn.Captain Parks tells the unit they need to investigate and can drop their present case to do so, leading Pepper to chirp in relief, “If I had to climb that ladder one more time, I would have to asked for flight pay!”It’s a harmless line, but now, in Pepper’s Season 2 mouth, it’s a little too harmless: it’s just dead, the line. One can imagine how engagingly Angie would have delivered the comment the previous year, when she was absolutely mesmerizing in every single scene she was in, on the street or around the squad room; now, however, she almost sucks the life out of many scenes because they've sucked the life out of her, the brass’s insistence that she tone down her inflection at all times (so as not to be perceived as too sexual and, hence, degrading to women) leaving Angie in a neurotic no-man's-land, now unsure of how to play a scene.She’s officially a secondary character in her own series: apologetic demeanor, nervous glances, deliberately weakened delivery of her lines, the unit mascot who placidly watches the guys around her do very important things.Pepper and Crowley arrive at County General Hospital and confront Harper’s wife (Conny Van Dyke, who played the doomed women’s prison con the previous year in “Fish”) who is offended at the suggestion that her sweet boxer husband would ever “fix” a fight, despite the fact that he obviously didn’t fix it at all, which is why he’s lying semi-comatose in the next room –- room # 801, Aces and Eights, the dead man’s hand.Hummel arrives home to his unhappy household, a brittle and embittered wife (Fay Spain, who played the dykeyest of the homicidal lesbians in last year’s ”Flowers of Evil”) and a vulnerable teenaged daughter (Amy Irving, pre-CARRIE and pre-Speilberg) who the mother browbeats, literally. She hits her physically...Hummel gets a call from mobster Ballard: the boxer is still alive, and needs to be finished off in his hospital bed.But when the assassin arrives to complete the botched job, he finds his mark a helpless vegetable, unable to walk and talk, and with not even a guard on the door because, as the nurse (Maddie Norman, who played Bette Davis’ maid in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?) points out, “What’s left to guard??”<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 781px" />Pepper and Bill drop in at some dive called The Four Boar to speak with Dave Fisher, Tony Harper’s brother-in-law, to follow up on a lead that the two men, in business together in the failing restaurant, may have taken loans from bookmaker Ballard to keep their enterprise afloat. He denies any such scheme, but the visit isn’t pointless in that Angie looks really stacked in a tight yellow outfit... At any rate, our duo pay another visit to Mrs Harper at home who denies that her husband has been gambling for a year or was into someone, possibly Ballard, for substantial sums of money.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/PW_hit_boobies_zpsnejl3h13.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 780px" />At the station, Crowley gets a call from the brother-in-law (as Pepper watches from the doorway, dithery as if she somehow shouldn’t be there) who’s found the bookie’s phone number Tony used to call when he wanted to place a bet. Turns out the bookie is a fat guy (Cliff Emmich) who cleverly uses a laundramat to launder money.Meanwhile, back County General, the hit man returns again intent on finishing off Harper, explaining to the unresponsive former boxer just why exactly he brought about his own shooting by refusing to kowtow to Ballard’s demands. But before Hummel can complete the job, Harper’s wife walks in unexpectedly; Hummel claims to be a doctor just checking her husband’s chart, and then wanders out. The wife senses something is wrong, but is distracted by emotion from the sight of her three-quarters dead husband, eyes twitching in semi-conscousness.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 788px" />The squad busts “Moby” the fat guy, and promises to protect him from Ballard if he agrees to testify to a grand jury that Harper owed Ballard money. Understandably reluctant, Moby only agrees if Pepper will be his protection, leading to the inevitable scene of sweaty Moby in an undershirt putting the verbal moves on Sergeant Anderson. She rebuffs him promptly, and her only duty for the episode is quickly completed.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 794px" />Indeed, Hummel is sent out to kill Moby. So, while enjoying a tense Tahitian meal in public with the obese bookie, Pepper asserts that "I am not a 'broad'!" and then is foolishly lured away from the table by the hit man posing as a cop -– Crowley overhears the impending disaster on his car radio and rushes across the street and into the restaurant. Moby is shot, Hummel rushes out the back door of the restaurant, Crowley chases him, and Pepper stands there like a dullard, unable to figure out what’s just happened or how to act on it.God. Why are they doing this to her?!?<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 791px" />At the hospital, Hummel’s second would-be victim admits to Pepper and Bill about being "grateful" for the first time in his life for being fat (as that was likely the reason the shooting wasn’t fatal). They mention in an aside that the hit man will likely show up again, but that of course he shouldn’t worry about it, despite -- or perhaps because of -- everybody's recent efficiency record.Upset that another murder has been messed-up, Ballard calls Hummel and tells him to finish off Moby at the hospital or Hummel’s daughter, Amy Irving, may wind up finished off instead.In one of the better scenes (and the only one with a musical cue from Richard Shores, although Shores receives composer screen credit for the entire installment), Hummel shows up in tearful Irving’s bedroom in the middle of the night, gives her a bundle of cash, and tells her to leave town immediately. Thus getting her away from her abusive mother, and the guns of Jack Ballard.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_6.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 783px" />Undercover as a nurse, Pepper (in a hot pair of ‘70s teardrop sunglasses) and the team await the hit man’s arrival. Pete spots the likely culprit in the lobby, and Pepper monitors the killer’s advancement up the elevator, keeping the gang informed by phone and walkytalky.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_7.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 787px" />Much to their surprise, Hummel ignores Moby’s floor and, as Pepper realizes at the last moment, he heads right for poor Tony Parker’s room. In one of the slightly creepier scenes, Hummel again breaks into a monologue to rationalize his actions, this time to explain to helpless Parker that he is there to put the boxer out of his misery once and for all.Even some hit men have a moral code.Two shots ring out from Parker’s room, followed by a ‘thump’ as Crowley bursts in to find Parker shot to death and Hummel, with a bullet thru his brain, in a pool of his own blood, on the floor beside Parker's bed.Two hits, two kills. “A perfect score,” Crowley surmises.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/hit_8.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 775px" />The episode is solid. But with Angie’s charisma surgically removed, it all seems to have happened in a vacuum.IMDb usually cites this episode as the lowest-rated of all installments amongst fans, presumably because Pepper's sidelining is the most evident of any entry up until this point in the series -- she has basically nothing to do, and she has nothing to do for no particular reason!</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?