Reviews

An interesting sub-genre in action-type drama - especially superhero stories - is the hero meeting his match, a character so similar in ability and/or background as to leave the hero unsettled. Richard Kimble thus meets his match here in Joe Tucker, an accountant convicted - wrongly - of embezzlement and sent to prison, but he escaped four years ago and has made his way around avoiding arrest, now back in his home town wanting to get the man he blames for framing him, the son of his boss and best friend.

Tucker is sickly and is ready to shoot anyone, but Kimble wants to help him get better. He also runs into the cop in charge of trying to find Tucker (Michael Constantine) as well as Joe's daughter (Brenda Scott). They inform Kimble that the evidence exonerating Joe has been found, but Tucker is determined to shoot the man he blames, leaving Kimble and the others striving to stop Joe from making a fatal mistake.

Fritz Weaver steals the show as Tucker and the contrast of the angry Tucker and the much-calmer Kimble is strikingly effective, especially in the final confrontation.

SVU delves into underused territory here where a seemingly air-tight investigation goes haywire.

It opens, though, with some dubious cinematography. A man, his wife, and their 9-year-old daughter are injured in a bad car crash. The daughter, Holly, has to be taken in a separate ambulance and the unattractive man within asks Holly about possible internal injuries. He tells her in essence he has to take her clothes off to check for signs of internal injuries.

Apart from the general discomfort of this setup, the way the scene is shot - with the camera panning to almost looking up Jeanette McCurdy's legs - is doubly troubling. Whose idea was it to shoot it this way?

Holly naturally objects, and it takes a female doctor at the hospital to verify Holly doesn't have internal injuries. But it's what she and ex-cop Rebecca Hendrix do find that necessitates SVU involvement.

The ensuing investigation winds up snaring a school coach, and other children come forward and finger him for molestation. It's a slam dunk against the coach.....

But no. The kids fingering the coach are themselves being coached to identify him. Parent are doing this because others say he's guilty. But by the time everyone figures out who the real rapist is, the coach has been character assassinated.

It serves as a needed refutation of the Me Too movement and the kind of episode the series needs to revisit nowadays

Mother explores SVU into a twisted family and a psychiatrist who may not be so pure, either, and the first sign this case is flakier than usual is when a horny loser and his reluctant buddy happen upon a dingy basement where a woman is bound and gagged.

The woman is Doctor Greta Heints and somebody beat her up rather badly. She has no memory of the attack but as SVU investigates her treatments of sec offenders comes under scrutiny, especially when her office gets ransacked and therapy tapes are stolen.

SVU eventually finds a suspect in one of her most unstable patients, Robert Logan. His sister, a drug treatment worker named Christina, blames Greta for Robert's state as a mental cripple and it gets worse when Robert breaks down in court and Christina finds one of Greta's therapy cassettes - where Greta is all but begging Robert to make love to her.

Greta of course insists it is not what it seems, and the more SVU investigates the more bizarre the case gets.

Making the weirdness of the whole matter compelling are the entertaining performances of Susanna Thompson as Greta and Sherri Parker Lee as Christina, the both of them giving a delightful Shatner-esque flavor of over the top, such as when Elliott and Olivia (curiously wearing a rather fetching tank top) play the incriminating tape to Greta and later when they confront Christina complete with explanation of a kick where it hurts.

Man In A Chariot is the first episode in which Kimble is able to get something resembling a retrial. While working at a bar Kimble sees a television debate involving law professor G. Stanley Lazer, a former lawyer paralyzed in a car accident, who claims he can win acquittal for Richard Kimble is given the opportunity. Kimble tracks down the professor and takes him up on the offer, and a mock retrial, televised for the university at which Lazer is employed, is set up.

Lazer's star pupil is Lee Gould, and he proves more than formidable to Lazer, but the strain of the mock trial tells for both. Kimble has a talk with Gould and learns how much he respects Lazer. Kimble then confronts Lazer and realizes Lazer is driven by wounded vanity, blaming the students for his bitterness and also revealing his accident was the result of drunk driving by his wife, who was killed in that same crash. Lazer's jab at Kimble about a woman's capacity to get drunk is surprising and strikingly effective.

But Kimble counters in one of the finest moments of the series and of Janssen's career; he reminds Lazer that his students didn't make him paralyzed or are responsible for his advanced age, but Lazer insists they're guilty - and Kimhle cuts to the core of wounded vanity by asking if what they're actually guilty of is striving to be what he was and "trampling on some private little kingdom of yours?"

Lazer concedes Kimble's point, and responds in his final argument of the trial. The scene is powerfully portrayed but Lazer's speech is pathetically flawed - a maudlin epistle asking to acquit Kimble because he's a doctor who loves his job and loves people - nowhere does any fact of the murder indictment get mentioned, nowhere does Lazer offer any proof Kimble didn't commit the murder. What Lazer asks is for feelings to take precedence over facts - the absolute worst philosophy to live by.

This stunning logical gaffe damages an otherwise superior episode.

Joshua's Kingdom came early in The Fugitive's fourth season and as new producers Wilton Schiller and John Meredyth Lucas were beginning to better understand the show's subtleties; they'd wanted to play up the chase element of the series but here they better grasp the emotional interaction between Kimble and those he meets, resulting in a strikingly touching story.

Joshua Simmons is a farmer in the west who hires Kimble to help treat his horses, but Simmons has a daughter, Ruth, who has given him a grandchild. Simmons, however, is devout to a religious doctrine that forbids the use of medicines to cure illness, and he also harbors hatred of his grandchild for he believes Ruth bore him illegitimately, unaware that the man she loved gave her their child and vowed to marry her as soon as he returned from military duty, only to be killed.

Kimble must navigate this emotional minefield while also dodging Pete Edwards, a boorish young deputy prospect who has harassed Ruth, and when Ruth's child falls ill, Kimble must save its life despite the resistance of Joshua, who holds Kimble at gunpoint while calling the sheriff. Kimble, however, saves the child while appealing to Joshua's devout beliefs. It is one of the series' strongest moments and also one of the most powerful for Harry Townes, a real-life preacher off-screen.

The scene at the very end, with a powerful music cue from Jerry Goldsmith, almost by itself is worth the price of admission.

SVU opens its landmark 20th season, but the inconsistent to poor quality of the series in the last few seasons sadly continues in this poorly written and pretentious two-parter.

Sam Conway is an insecure teenager who is assaulted, and the episode has telegraphed the guilty party by Act III of the first part; the rest is just an exercise in the caricature that is the concept of "toxic masculinity," the latest sham social "ill" seized on by the intelligentsia and the culture to "explain" social problems. Every step is not a believable development, it is just a predictable caricature - the malicious macho father, the spineless mother, the school shooting, and the dumb speech by DA Peter Stone after he concocts a phony justification for what amounts to double jeopardy, the strikingly common outcome used in the series of late, most notably the boorishly stupid episode "Contrapasso."

Even the subplots are uninteresting or worse. Amanda Rollins becomes pregnant again - a plot necessity given the much-happier real life bundle of joy pending for star Kelli Giddish - but it never resonates as anything. Olivia Benson meanwhile is having two problems - she's out of shape and can't get it going, while her relationship with her adopted son has begun to collapse. Where this disturbing development goes is of course unknown, but one senses it will end badly for all involved.

The Ivy Maze is a pivotal point in The Fugitive's run, as it contains one of the most powerful moments in the series as well as the usual strong interaction between Richard Kimble and those around him in his search for one-armed vagrant Fred Johnson, the man who killed his wife.

Fritz Simpson is a professor at a college, and a former college pal of Richard Kimble and Helen Waverly. Simpson now runs a unique experiment - dream withdrawal, an experiment where he can extract admissions from people lapsing into dream. Fritz summons Kimble to the college because Fritz has seen a new gardener at work there - a man named Carl Stoker who Kimble recognizes as Fred Johnson.

Fritz subjects the unsuspecting Stoker/Johnson to his dream withdrawal experiment and Kimble, in the guise of a magazine writer, is there to observe and pick up details only the guilty party would reveal. However Fritz's wife Caroline - who remembers Fritz' interaction with Helen Waverly during their college days - sees Kimble and confronts Fritz, while also telephoning Gerard.

When Gerard investigates the college he finds the evidence that tips off that Kimble is there, and as he closes in the inevitable eruption occurs - and for the very first time all three protagonists - Kimble, Gerard, and Johnson - confront each other at the same time in the same spot. It is easily the strongest moment of the series to this point.

The denouement looks even more frantic given the steady buildup of tension throughout the episode, and there are several especially engaging moments, such as Fritz' introductory lesson to students, one of whom is Jill Janssen, David's real-life sister, with her only speaking role in the series - an irony lost on many is soon after her appearance Fritz gets a phone call from Kimble, and remarks "I was afraid your sister" - Donna Taft - "couldn't get in touch with you." Gerard's phone call from Caroline Simpson where he's left pondering why the call is anonymous with a ten thousand dollar reward offered is also charming.

This is a pivotal episode in the series as for almost the first time Richard Kimble and Lt. Gerard must actively work together against a common enemy.

Gerard has been brought to the Pocono Mountain area by a Pennsylvania State Policeman who recognized Kimble driving a local truck. Kimble indeed has driven such a vehicle in his employ at the farm of Arthur Brame. When a horse breaks free and nearly tramples Brame, Kimble saves him. For this Brame swears that Kimble's debt will be repaid, no matter what.

The reason for this is the code of honor Brame holds - as a retired member of the Syndicate. When Brame learns that Gerard is looking for Kimble, he realizes he can repay Kimble for saving his life.....by shooting Gerard. He thus sends Gerard on a false chase to a warehouse where he sets up an ambush.

When Kimble learns of this he presses Brame's reluctant wife Sharon to help him. They drive to the warehouse where Kimble shoves Gerard away from Brame's gunfire. Here we see the strongest expression yet of the genuine respect the two men have for each other, as Gerard recognizes Kimble's basic humanity.

Indeed this subtheme of the series is displayed in the epilogue where Gerard differentiates between Brame - a professional killer - and Kimble, who's "done the one murder" he'll ever do, but when Gerard states this there is little conviction on his part that Kimble in fact has ever killed anyone, and Gerard all but concedes Kimble's innocence when he concludes that Kimble for now is no menace to anyone but himself.

All four protagonists - David Janssen, Barry Morse, James Daly, and Elizabeth Allen - completely command the episode, and there is a genuine sense of integrity in all four even with Arthur Brame as a criminal - his sense of honor compels him to do what he believes is the right thing, and the viewer winds up feeling genuine sympathy for him even though he is a criminal.

You have to hand it to the writers at SVU - Season 19 has delivered the old plot-twisting vinegar of the series' best moments and here it intensifies the twisting with a clever story where SVU itself doesn't come out well.

Amanda Rollins learns of a girl named Esther Labott and that she is effectively a prisoner of her deranged father (Ray McKinnon bearing a terrifying resemblance to Dennis Weaver). Rollins learns more about the Labotts and the more she learns the angrier she gets, to where her colleagues even notice her increased derangement. After talking to neighbors of the Labotts Amanda breaks multiple laws and is nearly shot by the father and Esther's mother when she finds a girl chained in the basement (curious the Labotts didn't shoot Amanda and bury her in the basement a la Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi). Amanda then brings in heavy reinforcement, and the result is a bloody siege, a siege that ends in disaster for Amanda and SVU in general, to where the demented father comes out almost as a hero, and Amanda comes out as not part of the solution, but a BIG part of the problem.

The botch by Amanda is so egregious that even though it is alluded in dialogue that she'll only get minor punishment one wonders if it's worth it for Amanda to still have a job at SVU.

The episode title communicates this will not be a straightforward crime drama, yet Something Happened as a title doesn't quite do justice to its plot. A nature museum visit by a school class uncovers a woman hiding amid the animal models. The woman is identified as Laurel Winwood and she is a mess; a rape kit indicates sexual penetration, but no actual evidence of trauma.

Olivia questions Laurel and Laurel initially claims no memory of what happened. As she warms to Olivia she begins to give some details, enough that Dom and Fin track down a man seen with Laurel at a bar where they made reservation - and the man is found stabbed to death with scissors.

But Laurel soon begins ranting confusingly about hate she feels, and when her sister Lea - an attorney - comes in to represent her, Laurel turns on her and rants about their late father and how he favored her over Laurel. The longer Laurel goes on, the more deranged she is, to where she is claiming her father sexually molested her as a child - but later she implies sex with her father was consensual.

Clearly Laurel is manipulative to the apex and even when Olivia gives away secrets to her past, it comes across not as confession but as an act to smoke out the truth from the increasingly-manipulative Laurel. By the end all we know is a man was stabbed to death with scissors; just about everything else is grossly unclear, even whether Laurel is even a victim, to where the impression I got is she never was any victim, just a greedy self-serving psychopath using her father as an all-purpose excuse for any heinous act.

Confusing as this character study is, it is powerfully presented by Melora Walters and Mariska Hargitay.

SVU breaks out of its recent qualitative rut with a strikingly taut episode that breathes some of the old plot twisting life back into the series while advancing the budding subplot of Olivia Benson and Sheila Porter's involvement with little Noah.

Olivia has two issues - first Sheila Porter goes to family court in a challenge to Olivia regarding Noah. The other issue comes from a teenage girl who suddenly appears to an officer in Central Park and is identified as a girl missing for some ten years. The girl claims to have been kidnapped by someone named "Steve," and evidence seems to confirm her story - until further video evidence begins to question her credibility and an old arrest record identifies the girl as a con artist. Things get even murkier as we see the girl's brother - and his detachment from this entire affair. Further digging finally uncovers the truth - and it's a genuine surprise.

The primary crime investigation - despite a tacky celebratory presser with NBA star Isaiah Thomas - moves smoothly and the revelation of what actually happened is handled in a genuinely impressive montage sequence, but even this becomes almost secondary to the interaction between Olivia and Sheila. A café meeting between the two turns into a heart-to-heart chat in which Brooke Shields displays a striking ability to reach the viewer through her eyes in a way David Janssen (the best at conveying emotion through the eyes) couldn't have done more effectively. Though Mariska Hargitay isn't as effective in terms of conveying emotion through her eyes (though she thankfully doesn't over-emote as she's done a few times) she still sparkles as Olivia and Sheila begin building a genuine understanding - one that reassures the viewer as Sheila finally meets her grandson.

SVU has been woefully uneven in the last several seasons and the show reaches something of a nadir here in a pathetically predictable presentation.

SVU finds a man with his genitals sliced off in a hotel; he is identified as Jason Karr and three women seen in the hotel or its vicinity the night of the assault are tracked down; their evasiveness about their whereabouts makes them suspects and when SVU checks further Olivia Benson and company find the three women were schoolmates who were part of a poetry class under Karr. And it gets worse; Karr's own evasiveness gives away he knows why he was castrated, and when the three women are busted for Obstruction they come forth saying they were sexually violated as students by Karr. The one twist - an ironic term here - comes when the ringleader tells of being penetrated when Karr put himself atop her armed with a corkscrew and threatening violence should she resist; what sinks Karr is when his youthful wife - subjected to the same pick-up lines the three women received - shows a poem in a student magazine authored by the primary victim.

The guilt of Karr is telegraphed almost by the end of the first act, and it's been an increasing problem with the series, the poor quality of the writing and resultant pathetic predictability of the plots. The show established itself (notably during the 285-episode Ted Kotcheff era) not only by the strength of the cast (as one reviewer notes the absence of Christopher Meloni and retirement of Dann Florek and to a lesser extent Richard Belzer has hurt the show's casting quality; Peter Scanavino really doesn't cut it and Kelli Giddish is decent but unspectacular) but also with the wildly creative writing with twists and complications akin to The Twilight Zone Meets The French Connection; the good episodes of recent such as the Season 19 opener are solid but don't capture the engagement of the show's apex, and the increasing number of inferior episodes drag the series down more and more. One reviewer scathingly notes the insulting preachiness of episodes since star Mariska Hargitay assumed more of an executive producer role (here it shows in Raul Esparza's childish rant of a closing argument, the kind of whiny delivery made by someone knowing he's lost the argument), and that definitely needs to stop.

The only thing that salvages an episode otherwise unwatchable is the debut of series semi-regular Brooke Shields and the return of Peter Hermann as attorney Trevor Langan. The on-screen interaction of the real-life husband-wife tandem of Peter and Mariska is always enjoyable to see and here they face the potential crisis that Olivia's adopted son Noah has a grandmother who'd covered her tracks for years but now is in town - and appears at Olivia's very door. Though her scene is brief, Shields manages to convey a striking balance of ladylike, motherly innocence with the malice akin to classic TV villain Fred Johnson, haunting the life of the series protagonist even when unseen.

Olivia naturally is taken aback by this development, to where she lapses into a surprising burst of accusatory anger at Trevor that makes her disturbingly unsympathetic; Olivia should know better than this and Trevor apologetically makes sure any action against Noah will be resisted.

This subplot will drive the series for the time being, but it still needs to clean up its weaknesses of poor storytelling.

Design is designed to deliver one of SVU's most Rod Serling-esque teleplays and does so with the aplomb that has carried this series into nineteen seasons, and it has a surprisingly effective taste of sci-fi.

Estella Warren is April Troost. We first meet her straddling the edge of a large hotel's roof, threatening to jump - and almost ready to bear a child, a child she claims resulted from rape by a chemist named Barkley Pallister (Julian Sands). After Olivia Benson talks April out of the jump, Pallister is ready to go to trial when April disappears, and her car is found crashed and burned to a crisp.

Pallister covering his tracks, right? Wrong. April Troost's baby is real, but is also a master swindle on hopeful couples who are paying enormous sums to adopt the child, a girl. And it gets worse, for April has marked a slew of handsome men to seduce, and had worked for a creepy medical chief (Ronny Cox of "Total Recall") who is trying to create "designer" babies - babies injected with DNA of people with superior talents or IQs. All of April's marks have the same story - including Pallister.

All of this leads to the ultimate switcheroo, all of it leaving Olivia enraged at being taken in - but just when you thought you'd see every conceivable plot twist it all winds up leading to an actual adoption of a newborn girl.

Warren commands this episode, but also grabbing strong attention are Cox, Sands, and Lynda Carter as April's mom, who herself has a dirty little secret.

Writer-director John Meredyth Lucas had been The Fugitive's co-producer with Wilton Schiller for nine of the Fourth Season's episodes but decided to leave as co-producer when executive producer Quinn Martin was upset by the tone the series had begun to take. The irony is Lucas had begun to figure out the show's subtleties by the time he left as co-producer to where he submitted scripts later in the series, among them this superb sequel to the first-season two-part episode "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads." Among the series' best, this episode re-teams Richard Kimble with Sister Veronica.

The good sister is principal at a Catholic school for girls in Sacramento and as such has her hands full with budget concerns and also two troubled students - a gum-chewing blonde named Marie Dormond who harasses the school janitor for alcohol, and Dormond's friend, a brunette named Vicky who is promiscuous (her idea of lashing out at her mother for leaving her father) and already in trouble with local police. Kimble arrives at the school having been shot in the leg escaping a police dragnet - he'd been set up after acquiring information on Fred Johnson, who is in Tarleton, over a hundred miles away. He thus needs Sister Veronica's help, at a time when Veronica has to track down the wayward Vicky and also when Marie harasses Kimble - before recognizing who he is.

Kimble had helped Veronica travel to Sacramento and in the process restore her faith in life, and now Kimble winds up helping the overly stressed Sister find her strength to go on yet again. The interplay between David Janssen and Eileen Heckart is excellent, and also interesting is Kimble's encounter with Marie - Heather North plays the malicious student (and proves herself a capable dramatic actress) and an interesting irony is she encounters David Janssen here while under a week after this episode first aired North goes from David Janssen to David Jones in her appearance on The Monkees episode "Prince And The Paupers." Adrienne Hayes meanwhile plays Vicky, and nails it as a troubled teen even though she was twenty-nine years old at the time of filming.

The series' ability to draw in the viewer and leave the viewer emotionally drained at the end once again comes to the fore as Kimble and Sister Veronica finally try to track down Johnson.

This one-minute-plus short was written and directed by Darwyn Cooke to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Batman mythos, and it succeeds perhaps beyond expectation, leaving the viewer wanting more.

In the future elderly Bruce Wayne is attacked in the Batcave; when the new Batman, Terry McGuiness, arrives, Bruce reveals the Batcave was attacked by "me" - which turns out to be a robot replica of Batman in Bruce's heyday; the robot fights Terry, and as it turns out, there are seven other Batman Duplicates waiting in the wings.

The eight Batman Duplicates resemble the Batman character design spanning different periods of the character's existence; sharp-eyed viewers will recognize the Bill Finger original, the Adam West and Michael Keaton Batmen, and the Brave And The Bold character design.

The short screams for full-length treatment and brings back reminiscence of one of the strongest story arcs of The Animated Series - the HARDAC story arc, about a supercomputer and artificial intelligence that decides to replace human beings with robot duplicates. Given the success in the Batman Beyond series with such classic Batman villains as Mister Freeze, Ra's Al Ghul, and a reborn Joker, the rebirth of HARDAC makes too much sense not to be given full-length Batman Beyond treatment.

SVU takes an interesting turn as an Olympic hopeful gets assaulted while the squad's Amanda Rollins faces her own potential headache.

The nuts and bolts of the criminal case are secondary to the mini-character study of Jenna Miller (Brit Morgan), an Olympic wannabe whose introduction comes as she brutally trains on a treadmill in her living room with her husband and child watching; that night she goes on a girl's night out downtown and soon meets business sleaze Michael Wheeler (an effective Theo Stockman); next thing we see is Jenna, her expensive dress torn between her legs and obvious bruises on her calves, vaulting between two buildings and incoherently screaming to a black-and-white that she won.

While this is starting Amanda Rollins is tending to a parole hearing for her ne'er do well sister Kim (Lindsay Pulsipher); she is released on parole and stays with Amanda, and Amanda is not in the mood for any shenanigans from Kim (Olivia Benson, herself with experience with wayward siblings, isn't either, threatening to yank Amanda's badge if Kim screws this up), especially as Kim must help take care of Amanda's child.

The accusation against Wheeler is investigated and it doesn't take much to establish him as guilty, but where everything starts going awry is when Jenna Miller in essence refuses to press charges because if word of this gets out she will lose her chance at the next Olympics and resultant endorsement deals. Even when she agrees to wear a wire to try and smoke out a confession from Wheeler that gets botched when Jenna's husband barges in and confronts Wheeler.

Though Jenna is clearly the victim, she is a curiously unsympathetic character for refusing to press charges and for the ridiculous obsession with an Olympic dream (and endorsement deals) that never comes across as plausible. In several spots it is stated she missed the Rio games on a technicality, yet this comes across as something tacked on by the writers to provide some sympathy for Jenna, and she makes it worse when she has to be in court and erupts in a full-undress meltdown on the stand.

The reason why only becomes apparent at the end and winds up tying into the subplot with Kim. Amanda's ne'er do well sis lives up to the promise of working to stay straight, and perhaps the strongest scene in the episode comes when Amanda winds up with egg on her face upon learning something Kim hadn't told her yet.

It all adds up to an interesting character study.

SVU by 2007 was more than established for viewers and its tautness of plotting and strength of cast show through again in this very good episode with a show-stealing performance by Cynthia Nixon as the ultimate nut job, a split-personality who leads SVU on a wild goose chase for her sister.

This episode brings out the inadvertent humor that adds charm to the series as Nixon dons several guises, first as a lawyer reporting a child is being abused, then as a waif holed up in Central Park, then as a bitchy broad who tells off her own lawyer and then explodes in the subsequent trial - the bitchy broad telling off her lawyer is funny as heck, and the only thing this daffy duck doesn't portray is the telephone with dial tone - a Warner Brothers gag that, given how nutty Nixon's character is, would almost work in all seriousness on this show.

Easily the creepiest scene comes soon after Elliott Stabler has to sleepily tell off his teenage daughter who is griping about her punishment for drunk driving - Stabler goes to work, then gets a call that Nixon, in a hayseed guise complete with crude ponytails that looks like a deliberately atrocious Holly Marshall getup, has boldly walked into Elliott's house and is chatting with his wife and teenage children - complete with tightly-held butcher knife.

The other source of humor stems from the temporary "reassignment" of Captain Cragen over incidents of rule-breaking by Elliott, Olivia, and Fin; Munch is hastily promoted to oversee SVU and his protest to Fin et al that he wasn't seeking any promotion naturally isn't believed by anyone; he also doesn't inspire anything but snickering when he has to don the officious blues of his new assignment - which thankfully isn't permanent.

Zebras is an episode that seems to strain credulity at times but which allows for scenery-chewing at its best. We get that aplenty here when a woman is found mauled to death in a park with her child stacked in its carriage near a tunnel.

The first one there is a new member of CSU, Dale Stuckey. Right away Stuckey gets under everyone's skin with his deranged theorizing about mafia hits and his bellicose enthusiasm for his job, and we become more leery when we realize he's the first not only on this murder but a subsequent one.

SVU initially suspects a prisoner on work release, Peter Harrison. Harrison is mentally unstable and at one point tries to kill Stabler and Fin with poison gas. Nick Stahl is cast as Harrison and the character is played like a parody of Stahl's most famous role, as John Connor of Terminator fame.

By this point in the series the viewer should know it tends not to be the psycho you suspect who's guilty, but the one you don't. And when blood samples turn up that prove who the real killer is, the result gives Mariska Hargitay the best opportunity to chew up the scenery and it's obvious she's enjoying it for all it's worth and so does the viewer. One recalls her "getting abused" in the sham sibling rivalry fight in an earlier episode and here we see her "getting revenge." The plot may at times strain credulity but the end result is still brilliant.

Bound turns into a bit of an unusual episode for the SVU series in that while it has the usual high-quality tautness of presentation and strong Twilight Zone-esque plot twists, it also features a bit of a twist for primary characters Olivia Benson and Elliott Stabler.

The strangulation of an elderly lady is linked to a home-care foundation run by two twins, Matt and Emma Spevak, and as SVU investigates it finds evidence linking Matt Spevak to several other strangulation murders for access to substantial wealth - which Matt Spevak needs to pay off severe gambling debts.

But when Matt himself is found shot to death at the abode of his latest victim, SVU's resident psychologist George Huang and Medical Examiner Melinda Warner quickly find the setup doesn't make sense, and suspicion now centers on Emma.

It is here that one of the episode's two strongest scenes occur. SVU can't prove Emma is guilty, so they have to smoke out a confession from Emma. To do this Huang recommends Olivia and Elliott fake a "sibling rivalry" fight in front of her. Olivia's reaction when Huang recommends this course of action is priceless, a mild anticipatory glee in her eyes (and a credit to Mariska Hargitay's ability to convey emotion through her eyes in the best David Janssen mold), while the sham fight itself allows Hargitay and Chris Meloni an opportunity for minor hamming.

Then there is one of the inadvertently funniest scenes in the series - ADA Casey Novak must get a judge's signature on a warrant to exhume Emma Spevak's mother, and she happens upon a poker game involving seemingly all of NYC's judges, a setup that works humorously for two reasons - it brings to mind such entertaining card game scenes as the Presidents' Card Game sketch from Rich Little and Batman The Animated Series' "Almost Got 'im" card game - one half-expects a judge to mutter, "Not the robot theory again." And adding to the unintended humor is ADA Novak's confession to having nightmares of facing all of the city's judges - while naked. Judge Petrovsky (Joanna Merlin)'s reaction to that idea is worth seeing as well.

It adds to an entertaining murder mystery.

The Man Who Killed Batman is an episode that revolves not around Batman but around one of the people who gets involved with him, in this case a small-time stumble-bum hood named Sidney Debris who dreams of becoming a big shot in the underworld. He runs to mob boss Rupert Thorne when Batman disappears in a gas-tank explosion. With his fellow mobsters believing he killed Batman, he is hailed as "Sid The Squid," and now other punks want his hide, leading to a bar brawl and being bailed out of jail by a lawyer named Harleen Quinzel - who turns out to be The Joker's hench-woman Harley Quinn, as The Joker, supremely jealous that someone else succeeded where he hadn't yet made a full effort, wants bona-fide proof that Batman is gone - and seems to get it in a jewelry store holdup where no resistance worthy of the name is offered and Batman never appears.

Sidney Debris quickly establishes himself as a sympathetic character, and as incidents explode all around him through no action of his own, he becomes someone to actually root for, and when Rupert Thorne suddenly becomes suspicious his luck holds out yet again - and even holds out when he winds up in jail at the end, as the varied incarcerated hoods treat him with the respect he's always craved, since he succeeded in his encounters with Batman, Thorne, and The Joker.

Matt Frewer is perfectly cast as Sid.

Late in 1984 a syndicated entertainment magazine show aired a segment on Dwight Schultz and his involvement with "The A-Team." The segment included an interview with Schultz's wife Wendy Fulton. Many fans of the show likely saw this segment and thus, when learning that this episode would co-star Wendy Fulton, looked forward more than usual to this episode.

Knowing that Wendy Fulton is Dwight Schultz's wife is important because it adds to the warmth of the episode as Wendy and Dwight play off the very real love they have and thus imbue the episode with an extra humanity mostly missing from what is supposed to be an action comedy. Wendy plays a veterinarian, Kelly Stevens, who lives in upstate California. When a gang of shotgun-armed hillbilly-style bounty hunters kidnaps Murdock in broad daylight they take him upstate but he escapes, and finds shelter with Kelly Stevens.

The sparkle that emanates from Murdock and Kelly is just part of what makes this perhaps the show's best episode. Not only is there the love angle between Murdock and Kelly, there is the three-way pursuit involving the A-Team, the bounty hunters, and Colonel Decker, who arrives on the scene upon learning of Murdock's capture. This three-way chase intersects at the end of Act One when Murdock escapes the bounty hunters and they pursue, scant minutes before the A-Team bursts down the door of their house and then Decker arrives in a hail of bullets.

This is a case where a little more of Murdock and Kelly and less action would have made the episode better - an Act Three action scene where Hannibal and B.A. blow up some of Decker's cars to force a diversionary pursuit uses mostly stock footage from an earlier episode and could have been deleted altogether without disrupting the flow of the episode. In any event the episode shines thanks to its mixture of action and warmth, and one wonders why Kelly Stevens was never returned to the series as a periodic guest star.

This is the most unusual episode of the Popeye cartoon series in that it is made by one studio - that of Jack Kinney - yet it uses the opening theme and a particular cue from another studio - Paramount Pictures. Winston Sharples' mid-1950s power-march theme introduces the cartoon, editorially extended to cover the longer credits common to Kinney's entries, and the spinach cue from Paramount's 1957 entry "Patriotic Popeye" is also used, and also editorially extended.

The theme closes over the actual title card, which features silhouettes of Popeye and Olive Oyl over an outdoor stove. The silhouettes give away the cartoon's unusual visual quality. Dispensing with the handsome character designs of Paramount's 1950s shorts, Kinney goes back to the future with character designs straight out of E.C. Seger's newspaper funnies; Popeye even wears black sailor garb for the first time since his late-1930s shorts.

The subject matter here is a weekend off for Popeye and company in their new suburban setting, displayed by the opening establishing shot of a suburban block. Popeye is setting up a barbecue for himself and Olive. When he borrows some flowers for his sweetie from his neighbor Brutus, he gets a one-punch pounding but is otherwise unfazed. Brutus, after getting his "favorite pet petunias" back, begins scheming to get into Popeye's celebration (this leads to the short's funniest gag, when Brutus drops a lit match onto Popeye's grill, it blows up in his face, and all his hair is burned off only to regrow in an instant), but Popeye soon finds his hands full with J. Wellington Wimpy and Little Swee'Pea while Brutus regales Olive with his folk song about spilled mustard.

The cartoon is among the loudest and most chaotic of the entire Popeye animated series, theatrical or television, as Popeye runs himself ragged taking care of his unexpected guests while trying to get at Brutus. Falling into his cellar, Popeye finds a can of spinach and that gives him the strength to resolve this situation at last - Wimpy and Swee'Pea get the hint, but of course Brutus doesn't, instead being provoked merely by being referred to as "Junior." The soundtrack stock used for this cartoon has considerable room-sound-quality reverb in the voice performances, which hurts them (Mae Questel's in particular) as voices seem to crack at times. Nonetheless it still works as an entertaining if very unusual entry in the Popeye series.

The first cartoon of the 1960s Popeye television series, Hits & Missiles is a sleeper classic, in that you do not expect a made-for-TV cartoon to be this clever, funny, or well-made. This is the first Popeye cartoon made since mid-1957, and it's obvious that Paramount Pictures and director Seymour Kneitel welcome the chance to return to the spinach-eating sailor man given the cartoon's energy, much of it derived from the use of a new Winston Sharples score.

The cartoon is handsomely made, even though the animation is considered "limited" by the more free-flowing standards of 1950s theatrical animated shorts. This "limited" animation, though, is not any particular weakness; it actually gives the cartoon a nice stylized quality.

There are numerous puns and in one scene when Olive Oyl and Popeye plunge through the holes of the Swiss Cheese Alps on the moon, there is some semi-improvised Jack Mercer dialog, the use of which recalls its frequent inclusion in 1930s Popeye shorts.

Mercer voices both Popeye and his nemesis, the evil Big Cheese. There is a curious quality to the voice performances, for though they are crisply delivered by Mercer and Mae Questel, the soundtrack used sounds slightly rough compared to the backing score and sound FX tracks. Of course these latter production values were among the strongest in studio cartoons of the time and far better than those used on other entries in the series.

Most of Sharples' score is original to this short, except for the climatic showdown when Popeye downs his trusty can of spinach; here Sharples reuses the spinach cue from 1957's "Patriotic Popeye" to superb effect; this particular cue would become a standard for Paramount's entries into the TV show.

Without question this is a highlight of the Popeye series.