A Vietnam marine goes AWOL, only to return to his hometown, San Francisco, where he is gunned down when meeting a mysterious man at night. So who was his killer, and why?
Kudos to the writers of TSOSF, for turning a whodunit into a trenchant meditation of the 'spoils' of war. The consensus seems to be that a group of radical draft-resisters had a grudge against the AWOL soldier for going overseas in the first place, but as this episode expands, we enter a moral/ethical quagmire, which poses as many questions as it answers.
Meanwhile, Keller goes undercover as a deserter to infiltrate the radical underground, looking for clues. Calling himself "Murdock", he gets a lead from a head-shrinker - next thing, he confers with the gang and, after getting checked out, is taken under blindfold to their encampment, deep in the woods. Don Stroud plays the leader of this motley crew, who is understandably suspicious that Murdock may be a fed trying to infiltrate his group, and Keller/Murdock's casual questions only serve to feed his paranoia...
A conversation between Stone and the dead marine's girlfriend becomes a litmus test of loyalty versus conscience, which the writers handle masterfully. She reads to Stone a letter that Zahn wrote while "serving his country" that encapsulates everything that our involvement in Vietnam represents: it is one of the most poignant moments ever revealed in a crime drama since Hawaii Five-O's "To Kill Or Be Killed" (recommended as a companion piece to this episode.....seek it out for added context._
Since we know Murdock's cover will eventually be blown, I wont continue with the exposition -all you need to know is there is a wicked twist which I didn't see coming, but which gives the clarity to the whole mystery, heightened further by a dialog that draws parallels between the war abroad, and the war at home. In a word, brilliant.
