We’ve deliberately skipped a lot of episodes in which Jaime goes undercover in some unlikely profession. Steve got to go undercover in various blue collar jobs, never anything exciting, but Jaime got to do the inevitable beauty contest, and she was a wrestler, and a nun, and, in this two-part story, she gets sent to the nation’s quickest police academy for a week or possibly two as a cadet before getting assigned to the town of Santa Regina’s Fifth Precinct. I wanted to see this one because George Maharis plays a beat cop. His Route 66 co-star Martin Milner had played a beat cop for years on Adam-12. James McEachin plays the academy’s captain. This is one of what looks like seventy-two police roles in McEachin’s career. He must have played every single rank at one time or another.
As befits a basic counterfeiters-in-turtlenecks story, there’s really not a lot to this one, and certainly not enough to warrant a two-part story. It’s written by James D. Parriott, and his then-wife Diane Cary plays one of the other cadets. The most interesting part, honestly, was the strange decision to take the cadets to a “Tinseltown studio” for their final exam, in which they drive around the backlot on a fake chase. I enjoyed the chance for our son to see what a backlot looks like when they’re not pretending it’s a real street.
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 