User Reviews

Not bad, but the slow decent of the final season. There is an evil dude and a vicious rape. Stone and Robberson must investigate the murder, but a mega rich father decides to get involved. With and a p b for the suspect the father offers a 1 million dollar reward which creates pandemonium on the streets. With Douglas missing there is more street action riots, snipers, shootings to compensation. The Tom Bosley (happy days' dad) has an evil plan. There is direction, and theme of how greed creates the lower nature of man. A 70's riot type movie. Entertaining episode, but still missing Douglas dynamic character. Just another cop show.

From this episode on there is no Michael Douglas character which definitely affected the show and the ratings. But this episode revealed something else that I think affected viewers maybe deeper than the loss of Douglas's character: A total "all in" attitude about the pop psychology of the day. The idea that child molesters & sexual predators are solely a product of their environment and "sick" and therefore should be given treatment and not punished. This idea really took off in the mid 70s and the pendulum has not yet swung back the other way -except with minor corrections. The idea that a girl, at the very beginning of this episode, could be brutally raped, beaten and then murdered - and the monster who perpetrated the crime would not be the focus of the storyline but rather her father's ill-fated attempt to put a reward out for her killer and the shenanigans taking place in the city as a result of a million dollar bounty. By the end of the episode he (the father) is the bad guy - the focus of Mike Stone's (Karl Malden) rage and passion - hoping against hope he can get serious felony charges to stick on the grieving and revenge-seeking father. We really never learn much of anything about the girl, her family or what kind of person she was, or even if she had a mother. She was beautiful, white and wealthy. We learn a good amount about the killer, and also how greed can turn otherwise "normal" San Franciscans into crazy weirdos. The focus, truly, is placed directly on misdirected vigilante justice and there were several times where I thought the writers were actually trying to manipulate the viewer to feel sympathy & sadness for the hunted killer.

The SOSF writers had flirted with this idea before (of trying to pull heartstrings for criminals committing horrific crimes) but this time they went "all in" -and I believe lost viewers and eventually the series in the process.