A good example of this is the episode titled “A Town Called Sincere.”
A motorcycle gang holds a small town hostage in order to find a killer who whacked two of their own. Two of the squad members, Linc and Pete, find themselves forced to help the gang find the killer or risk getting themselves and the townsfolk killed. As typical with a cop show there are the usual scenes of violence and lots of distrust towards following a rule of law. Added along with that is a tinge of a casual Agatha Christie story with Linc being something of a detective and ultimately the one who saves the day simply by using his brain.
As dated as the look and politics of Lincoln Hayes may be, we don’t get enough black actors with the commanding presence of Clarence Williams or a script that celebrates a thinking black man these days.
Richard Dreyfuss does a guest appearance in this season in the episode “Mother Of Terror” as a psycho who lives with his mother and likes to take rather macabre photos of women. Sammy Davis, Jr. makes an appearance here too, although he had a look of “What the hell am I doing here?” in the same way Richard Pryor did when he guest-starred on The Partridge Family.
“The Deadly Sin” strikes me as probably one of the oddest of the bunch. Odd in that a nun, who happens to witness her gangster father murder someone, totally looks like she’s in space for most of the episode. Eventually everything is patched up as it should, but she still left an impression on me.
“A Time For Remembering” is more of a clip show episode. Usually these episodes are rather disposable and aren’t necessarily the best scripts ever written. This one, for some reason, made me care about Linc, Pete, and Julie, Linc more so as he was nearly put to hell after a man they put in jail decided to have his revenge on the squad.
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