This episode saw Bill out sick. He appeared only in a funny scene in his sick bed when Joe came to visit. "Pull up a chair, that red rocker there." Joe asks, "This one?" and Bill replies, "Well, that's the only red rocker in the room Joe See how it rocks and it's all red?" It was a silly question, but funny how Bill reacted.
As for the story, Joe is assigned a temporary partner, Lt. Chris Drucker, who normally works in a different precinct of the city. Working at capturing illegal bookmaking operations, right in the captain's office when Drucker meets Friday, he gets a phone call, providing a phone number and password to allow someone to make a bet.
Joe does the phoning after he and Chris figure out which horses to bet on, for the purpose of catching the bookmakers. He wins over $300 and is told, by phone to get his payoff at a restaurant at 9:15 that evening. He and Chris are there when a man appears and he and Friday exchange some coded phrases before he slips Joe an envelope.
Joe counts the money, writes something on it and passes it to Chris who puts it in his pocket and says he'll turn it in tomorrow morning. Chris expresses during this day a disdain for busting bookmakers, saying that people want to gamble, they bet a few bucks, nobody gets hurt. Joe responds that the money goes overseas where it's used to buy heroin and other drugs that come back and cause great harm.
Just after tucking away the payoff money, Chris says he's going home, and tells Joe to check out the restaurant's wine list before he goes. When he does, Joe finds a $100 bill paper clipped to the list.
We next see Joe meeting with the captain, at 2:30 in the morning, at a friend's apartment. He tells the captain that someone tailed him home and waited until a half hour after Joe made it look like he'd gone to bed before taking off. The captain tells him to keep the bill in case Chris wants to see it, but to try to find out just what he wants quickly.
In his second day of working with Chris, Joe sees more of the same-he gives out huge tips to waitresses, and drinks like a fish. He even had a waitress Joe met yesterday pick him up to give him a ride to work, but he forgot she was coming and so he called Joe to do the same. We learn the pair have known each other for a long time, yet Chris never suggested she was his "girl friend," or anything of the sort.
Later that day, Joe gets Chris to give him all the info he wants. He gives Joe a small booklet with phone numbers of who to call when he sees the "Bum" board(?) list of places to be raided. There are even three names to call at the back of the book if the other numbers can't be reached. He promises that Joe will get $400 each month just for helping to spoil raids in this manner.
Joe has another late night meeting at that same friend's apartment with the Captain, and is instructed what to do. We hear narration about a fake raid used to make it clear that Chris has to be the one involved in tipping off the bookmakers.
Then Chris is called into the captain's office, where Joe literally has him read himself his rights, from the back of a booklet, then tells him he's under arrest.
We see no raids, hear no confession of any sort, and that's it.
This seemed like a decent plot at first. But thinking about it later, I realized that Jack Webb must have been so intent on how police would deal with a cop offering a bribe to another, that he failed to notice the several plot holes.
Starting with the unlikelihood of this cop offering a bribe to his new, temporary partner, the day he meets him. In fact, Friday's response to his comment about the bookies not really deserving to be jailed should have steered him away from attempting his scheme.
We spent much of the time seeing how Chris throws big tips at waitresses, and has a longtime friendship with one of them. So what? He lived in a modest apartment by himself, and many honest people give large tips. We never heard how much he was giving them, but if his payoff was what he promised Friday, at $400 per month, he couldn't have been giving more than about a $5 tip at the rate he was giving them.
The only reason for Friday to schedule his early morning meetings with the captain was to keep us from seeing too much take place over the phone. The captain had him keep the $100, and even if he needed to turn it in, he could have done that the next morning. Everything he reported could have been done over the phone.
From what we could gather, this "board" they mentioned shows the location of upcoming raids. Friday was to see which places are on the list and phone in his warning. I get that Chris wanted a downtown precinct inside guy to see their list, but why would such a list be posted with locations for any of hundreds of officers and other police department employees free to see? If any such list would be posted, I would expect something like, "Raids on Bookie Joints: Vice Teams 2 and 3 leave station at 10 a.m. Teams 5 & 6 leave for second raid at 10:30." The point is, the exact locations would never be posted there. If 4 cops are riding together, probably only the driver knows just where they are going. Friday, or anyone, would realistically only know about upcoming raids when he personally is involved.
If more than a couple of raids are foiled because someone got tipped off, the police will be certain someone in their group is tipping off the bookies and they'll figure out ways to catch them. Kind of like a catcher coming out to tell the pitcher the other side is starting to crush balls like they know what's coming. "I don't know if they have my signs or what, but let's change them now." The department heads would quickly make it so the tipping of bookies stops, and they'd figure out who is doing it fairly quickly as well-"6 of the last 7 raids Reed and Malloy were involved in, the bookies were tipped off."
So on further review, the plot holes when coupled with this rather static, talky, episode where we see no chase or finding hidden objects, or interrogation of a suspect at all, give this one only a 4 rating.
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