The Equalizer: Race Traitors (1989)
Season 4, Episode 20
5/10
Race Traitors
11 August 2019
Laurence Fishburne makes an appearance as a young black teacher who has moved into a nice white neighbourhood with his pregnant wife and experiences racism. At the beginning of the episode he is stopped by a police car and then neo nazis beat him up and throw white paint on him.

A white supremacist Dale Stevens is antagonising the area and rounding up neo nazi skinheads to terrorise the back family. Stevens plans to lead these young white men to an aryan america. In once scene he has hired some thugs to black up and do a drive by shooting of some white people.

McCall turns to Kostmayer to go back to his old neighbourhood and see what is happening. The area is struggling economically and he sees the brother of one of his old friends hanging around with skinheads.

Fishburne has a thankless role of playing the passive victim. If only the producers knew this was a future Oscar nominee and Morpheus.

McCall takes a back seat which he did in the later series since Edward Woodward had his heart attack. However he does device a cunning and dangerous plan to trap Stevens, a man who has no loyalty or ethics at all. The writing throughout was rather clumsy in my opinion. It had all the subtlety of a brick through a window. It might have been better if some of the police were in league with the racists, it would at least have added a touch of realism.

British singer John Cale turns up as an aryan sympathiser with an Adolf Hitler haircut.

Interestingly Edward Woodward's last appearance was in the British soap opera Eastenders where he played a character who was a racist thug in his youth.
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