If you're familiar with the trailer for the 1972 John Waters classic "Pink Flamingos," there's one rather flamboyant young man who describes the movie as "the future of city living." One of the guys who gave the fake tip to Detective Kojak (Matthew Cowles) looks a lot like that guy.
When we last left our lollipop sucking bald Greek-American NYPD detective, the city-living look-alike guy and his partner in crime (who I still can't identify) try to bump him off for the widow Morrison through Decker. He turns the tables on them only face a couple of uniformed NYPD officers. When they arrive, the "city living" look-alike guy concocts a crappy scheme to get the detective busted on a phony police brutality change, which specifically references the Burton-Shaw-Foster case.
In this episode, we also meet the "foreigner" that Sally Jo mentioned in the first part of the episode. Anton Lenco (Noberto Kerner) is either a Central or Eastern European janitor who's struggling to earn his citizenship by working at Columbia U as a janitor. The problem is he's kind of scared to reveal everything he knows, but it's not because of the KGB. It's because of that widow from the Gold Coast.
Edna Morrison (Geraldine Page) is still doing everything she can to try to keep Kojak from finding the truth about Karen Foster, and Foster from finding the truth about herself. Making sure Greg Burton gets on his good side, and that Decker continues to discredit the girl and ride him harder to stay away from the case. Of course, even with the Internal Affairs department watching over him, he still won't budge. He also knows somebody's trying to tear up that poor little skater girl, but he's not sure who it is.
In the meantime that big drug bust on the East River was compromised by that tipster who fled the scene. Luckily, the head detective from Manhattan South coerces him to resume cooperating with this drug bust, without seeming too threatening.
Later, that immigrant finally tells the detective that Karen was raped by two of the college boys and they threatened to tell the authorities that he raped her. And one of those kids has really close ties to that gold coast power broker lady. And for that, Anton Lenco must die. But that doesn't mean there aren't other loose ends for the 13th Precinct to exploit. There's the cabbie who picked the two rapists up, and was rewarded with the chance to run his own flower shop in return for his silence about what really happened. Somehow, it's not hard to believe they'd let him get away with this cover up.
I won't reveal exactly what happened, but the important flashback scene revealing what really went down has been compared to the Sally Field mini-Series "Sybil." I suppose I can see the comparison. Of course that mini-series aired the same month and this episode was shot before Sally Field's project was, so the comparision can only be made in retrospect. Also, the outcome for the little lady in question seems a bit too good to be believed. But the one other thing that I will reveal, because it's far too dissatisfying to do otherwise, is that Lieutenant Theo Kojak tells Edna Morrison that her days of deciding how life works and who it works for and against are numbered.
As with most people my age, a lot of what I know about Mary Beth Hurt comes from movies like "The World According to Garp," and even "Parents." Thankfully, with the advent of sites like IMDb, we can find work that many actors and actresses did before making it big, and Hurt is no exception. Admittedly, it's both cute and ironic to watch her call Kojak a bear. Her agonizing meltdowns might be a bit tough for some to deal with, but it's still worth it. GetTV still puts disclaimers at the beginning and end of this part of the episode, just like they did with Part One.
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