The Snow Game

Drug Enforcement Agency operative Twill (Gary Lockwood) teams with Veteran cop Sgt. T.J.Hooker (William Shatner) and his LCPD colleagues to attempt to take down a Chicano cocaine ring. Things go sour and an undercover cop is killed whilst his back up is out of position. The deceased was highly popular amongst his colleagues. Hooker, partly blaming himself for the death, vows to find the killers.

After his young partner Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed) is badly wounded saving his life Hooker enlists Officer Stacy Sheridan (Heather Locklear) and Officer Jim Corrigan (James Darren) to join him in an undercover sting. They all want to avenge the loss of a brother officer and near loss of another (Romano).

This is a mildly entertaining episode compared with so many if not most T.J.Hooker entries. But it illustrates the identity crisis the show had. This entry and others features Hooker and his colleagues doing things beyond the normal details uniformed patrol cops are assigned to do. This is explicitly alluded to but never adequately explained. Indeed this episode illustrates what can happen when cops aren't where they are supposed to be.

This show began as a series about grizzled cop Hooker returning to teach police academy classes before taking top rookie Vince Romano as partner and then going out on patrol with him. By the third season there was no need for any attachment of the main character to police academy training or the Academy Precinct or indeed uniformed patrol.

With this series making sense or depicting realism wasn't a priority. But for whatever reason ties to the police academy and the main character driving a patrol car in uniform were. In this episode and others they even have him doing roll call. Why not put him on dispatch or parking enforcement whilst also making him chief of detectives? One of ten episodes in this series directed by William Shatner.