As a thoroughly inebriated teen girl (Sherri Stoner) causes a disturbance atop her high school veteran cop Sgt. T.J.Hooker (William Shatner) and his young partner Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed) are summoned by dispatch to investigate. Blasted out of her mind on PCP she thinks she can fly. The caring cops manage to restrain her before she can make her swan-dive to the pavement in front of the entire student body.
Hooker swears to take down the scum who dealt her the PCP. It also becomes personal for Romano after his friend and academy classmate All-American boy Tom Clemons (James Daughton) is nearly killed on undercover assignment attempting to infiltrate the drug operation that is importing and distributing the PCP to local kids.
There are a lot of familiar faces in this episode including Michael Paul Chan who has appeared on seemingly every cop show ever at one time or another. A guest cast of veteran actors like James Daughton, Mitzi Hoag, Claude Earl Jones and Richard Lineback are augmented by younger performers like Sherri Stoner. The casting is so top notch in this episode it serves to buttress everything else on the screen.
If the plot seems a little silly keep in mind this was made in the early 1980s. The Reagan administration had deployed an aggressive anti-drug strategy which, at the time, seemed like a good idea to American parents though it inevitably produced decidedly mixed results. A cop show with an arch-conservative title character was almost certainly going to be depicted cracking down on narcotics.
PCP was a problem the media was reporting on as having become a nationwide epidemic. The overstatement and embellishment of it and its effects shown on this TV cop series were only marginally more alarmist than the picture the media was painting. The extremely expensive band-aid solution of prohibition was seen as better than nothing.
This is an episode where questions are raised about the economics of policing. Hooker jokes about whether he should risk his own safety to help a criminal whose life is in jeopardy. The costs of incarceration versus deletion from the grid are considered by cops whether they admit to it or not. A lot of civilians are with them on that without giving full consideration to the effects.
Though very dated it nevertheless makes for a solid entry in a series that had started off in the ratings top thirty then quickly declined. A decent episode like this one and others like it helped win it renewal for third season though producers had a mandate for noticeably revamping it to give Officer Stacy Sheridan (Heather Locklear) more to do.
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