riding the echo down

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 4/5

he's not the main antagonist - that would be lloyd bochner's character - but his scenes take up a fair amount of the runtime and he opens and closes the episode as well. it's a nice performance too, appropriately intense but not hammy. also, this episode has one of the most bonkers death scenes i've seen him do and that gives it a full extra point on the worth-it-for-dane scale. like i knew he was gonna die but the way it happens.... i've never seen anything like it elsewhere in such a serious context lmao. maybe i'm just sheltered?? a clip of the scene is included at the end of this post so you can judge for yourself. (uploading the whole episode privately to youtube for autocaptions was a bust because of copyright bullshit, so i paid for captions, but it seems as though very short clips are fine so there's that at least. a dane cut wasn't necessary imo since he's in it enough and the rest is interesting enough especially when lloyd bochner is there.)

the plot: two men are working together as diamond thieves at the behest of someone who knows where and when diamonds will be in transit and thus easy to steal - an inside man. dane plays one of the thieves and lloyd bochner plays the inside man. (they were together again in 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' a couple years after this, though they don't interact as much in that.) dane has something of a homoerotic relationship with his robbery partner, played by a fellow named clyde ventura* - we're given to understand that they met in prison and promised each other that they'd buy a ranch together when they had the money, among other intimate little details, and they seem to be peers but dane cares more about the welfare of his partner than one might expect for the average heist team. (dane could have been fun in an episode of leverage but i digress.)

on the one hand, this show was written in partnership with j. edgar hoover and his top fbi agents, which, yuck. but on the other, the screenwriters give the "bad guys" a surprising amount of depth in this context and it seems pretty clear to me that we're even meant to find the situation somewhat tragic. at least, dane gives us a performance good enough to help us believe he genuinely cares about his partner and the pathos of that carries the episode. the narrative ends pretty abruptly and i wished they'd had the space to dwell a bit on how bochner's character is treated versus the working-class thieves, but at the same time if this was produced under hoover's watch they probably weren't allowed to go that far.

while i was starting to draft this post i was reminded of his performance in his first episode of the virginian (aired 1968) and how he feels less natural there compared to this fbi episode. at first i was thinking oh he must've started hitting his stride in 1969 but no, he was very good in yerma and in his episode of jericho (both aired 1967) among other roles. really makes me think that it comes down to the director, something i think i’ve touched on before - with the right director he can be phenomenal, but that isn’t consistent enough to make someone a star. a shame, because he really does do a decent job with the material he's given in this episode.

since this was a procedural show it’s difficult to find newspaper reviews for individual episodes, but there’s a fansite for the show - that site’s rating for this episode is a B and i think i agree. if you enjoy the style of police procedural that's heavier on investigation than on action, it's a solid episode. if you don't enjoy police procedurals at all, well, understandable. but perhaps you can at least enjoy how cute dane is in this one.