‘CHiPs’ Retro Recap: ‘Dead Man’s Riddle’

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

One thing that has to be difficult for everyone involved in the production of a television series, is figuring out how to keep the audience engaged. Because while formula is a wonderful and effective tool for telling a story, it can get stale as time goes on and sometimes offers up predictable plots that the audience can call. And while that does engage the audience in its own special way, being able to call what’s coming next gets annoying after a bit and this is another why I am so impressed with what CHiPs has to offer. Because they consistently found new ways to keep things interesting and for proof, look no further than its next episode.
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Because ‘Dead Man’s Riddle’ took an older concept from season two, specifically the MAIT Team, and found a way to resurrect it here in a unique manner. For this time around, rather than show us most of the details of how a horrific crash came to be, the story felt the need to create an actual mystery for the MAIT Team to uncover and it was quite the doozy. Because in this particular tale, a horrific car crash, appeared to be the fault of a public servant who died in the collision, and it was going to be up to the MAIT Team to prove whether or not he was fault and how exactly this accident happened, and it didn’t take long for their investigation to go in wildly different directions, the kind that made explaining any of that as difficult as possible. Because one of the cars was empty when emergency services rolled up, and another victim was pulled from his vehicle, something that shouldn’t have happened in this isolated part of the highways.

To complicate matters further, a shady fellow law enforcement officer named Brooks, was stonewalling Sergeant Getraer’s efforts to investigate the empty vehicle for reasons he would not divulge, their ‘eyewitness’ didn’t really want to talk to the police and a psychologist named Colleen that was assigned to the case, had vital information on the crash since she was racing one of the victims earlier in the day. Which means, for a fair chunk of this episode, everyone was in the dark as to what the heck happened. Which allowed for a genuine mystery to slowly unfold as the MAIT Team worked to uncover all the details. And while Colleen was finally willing to fess up to being in the area after a little pressing from Jon, she had no direct hand in this mess, which still left the MAIT Team no closer in achieving their respective goals and that meant it was time for a little science to come into play in order to crack this case.

Because Ponch postulated the possibility that maybe nature was involved via black ice, and if that was the case, it would have caused all this carnage. Which would have absolved said servant and provided the team with a cause and that would have to do since the nitty gritty details still eluded the MAIT Team. But in order to prove this, someone had to recreate the accident in a car, and that put Baker at severe physical risk, and right in the midst of the test, Brooks finally came clean on what he knew. As it turns out, he was in charge of protecting a federal witness and on their backroads ride to the safe house, they hit that ice, and spun out and collided with the other cars in question. And after securing the witness in a backup car and saving one life, there wasn’t enough time to go back for the other.

Thankfully this absolution, put an end to any questions surrounding this case and it’s wonderful that the truth was the real goal here and it was equally as impressive, that this episode really didn’t feature a genuine Creep of the Week and that makes this tale a genuinely unique one for certain. Plus, it really does do a fine job of keeping the audience in the dark on the facts, making the finale a surprise for certain. And also, this episode deserves some serious kudos for taking some incredibly bold liberties with the formula of the show and well, there’s only one episode left for us to dive into in year four, and it should be interesting to see where the series is going to go, as it wraps up a supremely impressive season of thoughtful and unique storytelling. Until next time.

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