After a WAC is mysteriously shot and killed during rifle training, an Army general buddy of Charlie's hires the Angels to temporarily enlist in the military to find out who murdered her and why (most of the police on the base are female and wouldn't be able to get answers out of the male officers, or so the general says). Jill and Kelly get stuck posing as (very nosy and very disgruntled) privates, while Sabrina goes undercover as a nurse. Some interesting story points in this plot are nearly camouflaged by writer Jeff Myrow's need to bring it all to an explosive conclusion. A lady soldier who enlisted with a secret heart murmur is the key to the mystery involving a drug company selling out its expired medicine to a doctor and one of the training sergeants--but Sabrina isn't able to get any information out of her and we never learn her fate. L.Q. Jones overacts mercilessly as Sgt. Billings, yet his relationship with the deceased WAC (which Jill and Kelly determine early on was romantic in nature) is not explored further. Instead, we get Farrah Fawcett-Majors (braless) and Jaclyn Smith enacting hand-to-hand combat, training with gas masks, shining their boots, peeling onions, and looking through drawers and filing cabinets. There was great potential here for a first-rate examination of dirty pool behind military base doors (and the scenario is convincing, apart from Smith and La Fawcett being allowed to wear their locks long and flowing). Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time on the clock to explore all the angles, nor flesh out the two villains. Bosley gets a tour of the stockyards (seems the murder weapon was broken down and hidden in the garbage used for swine slop) and Kate Jackson has a second or two when she honestly looks frightened for Farrah's safety. The climax on a remote airstrip is patched together (sloppily) by the editor, but the tag at the end is fun. No matter who does what to whom, these Angels always come up smiling.
3 Reviews
One scene sticks out in this ep
bobforapples-401464 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
The scene where Jill pretends to be meditating. It turns out she is only faking the whole meditation bit. She opens her eyes and silently starts laughing while she gets someone else to try meditating. This scene is very sexy on Farrah Fawcett's part as Jill is partially undressed ( she has removed her thongs or flip flops) to do her trick.
The rest of the ep is much less memorable by far though after her little joke when Jill is kidnapped and has a an upset look on her face it is also memorable in light of how carefree she acted in the phony meditation scene. The meditation scene alone is worth watching over and over again! I love Farrah' in that scene.
The rest of the ep is much less memorable by far though after her little joke when Jill is kidnapped and has a an upset look on her face it is also memorable in light of how carefree she acted in the phony meditation scene. The meditation scene alone is worth watching over and over again! I love Farrah' in that scene.
Army Angels
adamcshelby10 May 2021
Warning: Spoilers
This one was a stinker. The cold open starts at a Women's Army Corp base. We see a group of women target shooting, then we cut to a man peering over a high wall with a rifle. He shoots one of the women dead.
We cut to the Townsend Agency where the Angels learn that the General who runs the base is an old friend of Charlie's and wants the Angels to investigate. There is a lame excuse as to why the MP can't investigate the murder itself, and it starts a bad trend of suspending disbelief that ultimately makes this one of the more inane first season episodes so far.
The Angels go undercover, Kelly and Jill as grunts, Sabrina as a nurse. We quickly find out that the murderer is a drill Sergeant from the base. There are several training scenes featuring Kelly and Jill marching, wrestling, peeling onions, practicing gas mask use etc. During the gas mas exercise Kelly tells a tasteless Auschwitz joke. More like ouch wits.
Meanwhile Sabrina has befriended a woman soldier in the infirmary who obviously knows something but refuses to talk about it. She almost loses her life when some bad medicine is used on her. This is one of those deadend plots threads that is never resolved.
Kelly snoops around in the drill sergeant's office and discovers one of the worst tropes in the Charlie's Angels' canon--- incriminating evidence left inside a desk drawer just waiting to be found. The evidence, bank deposit slips in the thousands, is given over for Bosley to look into. Kelly also conveniently overhears that the food waste from the base is delivered to local farms for their swine to consume. Since the Angels are searching for the murder weapon, Kelly brilliantly surmises that the weapon could have been smuggled out of the base through food waste. Because of course the drill sergeant had no way whatsoever to smuggle it off base without being discovered. Just plain silly that he'd need to resort to such a disposal.
Sabrina has befriended a handsome army doctor, played by the father of Chris Pine, Robert Pine, who co-starred on CHIPS for a number of years. Their relationship goes no where but she finds that there is connection between the doctor and the drill sergeant and it might involve expired medicine being sold for profit.
Meanwhile Bosley takes a trip to the local pig farm to look for the discarded murder weapon, and of course finds it in the first muddy pig sty he looks in. Complete lunacy that the farmers would not feed their pigs through a trough, but rather just toss the food to the floor of the pen. And inane that Bosley would go looking for it in his suit, which gets covered in mud, and that the weapon was so easy to recover in the first place.
Eventually Jill decides to search the sergeant's office a 2nd time--- mainly because it was the best way to have her be taken hostage. She's kidnapped and taken to a remote airstrip, where they meet the army doctor, who brings their ill gotten gains from their expired medicine sales. In an awkward scene, the drill sergeant ends up killing the doctor when he tries to keep some of the cash. Nothing I hate more than a dumb criminal.
When the base general is confronted with this issue by the Angels, he weakly takes no action, leaving it to Kelly, Jill, and Bosley to save the day. The performance by the general has to be one of the lamest, softest, inadequate portrayals of a high ranking army officer in the history of television. Just pathetic!
The denouement takes place at the remote airstrip, where the sergeant tries to fly away with the money to Mexico, but Sabrina, driving a jeep, cuts him off and he hilariously taxies into a shack before taking flight (in a poorly edited scene). The plane explodes and all is good again with the world.
The final scene back at the agency has Charlie complimenting everyone, then he's greeted by an older female soldier who wants to have a romantic tryst with him, set up by the Angels of course. The woman mentions that she got Charlie's address from the general, who was Charlie's friend, and that she refused to tell the Angels where Charlie lived despite them asking. What's strange about this is that there was an episode just a month earlier in which the Angels had already discovered where Charlie lived. It was called Target: Angels. So that is a clear continuity goof, but seeing how sloppily written this episode was, it's no surprise they got it wrong.
We cut to the Townsend Agency where the Angels learn that the General who runs the base is an old friend of Charlie's and wants the Angels to investigate. There is a lame excuse as to why the MP can't investigate the murder itself, and it starts a bad trend of suspending disbelief that ultimately makes this one of the more inane first season episodes so far.
The Angels go undercover, Kelly and Jill as grunts, Sabrina as a nurse. We quickly find out that the murderer is a drill Sergeant from the base. There are several training scenes featuring Kelly and Jill marching, wrestling, peeling onions, practicing gas mask use etc. During the gas mas exercise Kelly tells a tasteless Auschwitz joke. More like ouch wits.
Meanwhile Sabrina has befriended a woman soldier in the infirmary who obviously knows something but refuses to talk about it. She almost loses her life when some bad medicine is used on her. This is one of those deadend plots threads that is never resolved.
Kelly snoops around in the drill sergeant's office and discovers one of the worst tropes in the Charlie's Angels' canon--- incriminating evidence left inside a desk drawer just waiting to be found. The evidence, bank deposit slips in the thousands, is given over for Bosley to look into. Kelly also conveniently overhears that the food waste from the base is delivered to local farms for their swine to consume. Since the Angels are searching for the murder weapon, Kelly brilliantly surmises that the weapon could have been smuggled out of the base through food waste. Because of course the drill sergeant had no way whatsoever to smuggle it off base without being discovered. Just plain silly that he'd need to resort to such a disposal.
Sabrina has befriended a handsome army doctor, played by the father of Chris Pine, Robert Pine, who co-starred on CHIPS for a number of years. Their relationship goes no where but she finds that there is connection between the doctor and the drill sergeant and it might involve expired medicine being sold for profit.
Meanwhile Bosley takes a trip to the local pig farm to look for the discarded murder weapon, and of course finds it in the first muddy pig sty he looks in. Complete lunacy that the farmers would not feed their pigs through a trough, but rather just toss the food to the floor of the pen. And inane that Bosley would go looking for it in his suit, which gets covered in mud, and that the weapon was so easy to recover in the first place.
Eventually Jill decides to search the sergeant's office a 2nd time--- mainly because it was the best way to have her be taken hostage. She's kidnapped and taken to a remote airstrip, where they meet the army doctor, who brings their ill gotten gains from their expired medicine sales. In an awkward scene, the drill sergeant ends up killing the doctor when he tries to keep some of the cash. Nothing I hate more than a dumb criminal.
When the base general is confronted with this issue by the Angels, he weakly takes no action, leaving it to Kelly, Jill, and Bosley to save the day. The performance by the general has to be one of the lamest, softest, inadequate portrayals of a high ranking army officer in the history of television. Just pathetic!
The denouement takes place at the remote airstrip, where the sergeant tries to fly away with the money to Mexico, but Sabrina, driving a jeep, cuts him off and he hilariously taxies into a shack before taking flight (in a poorly edited scene). The plane explodes and all is good again with the world.
The final scene back at the agency has Charlie complimenting everyone, then he's greeted by an older female soldier who wants to have a romantic tryst with him, set up by the Angels of course. The woman mentions that she got Charlie's address from the general, who was Charlie's friend, and that she refused to tell the Angels where Charlie lived despite them asking. What's strange about this is that there was an episode just a month earlier in which the Angels had already discovered where Charlie lived. It was called Target: Angels. So that is a clear continuity goof, but seeing how sloppily written this episode was, it's no surprise they got it wrong.
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