Sidekicks Are Boring

            It rained several times on Friday and so I didn’t take a bike ride. I just stayed home and got caught up on my writing.

            I grilled an eye of round steak for dinner and watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye, starring Stacy Keach. A young woman goes missing and Hammer is called but her little brother assures Hammer that Tamara is dead. They find that’s when he gives them a URL that links to a snuff site and shows Tamara being killed. It all started with Tamara joining a modelling agency that books young, attractive women to pose in lingerie online in sexy poses. But unknown to the owner of the agency, some rogue employees are diverting selected girls into more hardcore stuff. Hammer infiltrates the agency as someone wanting to supply them with girls from the Midwest. A party is thrown and the champagne for the models is spiked with super roofies. One attractive, scantily clad and stoned model pulls Hammer into a separate room to make out. He doesn’t want to take advantage of her situation but he goes along and tries to reason with her. It turns out though that she’s a CIA agent that knows who Hammer really is but she’s too stoned to help him. There are video cameras monitoring every room and so the bad guys find out Hammer is under cover and there’s a gunfight, which of course Hammer and his partner win. We don't see the undercover CIA agent again. It would have been a more interesting ending and funnier if she’d tried to help out in the gunfight while at the same time being stoned.

            One of the worst things about this show is that Hammer has a sidekick. Mike Hammer is supposed to fight alone.

            An interesting aspect of the show, though not interesting enough to save it is that there is a yoga studio across from Hammer’s office. In every episode he has some interaction with the instructor that is supposed to provide comic relief by making fun of yoga teachers. In this episode, the instructor, Maya, approaches Hammer and complains about all the cigarette smoking being done in the building. Then she walks away while smoking a cigarette. Her character is played by Malgosia Tomassi, who is the real life wife of Stacy Keach.