21 Jump Street - The Worst Night of Your Life

"Perhaps by and by I may observe that private balls are much 

pleasanter than public ones." 

- Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice. 

Let's continue our look at TV proms with "The Worst Night of Your Life," the 6th episode of season 1 of: 

Broadly speaking, if you were born before 1970, you probably had no use for the show when it was on the air (1987 to 1991). And if you were born after it went off the air, you might not even have known the show existed before the recent movie version(s) with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. 

As for me, like a lot of kids in junior high when it premiered, I enjoyed it intensely for a year or two, then forgot all about it. How Season One on DVD ended up in the closet, I have no idea. (Well, actually I do: Amazon had it on sale for $.99. No big mystery.) It was the first Fox network show to beat the Big Three in any timeslot.

21 Jump Street never really caught on in syndication. Johnny Depp became a huge star after leaving the show, as we all know. Did he or his people exert behind-the-scenes pressure because they wanted the public to forget about it? Or was its failure to find an audience in syndication a result of its quality, or its datedness, or its lack of original soundtrack? (Like a lot of shows that used the pop radio of its era as its soundtrack, the license for the songs didn't extend to syndication or home video. New soundtracks had to be cobbled together for the DVD release, with erratic results.)

Here's how it's described at the wiki:

"The series focuses on a group of police officers headquartered at the titular address. These officers are all young and have especially youthful appearances, which allows them to pass for teenagers." 

Frederick Forest played Captain Jenko, their first boss, an eccentric hippie type. He was replaced by the more cop-traditional  Steven Williams in the episode after "The Worst Night of Your Life."

The "titular address" is some kind of converted chapel/ fire station with all sorts of oddities, like a gasoline pump, pinball machine, fireman's pole, and wall potpourri from your local Applebees.

"Their assignments generally consist of undercover work in high schools or, less commonly, colleges, where they generally investigate drug trafficking and abuse. The show's plots cover issues such as alcoholism, hate crimes, drug abuse, homophobia, AIDS, child abuse and sexual promiscuity. Similarly, each problem is often solved by the end of the hour-long episode, giving an implicit moral about the impact of a particular activity. When the show originally aired, some episodes were followed immediately by public service announcements featuring cast members." 

I'd totally forgotten about those PSAs at the end of the episodes! Nice.

The discriminating TV consumer probably has a number of questions about this set-up, like "Wait a minute, how many high schools are in the area? Enough to sustain a series? Is it realistic that enough of them would require an undercover sting operation? Does the LAPD really have these sorts of resources? * Wouldn't kids from different high schools, like, talk to one another about these same three or four "kids" transferring from one school to another? And wouldn't the press (not to mention the PTA) get wind of this?"

* 21 Jump Street is actually set in the fictional city of Metropolis in "Evergreen State." But these questions apply to any city, even a fictional one.

All reasonable questions. At no point does the show attempt to answer them. It was not uncommon at the time for a TV show to have a premise that would fall apart in the real world. It still is - one need only look at "realistic" shows like 24 or Law and Order: SVU to see that - but yeah, a show like this would probably need a little more time in the oven before making it to the table these days. That's both good and bad, but we're getting away from proms.

Onto the episode at hand. 

Hoffs (Holly Robinson Peete) is the undercover officer this time around.

She's been sent to a Catholic school to figure out who's been setting off locker bombs.

Hoffs narrows down her search to a small group of suspects and joins the prom committee to keep tabs on them. 

Is it loner sidekick Margie?

That one bitchy girl who mocks her (and the whole concept of prom itself) on the committee?

Or Freddy's Dead alum Jane (Lezlie Deane)?

Hanson (Depp) looks through their police records and thinks it has to be Margie. She has a record of starting fires. But when Jane keeps getting into trouble, she becomes the likeliest suspect. Hoffs reveals her undercover identity to her in an attempt to get at the truth. 

Captain Jenko tries to get Mother Superior to cancel the prom. Cancel prom?!

About halfway through the episode, there's a bonafide 80s-movie-montage of the undercover cops getting ready for prom, while the students decorate the gym, including face-obscured shots of our arsonist readying gasoline-soaked heart decorations (ahem) for the big event. 

Hoffs meets with the precinct psychologist/ profiler who has no firm idea on who the arsonist is, but he speculates she plans to stage her most lavish "event" yet. And likely kill herself as part of it. Proms are where tragic narcissism might combine with "anxiety of menstruation, fear of pregnancy, and depression of puberty" to produce an "elaborately-dressed victim ritual". When Hoffs hears this, she thinks back to a conversation she had with Margie in the bathroom, when Hoffs urged her to go the prom stag.

"You're gorgeous. I'm... fat."

Hoffs arranges for her colleague Penhall (Peter DeLuise) to be her date.

She sets Jane up with Hansen, while her date is the last of the Jump Streeters, Harry Ioki (Dustin Nguyen). Who opts for a Dracula look.

Speaking of Harry, there is a very odd scene where the camera slowly zooms in on his face as he reminisces about how he never went to prom in high school.

"I guess, when I was in high school, I just never believed it was the last time I was going to be there."

Nguyen delivers this line the way Quint wraps up his USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws, you know the one: I'll never put on a life-jacket again. Why? Is the irony of Harry being an undercover officer in high school so substantial that it deserves a slow-zoom close-up and dramatic line reading? Or is it teasing out the possibility that Harry is psychic? I couldn't tell. It sure calls attention to itself, though.

Hoffs never went to her prom either. She tells Captain Jenko about how she was all set to go, but her date (Charles Tyrone, a name she repeats several times as if it has become a codeword for all the disappointments she's endured in her young life) got drunk and they never made it. 

She intends to use this prom to make up for it, mission or no mission.

Penhall - who has the episode's other 80s-movie subplot, i.e. a desperate hunt to pick up chicks, and more on that in a minute - is all too happy to take Margie to the prom. ("The world's a supermarket, and I'm a comparison shopper.") When she arrives, all action stops, as everyone turns to look at her. Margie? At the prom? Doesn't she remember she's a Fat, for f**k's sake?

She pauses momentarily upon entering the gym -

then makes a beeline for the float with the gas-soaked hearts.

REVENGE.

Hoffs, Hanson, and Penhall get everyone outside without any injuries. The camera cuts to Margie on the curb, prior to her arrest, revenge and self-immolation thwarted.

The reasons for Margie's disenfranchisement are never more than superficially addressed (she's a Fat, for God's sake!); we're just supposed to be happy she was prevented from Carrie-ing everyone. Beautiful kids saved.      

Hey, not everything has to be Columbine. I'm down with that. It's an 80s TV prom episode; of course it plays out like this. It ends with Hanson taking everyone (including Jane, who let's remember is actually of high school age) bowling. There's a cool-kids after-party effect to it all. 

(And I guess none of the cops have to go downtown to fill out paperwork or anything. After burning down the school.)

This coda wraps up the other sub-plot of the episode (Penhall got his wallet stolen from a girl he tried to pick up in his aforementioned 80s-movie gotta-get-laid-bro arc). 

When Harry goes to the bar to get beers, he sees a lady sitting alone and naturally decides to ditch his friends to go off with her once she lets him pick her up.

But achtung! It's the same lady who stole Penhall's wallet.

"FREEZE!"

So, Penhall, fresh off the prom, pulls his service weapon in a crowded bowling alley, and cut to the end credits. As with the prom, I think we're meant to feel "Well that wraps that up" but my brain was buzzing with more questions. What if he fired and shot her? That would have thematically tied the episode up more, if in a much darker way. Penhall is the "uncool" cop getting revenge on the girl who rejected/ wrong him.

Ah well. At least it delivers on one TV Prom trope: ignore the marginalized at your own peril, but good looks are still your best protection. 

~

was

(the show's co-creator) and

Near the beginning of his long career.

Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis

"Yes, I suppose knifing people one after the other can become a strain, 

even for someone like you." 

Let's have a look at the first post-Fleming Bond novel:

"Robert Markham" was meant to be an umbrella pseudonym under which various authors would write the books to give the illusion of authorial continuity. Glidrose Publication Ltd. approached Kingsley Amis for many reasons but primarily because he'd written the literary critique The James Bond Dossier and the tongue-in-cheek The Book Of Bond (Or Every Man His Own 007), a how-to manual credited to M's Chief of Staff, Bill Tanner.

Ian Fleming's widow Anne was unhappy with the decision. She thought Amis was too sympathetic with communism and warned he would turn James Bond into a petite-bourgeois red-brick "Philby Bond," a reference to Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent. 

I doubt Amis had such an aim in mind, but who knows? Nothing of the sort happens in Colonel Sun, though, which as it turned out, was the only Bond adventure Amis ever wrote, despite its selling very well. 

The Plot: From the flap copy: 

"Lunch at Scott’s, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on his chief M, convalescing in his Regency house in Berkshire – the life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency … until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and his house staff savagely murdered." 

A conspicuous clue at the crime scene leads Bond to Greece, where he hooks up with a native gorgeous communist with ties to the KGB, Ariadne Alexandrou, and Nico Listas, a former WW2 resistance fighter and the kind of earthy rugged individualist with whom Bond often forges an instant and solid friendship. They sequester themselves on Nico's boat, the Altair, and look for M.

M has been kidnapped by Colonel Sun of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, primarily as bait for Bond. Sun's plan is to sabotage the Middle East détente conference that the Soviets are hosting on a remote Aegean island. Sun's plan is to fire trench mortars at the Soviets, then blame it all on M and Bond. He's recruited Von Richter, an ex-Nazi "atrocities expert," to help him carry it out. 

Serialized in The Daily Express, March 1968.

The "soft life" at the beginning of Colonel Sun is not the same prison for Amis' Bond as it was for Fleming's; as a result of the traumatic events of the last 3 Fleming levels, perhaps, the accidie has been burned out of him, or reduced to a manageable level, not requiring the "rounds of gin and tranquilizers" he previously needed. 

Critics seem to have been divided on this score. The Chicago Tribune's SK Oberbeck wrote that Bond "has become a sensitive man-of-ethics who suffers pangs of doubt and remorse over the 'senseless' violence of his profession. (...) The greatest flaw in Amis' conception of Bond is that he has attempted to transform the consummate spy-hero into something he was never meant to have been: a man with a job." 

I'm sympathetic with such a view to a point, but a) Fleming definitely gave Bond many a pang of doubt and remorse over the senseless violence of his profession, and b) at the end of the day, Bond is a man with a job, just one way better than yours or mine. (Definitely mine.) But here, too, Fleming had Bond filing reports and doing office work for months on end - hating it, naturally, but the point being: he was always a guy with a job. Not every day is a zigzag escape down the Black Run on Piz Gloria.

All in all, I had no trouble believing this was the same Bond of either the books before it or even of the ones still to come. Amis captures Bond in perfect transition between the two eras, actually, which makes me wonder what Gardner thought of Colonel Sun. I'll find out when I get there.

There are some nice callbacks at novel's end. As mentioned above, things get started with the brutal murder of M's house staff, the Hammonds. M doesn't know they are dead, though, until Bond confirms it for him. I was touched by M's remote anguish, as well as the note of vengeance he later strikes in their name. Also, a seemingly out-of-place chapter involving the last captain of the Altair (a man named Iodides) is tied up with a single sentence in some of Nico's last remarks.  

The Villains: This review from The Quietus nails it pretty well: 

"Amis ties the new threat of Red China to an older one with the character of ex-Nazi officer Von Richter. Like Hugo Drax who had 'half his face blown away' and Blofeld’s changing guises, this 'Butcher of Kapoudzona', with the left side of his head burned and his disfigured ear, keeps to the trend of Bond villains having distinguishing physical characteristics. The combination of Sun and Von Richter is one of Amis’ many subtle callbacks to the Fleming books: Dr. No, his own 'Dali-esque' features causing him to resemble 'a giant venomous worm', was also half-Chinese, half-German." 

Speaking of Dali-esque, here is the 1st ed. UK hardcover.

Colonel Sun and Von Richter are perfectly fine, as are their various underlings, but they replicate the status quo rather than reify it. Von Richter is not substantially different from any ex-Nazi officer you've seen or read anywhere else. And outside of bringing Red China into things, Colonel Sun could be swapped out for just about any other Bond villain, from Mr. Big through Blofeld. These aren't really failures, just missed opportunities.

I did like that the novel reflects the geopolitics of when it was published rather than carrying on as if it's still the 50s. In the late 60s, and due in no small part to the Sino-Soviet schism, the USSR and the West eased tensions considerably. We do have Soviets in the novel, of course, most notably General Arenski, the pederast in charge of security for the conference. At one point he delivers this summary of James Bond to Ariadne:

"He has conducted terrorist activities in Turkey, France, and the Caribbean. Quite recently, he committed two assassinations in Japan for motives of pure personal revenge. He has cleverly involved you in his schemes with tales of kidnapping and wicked Chinamen - he is a dangerous international criminal."

All true! And yet, not. Very interesting. 

After all is said and done, Bond gets a personal thank you from a Soviet foreign minister, Yermolov, who wants to give him a medal for his services. Bond declines the medal, and the two part on friendly and cautiously-optimistic terms. Yermolov even offers to host Bond as his guest in some after-the-fighting-stops Russian holiday of the future. I liked this moment. It'd have been a natural moment to follow up on post-Cold-War. A story where Bond visits Yermolov in modern-day Russia has a lot of potential. I could even see it going something like The Sopranos episode "College." (Allowing for some adaptation. And how cool would that be?)

The Allies: Ariadne is decent. It's difficult to tell what Amis was going for. She works as an extension of the thawing-Cold-War theme of the book. (And with regard to Anne Fleming's fears, it doesn't seem like Bond is any danger of selling England out as a result of his hooking up with her.) But she didn't jump off the page at me.

Nico Listas is a familiar Bond ally. I loved that he is only swayed to the cause when Bond gives him his "word as an Englishman." Wow! I'm not saying it's undeserved, it's just something no one would buy today. 

Later, when Bond reflects on the frame job Sun is planning, he remarks "No one who understands the British would be taken in." Hard to get a handle on his politics - Bond's just as apt to write off both parties and all politicians as he is to defend them - but underneath it all is a stubborn belief in the rationality of the English way of life. 

What Ariadne Alexandrou had said about the decreasing Greekness of Greece came to Bond's mind. In thirty years, he reflected, perhaps sooner, there would be one vast undifferentiated culture, one complex of super-highways, hot-dog stands and neon, interrupted only by the Atlantic, stretching from Los Angeles to Jerusalem; possibly, by then, as far as Calcutta, three-quarters of the way round the world. Where there had been American and British and French and Italians and Greeks and the rest, there would only be citizens of the West, uniformly affluent, uniformly ridden by guilt and neurosis, uniformly alcoholic and suicidal, uniformly everything. 

But was that prospect so hopelessly bad? Bond asked himself. Even at the worst, not as bad as all that was offered by the East, where conformity did not simply arise as if by accident, but was consciously imposed to the hilt by the unopposed power of the State. There were still two sides: a doubtfully, conditionally right and an unconditionally, unchangeably wrong.

He admires this about both Nico and Ariadne, who are endowed with "the undying nationalism that sits in the heart of every Greek, even the most sophisticated."  

As for Bond's mental meanderings - such an enjoyable part of Fleming's Bond - Amis is sparing but precise. At one point, he says with absolute conviction that "hatred of tobacco was a common psychopathic symptom, from which Hitler among others had been a notable sufferer." Bond was Godwin-ing before his time.

My favorite of these was in conversation with Ariadne, when he bluntly offers his opinion on Lord Byron: "As a poet, he was affected and pretentious, he ran to fat early and had to go on the most savage diets, his taste in women was appalling, and as a fighter for liberty he never got started."

Ariadne, of course, disagrees, considering his exile from England "a victory for bourgeois morality." Ah, the Cold War. 

Colonel Sun is sampled at least twice in the Bond movies, albeit in a non-royalty-generating way. M's kidnapping is a plot device for The World Is Not Enough, and the villain in Die Another Day is named Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. And as mentioned here:

"Although Kingsley found the films'‘denatured' and 'an almost separate being', he still held out hope for a cinematic release of Colonel Sun. Rumor has it that despite owning the rights, (Cubby Broccoli) was put off making a film version of Sun by Kingsley’s public dislike of the Roger Moore movies. Earlier, when Harry Saltzman was still involved with EON Productions, he had blackballed the notion of a Colonel Sun film in response to Glidrose rejecting Per Fine Ounce, a project with which he was involved." 

Per Fine Ounce (two pages of which of the believed lost manuscript can be read at the Quietus link) was a Bond novel by Fleming's friend Peter Jenkins that was commissioned by Glidrose but rejected.