Doc Fred wrote:
I don't think Cleo was so bad, but I think I would have written the story with a BIG surprise... have Rick marry Carol... they were around together a lot, interacting a lot, and could have had something going behind the scenes, which could have been written into the last show.
I like to think that Michelle faked her death and she and Rick hooked up after that chump Magnum reenlisted in the Navy.
Tanaka's Deam/Flashback Flub: I'm not so sure it is a flub. Let me play Sigmund Freud for a second here and analyze his dream.
1) Watergate : Conspiracy to cover up a crime which involved altering evidence (Nixon's White House tapes are mentioned.) Isn't that vaguely similar to the case Tanaka is investigating in a general sense? In the dream a characters says something like "Let me tell you why he (Nixon) destroyed the tapes" but is cutoff before he can actually finish his thought. Maybe Tanaka still hadn't figured out the doctor's motivations?
2) Tanaka is shot at point blank range in his dream. A premonition of his own death?
3) The Rockford Files/Lance White: Tanaka dreams about someone talking about a character played by Tom Selleck who is "mister perfect, right. He's finding all the clues, catching all the suspects...." And the next day he tries to ask Magnum to help him solve the case he's working on.
Some trivia: I think that in the scene where Magnum and Page are trying to pull one over on the Internal Affairs cop that Magnum is doing an impersonation of the Jon Lovitz Saturday Night Live Character "Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flan ... gical_Liar
As for the episode itself - I thought it was ok. I liked Tanaka and I really wish that more had been done with the character after his first few appearances. His death didn't have much of an emotional impact for me, and while the episode was pretty good the plot was pretty linear. Friend gets killed, Magnum (easily) gathers a few clues, gets revenge, and the friend is never mentioned again. Good, but not great. Tanaka deserved a "great" sendoff.