Mr. Big vs. Tennessee Buck. Gotta...
Mr. Big vs.
Tennessee Buck. Gotta love it.
Chris Noth's hard-luck cop Mike Logan — previously exiled to
Staten Island for slugging a politician — took on
David Keith's rogue detective Mark Virgini, a man hardly as innocent as his name implied. At first, Mike wasn't eager to bring down a fellow cop. As Barek said, "You know what it's like being on the wrong end of the microscope." Mike's volatile, sure. Let's face it, that's what makes him so much fun. Moreover, there are few things more satisfying in a cop show than the sight of
Logan sticking it to a creep — and heaven knows Virgini qualified. When the scum wasn't moonlighting as a hit man (he shot a bookie multiple times in a sensitive male area) he was offering his daughter Renata as a freebie to his mob pals. Heck, he passed her "around like a bowl of peanuts" to anyone — including Big Mike — he considered to be of use. The loving dad even provided the suitors with advice on how to seduce her. "Renata's like her mother, she can't hold her liquor," he snorts. Note to dirty cops: Whenever an
L&O cop dares you to check them for a wire, do so. Remember that
L&O years ago when Lennie Briscoe sat in the pew behind his ex-partner John Ryan and demanded that Ryan search him for a bug? I'm still amazed that it didn't ring any bells in Ryan's head when Lennie demanded that Ryan admit
out loud that the wisecracker wasn't on the take. Virgini, on the other hand, was an unscrupulous, incompetent glob of pus. It is Keith's lot that he plays those types brilliantly. True, super Dave wore the white hat with class in "The Lords of Discipline," but for me, he's at his best when his characters are reckless and diabolical. The whole reason Logan and Barek were on the case to begin with was because Virgini murdered the wrong Joe Long. The guy discovered at the bottom of the river was not the one who menaced the Masucci don, but a police officer's son! You'd have to be one stupid cop to accidentally murder another cop's kid. Not even
Daryl Gates would have your back under those circumstances, chump.
