McMillan & Wife

- Season 6

(1977)

Mac goes on vacation in Las Vegas to meet his girlfriend, a tennis professional (the first of six "girlfriends-of-the-week" who highlighted the "McMillan" series"). While she's preparing for a banquet at a Vegas tennis tournament, she's met by a man who presents her with her stepson's prize ring ("if I had been less civilized, I would have given you his finger to go with it"). The stepson, it appears, is being held hostage for the priceless diamond necklace the tennis pro is wearing, the last of her inheritance from her late husband. Mac quickly finds that it's a scam...

Mac comes home from a weekend fishing trip and walks right into his own funeral. On the night he was away, his apartment was annihilated by a bomb, along with a man and a young woman. Mac stays "dead" while Enright harangues a mobster who had threatened Mac, but the mobster has an alibi for the killings. Mac and a policewoman then focus on the dead woman, a student at a community college near San Francisco. She had arranged to meet someone at Mac's apartment knowing he wouldn't be there, and had brought a burly student to serve as her bodyguard (thus his corpse was ...

When Mac and DiMaggio go to meet a police informant at a waterfront setting (Mac complains that DiMaggio's car is not only cramped, but "has the baldest tires I've ever seen"), the informant's car suddenly starts up and nearly runs them down before plunging into the ocean. The informant is found later slumped in the driver's seat, with an empty suitcase beside him. It looks like he died from the impact, but Mac isn't sure and orders an investigation. Meanwhile, a suave "businessman" named Phillip shows up and starts following Mac around, inviting him and his ...

When Mac is scheduled to take a first-class flight from San Francisco to Hawaii, an airline executive arrives early and in mechanic's garb on the pretext of inspecting the aircraft. His real mission is to poison his wife, via cyanide injected into a champagne bottle. But a drunken passenger clamoring for more gets the lethal dose by mistake. The plane develops serious engine trouble and turns back to Los Angeles. The executive goes up to the VIP lounge to await justice -- but it comes sooner than expected when someone follows him upstairs and stabs him. Mac and a ...

To fend off a nagging Assistant District Attorney, Mac invites her to his weekly poker game. Among the other participants is Mac's dentist, who consoles Mac for biting himself while his mouth was numb from recent work on a tooth. When the dentist leaves the poker game and goes home, he finds a local TV-news anchor dead on his couch, apparently from a heart attack. The dentist's wife (who was the TV news anchor's lover) and her father (the dentist's boss) are frantic, so the dentist loads the dead man into his own car and drives it to a culvert, crashing it so it looks...

The intrepid Mac is presented with a 70's version of the 1944 film noir "Laura" in his final episode. The play on names of the two detectives: McPherson and McMillan is the most clever part of this finale.