Cagney & Lacey, Season 7

The final season of “Cagney & Lacey” had no lack of exciting investigations, character back-stories, and topical current event references. In “The City is Burning,” a thinly veiled reference to the real-life Howard Beach incident in Queens, Detective Corrassa’s gun is suspected to have been used in a racially-motivated shooting. This episode used racial epithets that were then (and still are) taboo in prime-time television, causing a great deal of mail and concern from the network. Lacey and Harvey’s son, Harvey Jr. shocked his parents by joining the Marines in “Old Flames,” and in a later episode (“Friendly Fire”), frightened them when he disappeared from maneuvers during his Marine training. It was a false alarm, and he calmed their fears when he visited home in the next episode (“Yup”). As always “Cagney & Lacey” is socially relevant; Lacey is concerned for her daughter’s health and safety when she discovers that one of her young daughter Alice’s classmates has AIDS in “Button, Button;” in the same episode, a slain Federal protected witness’s girlfriend begs Cagney and Lacey to find the killer. Near the end of the season (“Do I Know You?”), Cagney is the victim of date rape by “the perfect guy,” a man with whom everyone, particularly Lacey, had hoped she’d settle down. Cagney is forced to defend herself against accusations that the sex was consensual because she never attempted to use her gun to fend off her attacker. The season, and series, ends on a high note; an exciting two-part episode (“A Fair Shake Parts 1 & 2”) in which a plea bargain over a missing $100,000 sends the detectives upstate in search of a bank president and whopping $100 million. As they wrap the case, they both receive surprise promotions, and their lives change in an unforeseen way.