- Title: Remington Steele – To Stop a Steele
- IMDb: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the 80s detective show Remington Steele. “To Stop a Steele” offers an amusing comedy of errors as Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan) and Laura (Stephanie Zimbalist) are hired separately to investigate the same jewel store robbery. Laura’s client is the jewel store owner (Donald Bishop) who doesn’t want his insurance company to learn about the uninsured $2 million gem which was in their safe. Steele’s client is Morrie Singer (Cliff Norton), a thief brought out of retirement for one big score only to find the jewel vault empty when his crew successfully breaks in. With both clients afraid of publicity, both agree to keep the other in the dark while being completely unaware they ware working the same case for most of the episode. At one point, to keep those after Morrie at bay, Steele takes credit for the robbery using an alias famous to anyone who knows Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
The episode features several instances of Laura and Murphy (James Read) being one-step behind Steele unaware that there were two robberies. Working so closely together, without Steele, also allows the episode to explore the idea of Laura and Murphy’s relationship turning more romantic which wounds Mr. Steele (and does provide another reason for the two cases to remain separate until the end of the episode). Only after trading notes do Laura and Steele discover the true culprit of the crime, the man (Michael C. Gwynne) who financed Morrie’s job and then beat him to the score and killed off the rest of the crew. All of which leads to the unlikely circumstance of the members of the Remington Steele Detective Agency performing an armed robbery of mobsters in the episode’s climax.
