The Streets of San Francisco is settling into a rhythm for me. S4E2: “The Glass Dart Board” isn’t as immediately exciting as “Poisoned Snow,” and it takes a while to get moving, but it confirms something I liked about my accidental jump into Season 4: this show knows how to make an old-school procedural feel alive even when half the episode is cops talking, driving around San Francisco, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
And yes, the opening still kicks ass.
The music, the narrator, the episode title, the guest stars announced before the story even begins — I love all of it. This week’s lineup includes Patrick O’Neal, Lou Frizzell and Joel Fabiani, which naturally sent me down another rabbit hole when I discovered Fabiani starred in a 1969 series called Department S. Now I have to hunt that down too. This is how the Free TV Frontier gets you. You start with Karl Malden and somehow acquire three more shows before the opening credits are over.
Technicolor Urgency, Just a Little Less Urgent
The setup is simple. Someone is taking random shots into offices at Balboa Towers. One man is killed, another worker is injured, and nobody can find a connection between the victims. Eventually the shooter demands a million dollars and threatens to keep firing until somebody pays attention to him.
It’s a darker premise to watch in 2026 than it probably was in 1975. Random shootings from rooftops don’t play as comfortably as generic procedural danger anymore. But the episode doesn’t sensationalize it. This is still very much a case-of-the-week police story: crime happens, Stone and Keller investigate, clues pile up, catch the bad guy.
And that’s okay.
The Technicolor Urgency I loved in “Poisoned Snow” is still here. San Francisco looks like an actual city instead of a desaturated backdrop, the cars are enormous, people are running around real buildings, and even the endless driving scenes have some life to them.
There’s considerably less action this time, though. Stone and Keller spend a lot of time talking, investigating and bouncing theories off each other. Fortunately, Karl Malden and Michael Douglas make that worth watching. Their easy banter might actually be my favorite thing about the episode.
Stone has the experience. Keller has the gut instinct. Neither one needs a f*cking flowchart.
Unfortunately, their new captain does.
Congratulations on the Promotion. You’ve Become an Asshole.
Patrick O’Neal plays Captain Jacob Keely, an old colleague of Stone’s who has just been promoted. Apparently he and Stone once rode together, but Keely has been captain for approximately five minutes before deciding Mike had better start calling him Captain instead of Jacob.
Oh, we’re going to have fun with this guy.
Keely isn’t stupid. That’s what makes him interesting. He’s a guy who gets promoted and immediately becomes so enamored with being the man in charge that he stops listening to the people who actually know what they’re doing.
He wants data. Organization. Computerization. Analysis.
And charts.
Oh God, the charts.
Keely rolls out something called PERT, complete with a giant flowchart and computer printouts, and starts pulling cops off the actual investigation so they can feed information into his shiny new system. The other cops look about as impressed as I was.
Meanwhile, Stone is trying to understand the person they’re chasing.
That’s where “The Glass Dart Board” gets more interesting than its sniper plot. It’s really an argument about management versus experience. Keely has become convinced that because he has more authority, he must also have better judgment. Stone isn’t anti-technology; he just understands that a computer can organize information without understanding a human being.
And Keely’s precious system does exactly what Stone fears.
It gives him the wrong guy.
The Chart Says We Got Him!
Keely’s analysis identifies a former Xerox employee who had been a sniper during the Korean War. The pieces fit beautifully on paper, so Keely decides they’ve broken the case.
They haven’t.
Stone and Keller know something stinks, but Keely is so convinced of his own brilliance that an innocent man is booked while the actual shooter is still wandering around with a rifle.
Then Keely goes in front of the television cameras and starts talking about his wonderful system.
FFS.
I have a personal bias here because I hate charts. I make plenty of pictorial charts for the mafia site because readers like them. I don’t. So watching Captain Keely nearly derail an entire investigation in service of his beloved PERT chart was probably funnier to me than the producers intended.
His mistakes keep compounding. He overrides Stone’s instincts. He sends people in the wrong direction. He micromanages the ransom operation. By the time everything goes sideways, the swagger has completely drained out of him.
Ego down.
And here’s where the episode surprised me: it doesn’t make Keely a cartoon villain.
Once he realizes he screwed up, he admits it.
That’s something I can respect.
He tells Keller he’ll go back to his desk “where he belongs,” and eventually considers quitting altogether. I thought that was almost as foolish as his original behavior. You made mistakes. Fine. Learn from them. Stop acting like promotion magically added 40 points to your IQ and let your detectives do their f*cking jobs.
The Guy With the Gun—and the Dog
The actual shooter, Martin Truax (Lou Frizzell), turns out to have a much more mundane grievance than the elaborate investigation suggests.
Balboa Towers was built where his home once stood. He didn’t want to sell. The developers got the property anyway, he believes he wasn’t compensated fairly, and he’s been carrying that resentment ever since. The shootings are his deranged way of finally forcing somebody to acknowledge what happened to him.
None of that excuses murdering an innocent person. Full stop.
But the episode gives Martin just enough humanity to keep him from becoming Generic Sniper Guy #427.
And naturally, they accomplish this with a dog.
The damn dog knows something is wrong before everybody else does. Martin solemnly pauses by his apartment door, ignoring the barks from behind it, before heading for the roof. He seems to understand that whatever happens next, he’s not coming home. When Stone and Keller finally close in — thanks to the dog, no less — they don’t treat him like a monster. Martin pulled treats out of his pocket for the puppy, for crying out loud. They understand that they’re looking at an angry, broken man who turned a legitimate grievance into something unforgivable.
And now I’m worried about the f*cking dog.
Thanks, Streets of San Francisco.
A Man Rises to His Own Incompetence
The epilogue gives Keely the perfect ending.
He doesn’t get fired. He gets moved to research and planning — a job where all that analytical energy and chart-making might actually be useful.
Keely isn’t exactly thrilled and asks Stone whether he’s ever heard the saying about a man rising to his own level of incompetence.
But Stone doesn’t gloat.
That’s important. He could have spent the final scene enjoying the fact that I TOLD YOU SO might as well be tattooed across Keely’s forehead. Instead, Stone tells him the new assignment is a good move. Keely finally drops the formal bullshit and calls him Mike again.
Maybe that’s why Stone works so well for me. He’s confident without needing everybody else to know he’s the smartest person in the room.
Keely needed a title, a computer and a wall-sized chart.
Stone just needed to be a cop.
“The Glass Dart Board” isn’t as strong as my first Season 4 outing. It takes until around Act II to really get going, and there’s a lot more procedural legwork than action. But it never gets anywhere near the River of Molasses. Malden and Douglas remain ridiculously watchable together, Patrick O’Neal gives Keely enough dimension to prevent him from becoming an insufferable bureaucrat, and that final reassignment is a wonderfully tidy punchline.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE. The sniper gets the headlines, but the real target is a newly promoted captain’s runaway ego. It takes a while to get there, but watching Captain Flowchart discover that computers can’t replace good police instincts makes the trip worthwhile.
And seriously.
Somebody take care of that dog.
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