Equals: Joe Silver

Actor: Joe Silver

Role: Felix Dzershinsky, aka. The Guy No One Cares About Except For The Equalizer

Episode: 1x03, "The Defector"

Best known for: As so many of us know, Joe Silver played Captain Jet in Space Funnies from 1955-1960. He also appeared in David Cronenberg's Rabid as Murray Cypher, a name so Cronenbergian that I think Cronenberg had to fight Don DeLillo in an arena on a distant planet to get it.

Did he appear on Law & Order?: Joe Silver died in 1989, which puts him just outside the L&O umbrella.

Robert Urich check: Silver was a guest star on Spenser: For Hire as Guzman in "In a Safe Place". Speaking of Guzmans, Luis Guzman showed up as an unlicensed cab driver on the very next episode of The Equalizer after "The Defector." Coincidence? Well, yeah. Obviously.

---

Every episode of The Equalizer is a smorgasbord of incredible guest star talent (except that you may not eat the talent, as you'd except from a smorgasbord of anything). The toughest part of this column is just picking one out of several great actors that seem to pop up constantly. Just by way of example, in episode four alone I had the pleasure of choosing between Luis Guzman, Adam Ant and Lori Petty. Or J.T. Walsh.

In the case of "The Defector," though, it was immediately clear that the subject of Equals should be Joe Silver. I mean, look at that face.

What can I say? That is the face of Joe Silver, the actor who got his start in a role in "Tobacco Road" and worked in shows like "Mr. I. Magination" (Imagine trying to get a show with a name like "Mr. I. Magination" on air nowadays. Mr. P. Laytime? No, let's not do that. Mr. F. Unnibal? My god, what would a funnibal even be?). He was described by a radio announcer as having a voice "so low that when he speaks, he unties your shoelaces." That strikes me as a bit of a nuisance, but it's a great line.

In "The Defector," Silver plays Felix Dzershinsky, a minor functionary at the Soviet embassy and former CIA asset. In the opening moments of the episode, Felix spots a high-ranking KGB agent and contacts his old handler to pass on the information. His handler is - you guessed it - The Equalizer, who now has to convince his former boss to pay attention to Felix and help him defect.

To The Equalizer's disgust, nobody cares about Felix. Every other character in the episode refers to him "a little man" or a "nobody," which infuriates The Equalizer and drives him to recite bitter monologues about the many moral compromises he's had to make over the years.

As for Felix, he dies. 

There he is, dying. In the first act. Just as he's about to defect, a Soviet agent wielding a shotgun takes him out.

The question is: does this make The Equalizer really angry? You bet it does. It also drives him to rescue Felix's daughter Irina (Melissa Leo!) from certain abduction. It leads to a shootout in the country where Soviet heavies are hit by bullets and respond by flinging themselves through glass doors and tumbling abruptly down staircases.

If Silver and Leo weren't enough, the show also shoehorns in Robert Joy as a young CIA agent who first draws The Equalizer's scorn, and later, his grudging admiration. Joy's sunken eyes and shelf of a forehead are one of the great pleasure of late 20th century television.

Look at that cocky young Turk, thinking he can face off with The Equalizer.

Having Felix die so quickly is an unexpected and bold move. This is only a guess on my part, but Silver may have already been suffering from the liver cancer that would kill him a few years later. In the first scene, he is visibly winded from climbing a set of stairs, and he looks pitifully thin and shrunken in his suit. Silver's obvious illness lends a strange sense of tragedy to the repeated insults heaped on his character.

Along with the Le Carre-esque Cold War plot, "The Defector" throws in a B-story about a kid (a spectacularly bad J.D. Roth) getting bullied by a group of unconvincing high school thugs. After some false starts and black eyes, the kid stands up for himself with a few Equalizer-taught moves and the group of bullies folds. Somehow, both his father and The Equalizer are on the scene (there's some serious dream logic at work here) to witness his transition from shy child to aggressive young man. The Equalizer even gives him a thumbs-up, but it looks a little odd because the angle of the camera places his thumb directly in front of his nose. It makes The Equalizer look as if he's subconsciously embarrassed by his own nose, and it suggests that his nose is part thumb. Or maybe he got a little careless with the superglue and now he's in permanent thumbs-up mode.

Imagine Edward Woodward being so pleased with your conduct that he glues his nose to his thumb in your honour. We should all be so lucky.

Equals: James Russo

Welcome to Equals, the ongoing series that takes a frankly unhealthy interest in the guest stars and brief players of '80s television series The Equalizer.

Actor: James Russo (as "Jim Russo")

Role: Police Detective

Episode: 1x02, "China Rain" (1985)

Best known for: James Russo has appeared in 85% of all television shows and movies produced over the last 35 years (generally playing The Last Guy Some Unlucky Loser Tied To A Chair Ever Sees), but viewers may recognize him as the delightfully named Dicky Speck from Django Unchained or Axel Foley's hapless friend Mikey Tandino from Beverly Hills Cop.

Has he appeared on Law & Order?: Astoundingly, no. But he's popped up on modern science-hero investigator franchise CSI as "Sinclair" and its ginger spinoff CSI: MIami as Joey Salucci. 

Robert Urich check: Again no. But I'd like to think there's a field in Eternity where Russo is playing endless games of Red Rover with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks (to be clear, Russo and Brooks are not dead, but everything that will happen in Eternity has always been happening, will always happen, is happening now, dissolving the very notions of time and duration dissolve usw).

---

If you've watched any movie or television show that requires gritty Italian-American cops or criminals, you've seen James Russo. His characters tend to have names like Joey Salucci, Papa Lullo or Vince Hood (really). But in The Equalizer, he appears as Police Detective (sadly not Police Justice). Russo gets a couple of scenes with dialogue, where he mostly functions as a foil to say "Your plan sucks" whenever Robert McCall opens his mouth, but his main role is to provide a sense that Yes, these are police detectives doing police-type things. So he fills in that texture: holding a newspaper with a hint of impatience, lighting a cigarette with a slight Fuck it, might as well grab a smoke note of insouciance, or staring aggressively at whoever's speaking. He's a background character, in the sense that he's in the middle or background of nearly every scene.

Russo only comes to the foreground once or twice, when he has something to say. I'm not going to trouble you with the plot of "China Rain," which revolves around a botched kidnapping, Chinese gang members and a whole lot of Orientalist stereotypes, but Police Detective's lines all seemed geared to point out that The Equalizer's plans are a pile of horse dung.

His IMDb bio claims that Russo is "possessed of a stare that bring shivers down one's back," which makes you wonder who the hell writes those bios, but you can see a trace of it here. His chief character note seems to be I'm Police Detective and I'm putting in for a transfer to a precinct where the lieutenant doesn't hang out with some overdressed vigilante chump who shows up at a kidnap and tells the cops what to do. Does anybody else think this is ridiculous? Anyone? No? Man, what a bunch of crap.

For further reference, here is a rundown of firearms that James Russo has used in film and television.

Equals: Patricia Kalember

Welcome to Equals, the ongoing column that takes a surprising amount of interest in guest stars from Edward Woodward's 1980s series The Equalizer.

Actor: Patricia Kalember

Role: Carlene Randall

Episode: Pilot (1985)

Best known for: Georgie on Sisters (1991-96)

Currently playing: Kate Egan in Power

Has she appeared on Law & Order?: Hell yes. She played "Leslie DeSantis" on an episode of Special Victims Unit in 2001 and went to appear as "Judge Taten" on nine more episodes from 2004-2010.

Robert Urich check: Kalember and Urich appeared together on Final Run (1999): "A new computer-controlled train loses control due to an error in the system and speeds out of control while Urich attempts to stop it." 3.9/10

---

These days, television pilots have an unseemly amount of work to do. There's a world to build, characters to introduce, and a plot that will keep audiences interested for at least a season. Even the flimsiest network procedurals have to Wire up their game or risk being blown away in the blizzard of Peak TV.

Welcome to the '80s, people. The Equalizer has no time for your medieval slashfests or superhero support dramas. In the pilot episode alone, The Equalizer, aka Robert McCall (Edward Woodward), helps not one but two people (he even squeezes in time to repair his relationship with his estranged son). The first mystery functions largely as a device to drag in McCall's buddies from The Agency and establish his bona fides as an International Man of Mystery. The second mystery establishes him as a Man of Honour who likes to protect women and children. Enter Patricia Kalember as successful Manhattan single mother Carlene Randall. She's being stalked by a floppy-haired hipster named Steve (Scott Burkholder).

Steve doesn't have the internet to stalk his prey with, so he resorts to analogue methods: phone calls, hanging out at her grocery store, breaking in and leaving messages in lipstick. The police are unhelpful, so she turns to The Equalizer for help.

For a one-off character, Carlene gets nearly as much screen time as McCall, and their paths don't even intersect for nearly half an hour. This gives us plenty of opportunities to watch Kalember to go from calm to unhinged in the space of a second. The acting is theatrical by modern television standards, but my god does she go for it. There's nothing quite like watching her scream "I'll stab you in the heart!" in the grocery store checkout line as the nefarious Steve the Gaslighter General looks on in feigned befuddlement. 

The treatment of Kalember's character is not what you'd call woke. Although she points out that her situation is a basic nightmare ("Why should I have to change my whole life? He's the one who's destroying it"), the responsibility for dealing with Steve is handed off to a paternalistic McCall. "Look at me, Carlene. Look at me," he commands. "I. Will. Protect you." 

In today's television arena, Carlene would have taken a course in self-defense, spent some time in the gym and beaten the living snot out of Steve. But since it's 1985, she spends most of her time weeping and throwing herself at The Equalizer, who brushes off her advances. "I'd like to get you know better," she says. "No you don't," The Equalizer replies dangerously.

Kalember also popped up in season two for "Coal Black Soul" as Dr. Stephanie Davis, in which she plays a potential love interest and therapist for McCall. Here's hoping she turns out to be an evil mastermind in the vein of Root.