[Eric Paddon]

As a little follow-up on my earlier point about the Grover character. I came across a copy of Larson's earlier draft for this episode, and it turns out he was intending a blatant call-back to "McCloud" by having the Chief Clifford character played by J.D. Cannon return and for Grover to be explicitly the same character from "McCloud". Chief Clifford makes two explicit references to the McCloud character when he at one point tells Colonel Briggs that "We once had a Marshal on loan from New Mexico" who caused all kinds of headaches for the department and then at the end of the scene when they get the report about the Cylon spewing fire from his fingertips and they have go investigate, Clifford says, "This is even worse than McCloud!"

In the end these blatant callbacks were removed from the final script because apparently, J.D. Cannon was unavailable to return as Clifford. So they instead cast Bernie Hamilton (the captain from "Starsky And Hutch") as an unnamed Chief, while Ken Lynch as "Grover" is now a uniformed cop instead of the plainclothes detective he was on "McCloud" which suggests he isn't the same character. Or it could be that Larson couldn't do these callbacks because while he was the Executive Producer of "McCloud" he wasn't the credited creator of the show, and thus using explicit characters from that show might have actually required permission or payment to "McCloud's" credited creator Herman Miller (who wrote the short story that led to the movie "Coogan's Bluff" which in turn inspired the creation of "McCloud")

It's too bad they couldn't have left those callbacks in, because it would have made the episode, which is bad to begin with, a little more interesting from a TV crossover standpoint!