The BEST episodes of The Sentinel
Every episode of The Sentinel ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of The Sentinel!
Jim Ellison was a U.S. Army Ranger who spent 18 months in the Peruvian jungle after his unit was killed. During this time, he developed hyperactive senses that came online five years later, when he was a detective in Cascade PD's Major Crimes Department. When he goes to the hospital to see a doctor, he finds instead Blair Sandburg, an anthropologist from Rainier University who tells him that he's a Sentinel. In ancient tribes, Sentinels protected the village. For Jim, Cascade is his village. Blair has been studying Sentinel mythology for years, but he never found before a person with all five senses enhanced, a true Sentinel. Blair helps Jim control his senses and joins Jim as a police observer. To the surprise of many people, this unlikely partnership works and together they fight against crime in the streets of Cascade. Jim's hyperactive senses mean he can see beyond what others see, even in the dark, and with more detail; hear sounds that are farther than normal range or too low for anybody else; sense what nobody else can with taste, touch and smell, in short becoming a walking forensic lab. But Jim's powers have a drawback: if he concentrates too strongly in one sense, he could "zone out", a kind of catatonic state. Part of Blair's job is preventing the zone outs. The only person who knows Jim's secret, apart from Blair, is his captain and friend, Simon Banks, and in the last half season, so does Megan Connor.
#1 - The Switchman
Season 1 - Episode 1 - Aired 3/20/1996
The sole survivor of an Army plane crash in the Peruvian hinterlands, Jim Ellison subsisted for nearly two years on his raw animal instincts. When he returned to America and became a police lieutenant, Jim discovered that the abilities that had kept him alive in the jungle now gave him extraordinary senses of perception. With the help of Captain Simon Banks and a grad student Blair Sandburg, Jim now attempts to use these powers to apprehend a terrorist bomber called the Switchman.
#2 - The Rig
Season 2 - Episode 8 - Aired 11/6/1996
When employees start dying aboard the North Star Five oilrig, Jim and Blair conclude that ex-con Truck Brower is their most obvious suspect.
#3 - Rogue
Season 1 - Episode 7 - Aired 5/8/1996
While guest-lecturing in Blair's anthropology class, Jim saves the entire building from a deadly gas leak designed to distract the attention while a canister of the Ebola virus was being stolen from the hazardous materials lab.
#4 - True Crime
Season 2 - Episode 6 - Aired 10/9/1996
Ellison gets fame when the police department invites TV producer Wendy Hawthorne and her cameraman to do a piece on him for her show ""True Crime.""
#6 - Ice Man
Season 2 - Episode 7 - Aired 10/30/1996
Ellison and Sandburg are called in to investigate an attack on a prostitute named Amber Larkin.
#7 - Spare Parts
Season 2 - Episode 9 - Aired 11/13/1996
Ellison and Sandburg get a chance to hone their driving skills when car thieves set up shop on the streets of Cascade.
#8 - Love and Guns
Season 1 - Episode 8 - Aired 5/15/1996
After stopping an armored car heist, Ellison is struck by the high-tech weaponry at the criminals' disposal.
#9 - Night Train
Season 1 - Episode 6 - Aired 5/1/1996
Jim and Blair are assigned to escort Derek Wilson, a key witness in a local homicide case, on his train ride to the courthouse in Cascade.
#10 - Vow of Silence
Season 1 - Episode 10 - Aired 7/17/1996
As Blair forces Jim to a vacation at a remote monastery, Ellison begins to enjoy until one of the monks is found dead.
#11 - The Debt
Season 1 - Episode 4 - Aired 4/10/1996
When Blair moves unknowingly into an apartment next to the drug lab of a gang, Jim finds himself embroiled in a gang war.
#12 - Flight
Season 2 - Episode 1 - Aired 9/4/1996
During a flight to South America, Captain Banks and his son Daryl crash land in the Peruvian jungle.
#13 - Cypher
Season 1 - Episode 5 - Aired 4/24/1996
Blair and Jim, with forensics specialist Carolyn Plummer, suspect that a series of seemingly unrelated murders are actually the work of a serial killer.
#14 - Survival
Season 2 - Episode 22 - Aired 5/7/1997
Dawson Quinn, a cop-killing thief who stole five million dollars that has never been found, is transported through forested wilderness. The convoy is attacked and the criminals flee with Banks as hostage.
#15 - Payback
Season 2 - Episode 5 - Aired 10/2/1996
Ellison finds himself witness to the beginnings of an underworld war between the drug-running bikers and the local representatives of the deadly Japanese Yakuza.
#16 - Hear No Evil
Season 2 - Episode 13 - Aired 1/15/1997
Ellison sees undercover police detective Brent Marten thrown to death from a police helicopter.
#17 - Light My Fire
Season 2 - Episode 14 - Aired 2/5/1997
An arsonist burns down a furniture warehouse, and Ellison rescues an unconscious guard from the building.
#18 - Second Chance
Season 2 - Episode 10 - Aired 11/20/1996
When Francisco Rivero, an ex-associate of Hector Carasco, kidnaps Carasco's daughter and uses as blackmail for the fortune, Ellison and Sandburg join forces with her Uncle Gustavo to bring her home.
#19 - Killers
Season 1 - Episode 3 - Aired 4/3/1996
After witnessing the death of undercover officer Danny Choi at the hands of sniper Tommy Juno, Jim uses his vision to identify and apprehend the killer.
#20 - Out of the Past
Season 2 - Episode 2 - Aired 9/11/1996
Jim and Blair are assigned to protect pop singer Angie Ferris from escaped convict Jay Weston.
#21 - Attraction
Season 1 - Episode 9 - Aired 5/22/1996
Jim's sentinel abilities detect something strange at the scenes of the recent jewelry robberies but he's unable to figure out what's causing the reaction.
#22 - Deep Water
Season 2 - Episode 3 - Aired 9/18/1996
At an unrelated auto accident by the river, evidence surfaces which implicates Jim and his old partner, Jack Pendergrast, in a case from four years prior.
#23 - Dead Drop
Season 2 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/19/1997
Sandburg becomes trapped between floors in a skyscraper elevator controlled by an extortionist, who threatens to send the elevator to its doom unless a ransom is paid.
#24 - Pennies from Heaven
Season 2 - Episode 21 - Aired 4/30/1997
An armored truck explodes and rains hundred-dollar bills down into a ghetto neighborhood.
#25 - Murder 101
Season 4 - Episode 2 - Aired 2/8/1999
It appears that two students in Blair's anthropology class are engaged in extracurricular activities that aren't listed in any of the college handbooks.