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 - 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.""

#3 - 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.

#4 - 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.

#5 - 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.

#6 - 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.

#7 - 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.

#8 - 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.

#9 - 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.

#10 - 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.

#11 - 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.

#12 - 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.

#13 - 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.

#14 - Sleeping Beauty
Season 2 - Episode 24 - Aired 5/21/1997
12-year-old girl Stacey and her parents flee their home. The car is run off the road, killing the parents and placing Stacey in a coma.

#15 - Red Dust
Season 2 - Episode 17 - Aired 2/26/1997
A birthday party for a Russian woman is interrupted by a vicious attack that claims two men and ends with the theft of a suitcase from the woman's boyfriend.

#16 - Three Point Shot
Season 3 - Episode 2 - Aired 9/17/1997
When basketball players on the Cascade Jaguars start turning up dead, Jim must bring the killers before justice.

#17 - Sweet Science
Season 3 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/25/1998
Ellison and Sandburg watch Sandburg's old buddy, boxer ""Sweet"" Roy Williams fight a few rounds. Things turn decidedly sour when Sweet Roy winds up dead and all the leads point to his little brother, Jamie.

#18 - Smart Alec
Season 2 - Episode 18 - Aired 3/12/1997
Ellison and Sandburg are sent to a college campus to investigate the murder of a maintenance worker.

#19 - Prisoner X
Season 3 - Episode 12 - Aired 1/14/1998
Jim Ellison agrees to go undercover as an inmate in Starkville Prison to investigate a series of suspicious prisoner suicides.


#21 - Breaking Ground
Season 3 - Episode 11 - Aired 12/17/1997
When archaeology student Martin Gillman is buried alive by a cave-in at an excavation site, Ellison and Sandburg suspect foul play.

#22 - Love Kills
Season 3 - Episode 18 - Aired 3/18/1998
Buddhist monks start dying in Cascade's Chinatown and Jim's old love Lila from his days in Bali, seems to be involved. Despite Jim's investigation is hampered by overwhelming sensory overloads, it isn't hard to figure out that the monks are interested in opium smuggling.

#23 - Sentinel Too (1)
Season 3 - Episode 23 - Aired 5/20/1998
When Ellison has strange visions of jaguars and a series of superhumanly performed thefts occurring around the city, Blair and Jim suspect that he may not be the only sentinel in town. Even with the entire force on the lookout, this cunning burglar seems always to elude capture.

#24 - Siege
Season 1 - Episode 2 - Aired 3/27/1996
Garrett Kincaid, a notorious criminal that Jim Ellison had arrested years before, seizes control of Cascade's police station with the help of his gang of felons.

#25 - Warriors
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 9/10/1997
In the Peruvian jungle, a Chopec Sentinel named Incacha is enraged by the pollution of his land by a contaminated oil well and the murder of one of his tribesman by an employee of the Cyclops Oil Co. In Cascade, Ellison examines the poison dart that killed the VP of security for the Cyclops Oil Co. and recognizes the markings of the Chopec tribe — the people who helped him develop his Sentinel powers.