Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing South Central, which aired, for 10 episodes, on Fox in 1994.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Andre gets a gun!

Episode 1.7 and 1.8 “Gun”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on May 24th, 1994)

I’m not a huge fan of the song Amazing Grace.

Okay, allow me to clarify.  I know that it’s an important song.  I know that it’s a song that was at least partially written as a protest against the Atlantic slave trade.  I know that it’s a song that means a lot to many people.  But I have to admit that I cringe whenever someone starts singing it in a movie or on a TV show because it’s always sung in such an overwrought manner and it usually indicates that the program is about to take an extremely heavy-handed term.

I point this out because the first 30 minutes of Gun features Tasha singing Amazing Grace several times around the house, once while a police helicopter hovers over her house.  My first instinct was to cringe but actually, upon watching a second time , I realized that the scene with the helicopter is a powerful moment.  Tasha sings not only in defiance of the police but the helicopter’s spotlight briefly turns her front porch into a stage.  After six episodes of Tasha continually being told to sacrifice, it was nice to see a rare episode in which Tasha actually got a moment of triumph.

The majority of this two-part episode centers on Andre.  Just as Tasha has spent six episodes being expected to constantly sacrifice for the family, Andre has spent six episodes trying to come to terms with the death of his brother Marcus while living up to his mother’s expectations and also trying to pursue a relationship with Nicole.  In order to see Nicole, Andre has been riding the bus and, as we’ve seen, he’s gotten mugged, beaten up, and continually harassed for his troubles.  This episode, Andre takes two things with him on his latest trip to Nicole’s.  One is a pack of condoms, which leads to Nicole telling him that she doesn’t want to see him again unless he can figure out how to articulate how he really feels about her.  The other is his mother’s gun, which he tucks in the waistband of his pants and which he flashes when a guy starts to give him and Rashad trouble.  Rashad is excited about the gun, announcing that he and Andre now have “juice” and treating it almost like a toy.  Andre, who has actually lost a family member to gun violence, is more serious about it, telling Rashad that he would like to use it on the people who killed his brother.  (Of course, while Andre and Rashad stand in the house and handle the gun, Deion stands silently in the background, taking it all in.)

One interesting thing about this episode is that Andre’s mentor, Ray, is nowhere to be seen nor is he mentioned, even when Joan grounds Andre for forgetting to pick up Deion.  Given the fact that Ray was last seen realizing that Joan will probably never love him the way the he loves her, it makes sense that Ray might need a break from the Mosely family but it also means that there’s no one, outside of his family, for Andre to talk to, with the exception of Rashad.  At the Ujamaa Co-op, Bobby attempts to reach out to Andre and Rashad, telling him that he heard they had trouble on the bus and warning them about young men carrying guns.  As well-intentioned as Bobby is, both Andre and Rashad are too young and immature to really understand his message of building up the community as opposed to destroying it.  As opposed to Ray, who sometimes seemed too distant from the realities of life in Andre’s neighborhood, Bobby understands what is happening in the community but his insistence on trying to view everything in idealistic terms makes him ineffectual as an authority figure.

(If anything, Earl Billings’s perpetually annoyed Mayo Bonner, who trusts no one, seems like he might be the wisest of the older men on the show but his bad-tempered comments are mostly just played for laughs.)

Days later, Joan agrees to allow Andre to go to the High Life Party being held at the Co-op.  Andre knows that Nicole will also be at the party and he wants to give her a letter that he’s spent the last few days writing and re-writing.  While Joan and her next-door neighbor Sweets go through Andre’s bedroom and discover not only his condoms but also a first draft of the letter that he wrote for Nicole, Andre meets up with Nicole at the Co-op and ruins everything by once again flashing his gun at a guy who rudely steps in front of Nicole.  Nicole leaves, even though her best friend Candi, who has taken a sudden interest in Rashad, refuses to leave with her.  Andre chases after her and, on the bus, he tells her that only carries the gun for protection.  Nicole says that her parents were right about Andre and refuses to talk to him for the rest of the ride.  After Nicole gets off the bus, Andre tears up the love letter that he was going to give her and realizes that he will probably never see her again.

Yep, just another not-so happy ending on South Central!  That said, it was also a realistic ending and the show deserves a lot of credit for having Nicole react realistically to Andre’s aggressive behavior.  She freaks out when she sees that he has the gun and all of his excuses (and they are just excuses) cannot fix the damage of that one moment.  And Nicole is totally in the right.  What if the guy at the party had a gun?  What if someone on the bus had a gun?  Carrying a gun for protection is one thing and certainly, Andre has had enough bad things happen to him on this show that one can understand why he would feel like he needs some sort of protection.  But, at the Co-op, there was no threat.  Andre showed off the gun just to intimidate someone else.  I would have dumped Andre too.

This was a powerful episode.  In the end, Andre swears that he’s never going to carry another gun and watching it, the viewer hopes that he’s telling the truth but also knows that life is never as simple as one might hope.

Next week: we finish up South Central!