Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing T. and T., a Canadian show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990.  The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, Amy, T.S. and Joe get involved in a — ugh — hostage situation!

Episode 2.9 “Hostage”

(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on November 28th, 1988)

Fleeing from the police after a botched robbery, two sweaty crooks, Rook (Lawrence King) and Larry (Angelo Rizacos), duck into Don’s Sporting Goods and end up holding 8 people hostage, including Amy and Joe!  What a scary situation!  These eight Canadians probably just wanted to buy new hockey jerseys and now, they’re being held hostage!

The police, of course, are ineffectual.  T.S. tracks down the ex-wife of one of the men but she can’t convince him to come out of the store.  The two crooks don’t want to go back to prison so they’ve demanded a lot of money and a plane and they’ve given the Toronto police only two hours to meet their demands.  Inside the store, Amy tries to reason with them.  Rook knows that things have gone too far and that they need to surrender to the police.  But Larry is sweaty and violent and determined to escape with the money.

I groaned a bit when I saw what this episode was going to be about.  I absolutely dread sitting through anything that involves hostage negotiation.  There’s really not much that can happen in a story like this, other than the hostage takers doing a lot of yelling and the negotiators saying, “You’re going to have to give us more time!”  It’s really not much fun to watch people getting guns pointed at their heads while some loser rants and raves about how he’s going to pull the trigger unless he gets what he wants.  With the exception of Dog Day Afternoon, hostage taking is usually pretty boring to watch.

Probably the biggest mistake that this episode makes is that it sidelines T.S. Turner for much of the action.  The main appeal of T and T is the chance to watch and hear Mr. T take down the bad guys.  T.S. spends the majority of this episode just standing around and only he gets to call one person “brother.”  Finally, during the final few minutes, T.S. ends up crawling around in the building’s loft so that he can break through the ceiling and take out the hostage takers but, by the time he does, the two criminals have already turned on each other.  For once, it falls not to T.S. to capture the main bad guy but for the bad guy’s accomplice to shoot him in the back.

All in all, this was a disappointing episode.  Amy failed to talk the criminals into giving themselves up and T.S. failed to capture the criminals by himself.  What is Canada even paying these two for?