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, someone from the past shows up but it’s not Amy.

Episode 3.4 “Cry Wolf”

(Dir by Alan Simmonds, originally aired on January 26th, 1990)

While filming footage for what is sure to be a riveting cinematic essay on urban decay, high school student Martina (Joanne Vannicola) films a drug deal going to down in an abandoned warehouse.  (The world of T and T was full of abandoned warehouses where people were either selling drugs or hiding stolen money.)  Unfortunately, Martina runs out of film before actually capturing the drugs being exchanged.  Everyone who sees the footage says that it doesn’t prove anything.

Martina decides to take justice into her own hands.  I’m not really sure why.  Martina’s obsession with tracking down the drug dealers and getting them arrested feels somewhat unhinged and it’s a bit disturbing to see coming from a teenager.  I mean, Martina doesn’t know the drug dealers.  She is apparently not a user of cocaine.  She’s just decided that these people deserve to be taken down by her.  One gets the feeling that Martina is going to grow up to be a member of the secret police.

Martina’s investigation leads her to a suburban couple who capture her and make plans to eventually kill her.  Fortunately, Martina’s best friend is Joe Casper (Sean Roberge) and he is able to enlist his mentor, T.S. Turner, to save Martina’s life.

That’s right!  Joe’s back.  He was a semi-regular during the second season, appearing in the opening credits even though he rarely got to do anything on the show.  Still, the return of Joe would, in theory, be the perfect opportunity for the show to explain what happened to Amy.  Amy and Joe were close, after all. It seems like it would be natural for Joe and Turner to say something about missing Amy and perhaps provide us with a clue as to why Amy has been replaced by Terri.

However, that doesn’t happen.  In fact, Turner acts as if he barely knows Joe, despite the fact that he practically adopted him during the second season.  “Why are you kids always here?” he growls when he sees Joe and Martina in Decker’s gym.  And seriously, why is everyone always in Decker’s gym?  The place is a dump!  And is there no one at the gym who could tell T.S. that the hot pink bodysuit that he wears while boxing looks kind of silly?

Anyway, T.S. goes down to the suburbs and saves Martina.  As usual, it doesn’t take much effort because the drug dealers are all kind of wimpy whereas T.S. Turner is Mr. T.  It was only as things ended that I realized that Terri didn’t even appear in this episode.  With Amy gone and Terri not being all the important, T and T is feeling more and more like T.

This episode was pretty dumb but I did appreciate that the drug dealers were essentially just two suburbanites who had no idea what they were doing.  That was a nice twist.  But otherwise …. yeah, pretty dumb.