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, Terri is approached by a man who claims to be a political refugee.  But is he really?  It’s a good thing T.S. Turner doesn’t have anything better to do than help her out.

Episode 3.17 “Nightmare”

(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on April 28th, 1990)

While walking down the street in Canada, Terri is approached by a desperate man (William Colgate), who introduces himself as Sebastian Fuentes.  He explains that he was a newspaper editor in his native country of San Miguel.  After a left-wing death squad killed his family, Sebastian fled to North America.  Now, he needs Terri’s help to be designated a refugee.  He claims that there are people from San Miguel who want him dead and, for that reason, he cannot risk going to the authorities or even being seen in Terri’s office.  He says he has to hide, no matter what.

Terri doesn’t know anything about immigration law.  Both T.S Turner and a sleazy lawyer named Kerr (Don Allison) warn her that she shouldn’t be so quick to believe Sebastian’s story.  But something about Sebastian’s fear touches Terri’s heart and she agrees to help him.

Unfortunately, it turns out that both Turner and Kerr were correct.  Sebastian is actually a colonel who murdered the real Sebastian.  The nightmares that haunt him are not about watching his family being killed but instead about being the killer himself.  The people who are searching for him are not government agents but instead the relatives of the people who he victimized in his home country.  Eventually, Sebastian’s real identity is discovered by some fellow refugees (one of whom is played by a young Jill Hennessy) and he ends up in prison, haunted by his crimes.

This was an unusually serious episode of T and T.  Indeed, it was shot more like an episode of Monsters than a typical episode of this show.  Unfortunately, with the exception of Don Allison’s performance as the sleazy Mr. Kerr, the acting in this episode was pretty dodgy and it was easy to guess that Sebastian was going to turn out to not be who he said he was.

Probably the most interesting thing about this episode is that it aired 34 years ago but the issues that it deals with are the same issues that are going on today.  Dictators are still coming to power and abusing their citizens and, as a result, refugees are still flooding over the border.  The immigration system is still broken and it doesn’t appear that anyone is truly interested in finding a way to fix it.  This episode aired in 1990, long before men like Venezuela’s Maduro came to power.  The issues that are dealt with in this episode existed before the current crop of dictators and they will undoubtedly continue even after people like Maduro fade into history.