Kimble Hall | Through the Shattered Lens

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, T.S. goes up against his scariest opponent yet!

Episode 2.10 “Conspiracy”

(Dir by Robert Malenfant, originally aired on December 5th, 1988)

Two pre-teens, Paul (Michael Fantini) and Colby (Alan Fawcett), come across a million dollars hidden away in an apparently deserted warehouse. In slow motion, Paul throw the money into the air and declares that he and Colby are rich. Of course, Paul doesn’t stop to consider that the money is probably linked to something illegal and that it’s dangerous for him and his best friend to take it.

Soon, Paul and Colby are spending money all over the place. They buy new clothes. They buy new bicycles. Local store owner Bud (Charles Woods Gray) is concerned about the amount of money that Paul and Colby suddenly seem to have. He meets with his old friend, T.S. Turner, and asks Turner to talk to the boys.

Paul and Colby meet with Turner at Decker’s gym and Paul lies and says that the money came from his grandmother. He also says that he loaned Colby the money for Colby’s new bike. After the boys leave, Turner says that he knows that there is more to the story and that he’s going to investigate on his own. Turner invites Joe to investigate with him. It’s good to see that the show’s writers finally remembered that Turner and Amy basically adopted Joe at the start of the second season.

Turner is not the only one investigating. The counterfeiter who created the money wants to know who stole it. Birken (Martin Neufeld) may drive a car with a personalized license plate that reads “Rainbow” but he’s still a scary dude. He’s so dangerous that he doesn’t even wear a shirt half the time! No one is going to tell Birken what to do.

Eventually, Birken kidnaps Paul and ties him to a chair and threatens to suffocate him if he doesn’t help Birken get back his money. That leads to this rather disturbing sight:

The villains on T and T are usually fairly generic and forgettable but Birken is probably the scariest man in Canada. He’s certainly the first villain on this show to be just as intimidating at Mr. T. As soon as Birken shows up, the viewer has no doubt that he’s willing to kill anyone to get back his money. For once, the stakes on this show feels real.

Or, at least, they feel real until T.S. Turner shows up at Birken’s loft. (This is yet another episode where T.S. somehow manages to sneak into a building without being noticed.) When he confronts Birken, Birken attemps to show off his karate moves but T.S. takes him down with one punch.

It’s a bit of an anti-climatic ending, which is a shame because this was actually, by the standards of T and T, a pretty good episode. Birken was both memorable eccentric and genuinely menacing. Still, he was no match for T.S. Turner. No one stops Mr. T.

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?