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!

Wait a minute!  This isn’t Friday afternoon!  This is Saturday morning!  Why am I posting my review of this show now?

I’m only human.  After a long week, I was so exhausted on Friday that I couldn’t even find the strength to former coherent thoughts about a show as simple as T and T.  So, I put off the review until this morning.  Of course, I’m still tired.  All of this thinking is exhausting.  Roll the opening credits so I can take a 90 second nap.

Episode 2.15 “Jump Start”

(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on February 20th, 1989)

In a rare nod to maintaining some sort of continuity from episode to episode, this week’s episode of T and T opens with a flashback to a previous story.  We once again witness how two hapless crooks — Fritz (Dominic Cuzzocrea) and Finn (Ron Gabriel) — tried to pull a gun on T.S. and Decker, just for the clip to fall out of the weapon.  At the time, my feeling was that the two crooks were both too incompetent to be viewed as a legitimate threat and this follow-up episode proved me right.

Fritz and Finn are back on the streets, having had their criminal charges dismissed on a technicality.  They want revenge on Turner for sending them to jail so they decide to steal his car.  However, because they’re both incredibly incompetent, they have to ask Max (Kathleen Laskey, who also played Marlene on Check It Out!) to steal it for them.  Just as with so many episodes of Check It Out!, Laskey was this episode’s saving grace.  She brought so much badass attitude to the character that you couldn’t help but cheer Max on as she stole Turner’s car.

Unfortunately, Laskey really isn’t in much of this episode.  For that matter, Alex, Decker, and even Turner have reduced roles.  The majority of the episode is devoted to Fritz and Finn and their total and complete incompetence.  I get that it was meant to be comedic but these two characters were so stupid and so foolish and so obviously doomed to failure that there was absolutely no tension as to whether or not Turner would be able to get his car back.  As far as I could tell, Turner didn’t even bother to report that his car had been stolen.  He just tracked the two guys down and took it back.  That’s the power of T and T!

Anyway, this was a throw away episode.  I’m not sure why, out of all the villains that have been on this show, T and T decided to bring back the least impressive of them.  Episodes like this leave little doubt that all of the serious criminals left Toronto as soon as Mr. T showed up.