A-Team Episode 4×05
“The Road to Hope”
- Location: Skid Row, Los Angeles, CA; and Hidden Valley, CA 99919 (for the record, that’s an Alaska zip code)
- Tank: Food Truck (it’s unmodified, but they use it as a tank so I’m counting it)
- Disguises: “Jack Daniels” the Wino
- Scam: A Building
- Flight: No
- Fixation: Carmine the Invisible (with sound effects!)
- Flips: 1
- Fee: not $300,000
- Quote: “The Brooklyn Bridge goes for $500-600 thousand dollars minimum. Believe me, I know, I’ve sold it twice already.” – Face. Of course only a fool would pay that–he gave me a 20% discount!
- Bonus Quote: “Makes me wonder where all the female bums are” – Murdock. Actually, he has a point…
- Who is that?? Nope, I got nothin’
The team, fairly certain that the client this time around is an MP agent, has Hannibal under disguise as a wino. I’ll just say right now, Hannibal’s wino, “Jack Daniels,” is fantastic. I could listen to his ridiculous delivery of highly-refined, highly-slurred speech for hours. Hannibal meets another bum, and the team quickly loses track of which bum is which. Hannibal is captured by aliens from the future who are using bums and others forgotten by society to conduct medical experiments on. We learn that they are developing a bio-weapon, with the ultimate aim to wipe out all of humanity before they can take their rightful place among the stars!
Nah, forget all that. We don’t yet know why they’re capturing bums, though even Hannibal acknowleges waking up from his chloroforming to find himself “in a sci fi movie.” What we do know is Face is driving quite the car. An Excalibur (I had to google it). Wonder if it’ll survive the ep? My money is somewhere between Amy’s wreck and leaded swiss cheese. But back to the current act: the bum who’s not Hannibal is handed a large suitcase of money just before being captured by the MPs. Our heroes spring him (as is their norm in such situations), only to discover the mix-up.
The team climbs the bad guy ladder through to Bluto, who’s part of an operation that’s stealing the identities of bums and selling them on the black market after disappearing them. The entire operation is run out of a Mission, so for the second time in as many weeks… Father Face is back again! Assisted by evangelist Murdock, naturally.
Face’s scam to procure a building was particularly good this time around–it’s a deal he’s only too happy to acknowledge as “too good to be true” to the mark. Our heroes are now running a Mission, which raised for me some philosophical questions: the team is essentially doing the Lord’s work, and there are fruits being born out… but they’re doing it for deceptive reasons. Of course the deception itself is to get the bottom of the criminal scheme… I’m left to ponder the implications of that one… in the end, I’m going to go with it was the 80’s, and our heroes are true heroes (there was no other kind in the 80’s), and fall way back to the episode where Hannibal showed an implicit respect to the Bible. So sure, why not.
The team is captured at the next rung of the ladder, which usually means it’s time for a well-appointed machine shop and Montage Time! But no, this time B.A. rigs a distress call to Murdock, a Code 6:16, which I assume means “Captured again, come rescue us.” I can’t help but think that’s probably what most of the codes mean, perhaps with a variation to account for “Captured again, come rescue us–also one of us has been shot, so, like, hurry.” Murdock comes to the rescue with an army of bums–it’s not a perfect finale as only one of the three Jeeps flips, but it’ll do.
This ep was a lot of fun–the comedy of errors and constant mix-ups, just the right amount of tension and light-heartedness, and Hannibal’s wino really put it over the top. Not sure what I think of the team running a fake Mission, but when it comes to 80’s TV, I suppose it works for me. There were also plenty of great character moments–the references to the bad guy looking like Bluto, a minor gag regarding Murdock’s ever-present ball cap, an order for Milk from B.A. at the restaraunt. Subtle writing, and nice detail.
