A-Team Episode 1×05
“A Small and Deadly War”
- Location: Los Angeles, California
- Tank: No
- Disguises: Barfly, Cowboy Statue
- Scam: Admittance into police station as Exterminator crew
- Flight: No
- Fixation: Not really, though first mention of Billy the Dog
- Flips: 1
- Fee: $3680 (reduced from $14,602)
- Quote: “Your captain almost lost a, ah… vital piece of equipment” — Face, after a warning shot nearly costs someone a, ah… vital piece of equipment.
- Who is that?? Dean Stockwell, Officer Collins. Hint: “…and they have a plan”
This week’s bad guys: policemen! That’s right, cops rate right up there with biker gangs and… Heh, well of course I mean crooked cops. The second-worst bad guys of the 80’s (they’re right beneath drug lords–see the pilot episode). Hannibal’s riding the jazz pretty hard this ep. After having the bad guys bugged, proceeds to repeatedly play on their paranoia, taunting them with the information he’s gleaned from the bugs.
I love a show where I know that even when the bad guys think they have our heroes where they want’em, we know they don’t really. This episode also featured the classic trope of “they’re hiding on the ceiling.” Pro tip: if you’re ever hiding in a building and you know bad guys are about to shoot it up with automatic weapons, hide on the ceiling. Bad guys never shoot or look there. And as a bonus, you get to drop on them when they come into the room to make sure they got you.
Speaking of tropes, the Irish Pub we meet the first of Hannibal’s two disguises in has got to be the most Irish Irish Pub that ever did Irish its Irishy way o’cross me screen… After a bit of fun, our heroes find the weak link in the bad guy team (Officer Collins, pictured above), and blackmail him into turning against the remaining thugs.
The entire final act was lots of fun–the setting of abandoned amusement park I feel is normally reserved for horror movies, but it made for an interesting place to have the final confrontation. I immediately knew Hannibal would be one of the cowboy statues but the reveal of which one was still fun. And B.A. punching the driver of a moving car through the windshield was pretty epic. “Bah, impossible, that would totally tear up B.A.’s hands!” I hear non-believers say, so let’s clear up the confusion here: Mr. T can indeed punch through glass because people were simply tougher in the 80’s.
It’s a well-known fact.