A-Team Episode 2×12
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“The White Ballot”
- Location: Parkland, New Mexico
- Tank: No, though they did rig a warehouse into a sort of fortress
- Disguises: News Man
- Scam: Joe Morgan election–not exactly a scam, but it’ll have to do
- Flight: No
- Fixation: Invisible Harmonica
- Flips: 1
- Fee: Unknown, but no implication there wasn’t payment
- Quote: “In a cup, fool!” – B.A., answering how he’d like his coffee
- Bonus Quote: “When I was in high school, I ran for president of the student council. But I lost on a technicality though–they weren’t having an election at the time” – Murdock, on his short-lived career in politics.
- Who is that?? Clifton James, Sheriff Dawson. Hint: wherever you saw him, he was probably a Sheriff.
And we’re back to one of our big-three 80’s bad guy trifecta–crooked cops! Sorry about the false alarm last episode regarding Amy. Spoiler alert: we don’t have her for much longer, but while she was absent last episode, she was back (again with no explanation) in this one. The plot is pretty simple–there’s a crooked Sheriff that needs getting rid of, so our heroes pit Face (aka, returning war hero Joe Morgan) up against him in an election.
The election theme earns us what are probably the best minutes of this episode: multiple presidential impersonations from Murdock. I couldn’t place the first one, though I think it was supposed to be Reagan. The second was clearly Nixon.
Our other guest star, Clifton James has a remarkable career playing Sheriffs left and right. You may recognize him from Pros & Cons as having played Warden Beale (Warden, Sheriff, whatever). Anyway, the guy is a Sheriff all over the place, it’s kind of amazing.
Guest star Andrew Robinson returns again, too–and he was either playing his part very oddly, or had been over-dubbed. I’m not sure what was going on there, but it was very distracting. The odd thing is, if he was over-dubbed (as I suspect), for some reason it was still his voice they dubbed him with. Either way, every time he opened his mouth, it was jarring and pulled me right out of the episode. Very strange.
Anyway, these were some pretty dumb bad guys–I mean more so than usual. It’s made clear that they intend on just killing our heroes outright, and they had multiple opportunities to do so–and instead, the lock them up to go have coffee, leaving the team alone in a well-appointed machine shop with only one guy standing guard. I mean, yes, we expect that, it’s the A-Team, but they usually give us some reason for it to happen. Something better than “well, let’s go to Denny’s.” I’ve read the Evil Overlord Guide book, and it’s pretty clear on what you do when you capture heroes (hint: you don’t go out for coffee).
A fairly forgettable episode, with only one car flip, no real scam, below average bad guys, and gags that seemed a bit below par, too (not to mention the bizarre technical issue with Andrew Robinson). Ah well, they can’t all be the team building a cabbage cannon.