A-Team Episode 3×08

“The Island”

• Location: An Island
• Tank: Yes! An M4A1 Sherman, I believe
• Disguises: No
• Scam: No
• Flight: Yes
• Fixation: Crocodilus Niloticus
• Flips: 0
• Fee: Free
• Quote: “I like having a tank” – Don’t we all, Hannibal. Don’t we all.
• Who is that?? I got nothin’–but hey, did you happen to notice The Tank???

Lots of exciting things happened this week! First off, the bad guys actually manage to hit someone with a gun–who turns out to be an old field medic friend of the A-Team from the war. This is only the second time we’ve seen someone actually get hit by a gun on this show.

The bad guys this ep are taking over an island, and they’re led by what I can only describe as an old-school Bond Villain. This guy literally has an iron fist. Meanwhile, one of the island kids gets a message out via a wanted ad. Both the team and Decker respond to the ad. Guess who wins. Speaking of Decker, I guess other guy was only a special guest Colonel.

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Murdock’s cover is finally blown, though I’m not sure the show will acknowledge it. While Decker (and Lynch) have long suspected Murdock of working with them, they’ve never had proof, and the show is usually at least ambiguous if not explicit in maintaining Murdock’s cover. This time, though, it’s pretty obvious. Decker is maybe 12 ft away from Murdock who’s not wearing a mask or anything.

Once they arrive on the island (by a boat, at B.A.’s insistence–which was actually a boat-plane, at the rest of the team’s insistence), Face delivers a beautiful speech about this being America, the implication being that, due to no plane being present, their innocence should be presumed until proven guilty. Of course there are two problems with this: first, there’s no way they took that raft to the island, and second, the island, as we were informed earlier, is a sovereign nation–and therefore, decidedly not America. B.A. lets’em off easy this round.

I want to make a special call-out to the woman and her son who helped hide the A-Team while under extreme threat. It’s not often we see non-Heroes stand up against bad guys like this. Contrast them with the girl who sold out the team this episode. Fortunately for them, they never trusted her in the first place–as evidenced by Face’s total lack of putting the moves on her. Also, a special call-out to the writers for, once again, doing their homework, this time on Murdock’s crocodile, which is a real species (though native to the Nile river, so…?).

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This ep, taken as a whole, is good, but not quite what I’d call great–but boy does it ever check the boxes! It’s a momentous occasion when Hannibal gets a tank and always fun to watch. My only real complaint is we didn’t get a single flip. Seems a bit of a shame to have a perfectly good tank and get no flips. Especially irritating was the Jeep that was blasted into the air only to land on its dumb wheels. Dumb jeep.

Oh well, at least this time, Hannibal has an excuse for not keeping it. Can’t very well drive a tank off an island, after all.