A-Team Episode 4×10
“There Goes the Neighborhood”
- Location: Canoga Park, California
- Tank: Survivalist Tank, upgraded
- Disguises: No
- Scam: No. It was the oddest thing: Face acquired a house by taking out a mortgage.
- Flight: No
- Fixation: The suburban family
- Flips: 1 (the car was parked, so this is a non traditional-flip, but it did flip)
- Fee: Unknown, non-free
- Quote: “We’re very quiet, you’ll hardly notice us” – Face, describing the A-Team, of course.
- Who is that?? Valerie Stevenson, Stevi Faith. Hint: unless you’ve seen 1984’s single-season Dreams, you’ve never seen her anywhere else. I guess that’s kind of a cheat of a Who is that?? since I’d never heard of Dreams before doing my usual pre-writeup IMDB research, but I’m going with it. Interesting enough, this means the only two roles she’s ever played were both as a chick rocker.
“Great, another guest star MTV ep and I have no idea who the pop star is…”
Turns out this time our client is simply invented for the episode, rocker girl Stevi Faith. Someone’s out to get her so it’s up to our heroes to protect her, and what better place to do that than Suburbia, USA. This house is so getting destroyed…
The quiet little cul-de-sac is home to a host of zany characters, the first of which are a Biker Gang. I just knew we’d see Biker Gangs again, but boy has it been a while. Anyway, later these dudes are entertaining themselves by shooting at a little girl’s dog. It was one of those yappy puntable dogs, but still, come on guys, shooting at dogs is not cool, not even in the 80’s! The boys (and our somewhat space-cadet-ish young lady) are living the suburban life which has several great moments, and Stevi’s character cemented her place with me the moment she remarked that 8am is “the middle of the night!”
Soon, zany neighbor #2 shows up, block captain/survivalist Joe, who, having seen B.A. walking about the house, assumed the house was being robbed. For context, I’m writing this right in the middle of Black Lives Matter (and COVID-19, but that’s not relevant here). I’ve never said this show holds up universally, but it usually does. Until sometimes, when it very much doesn’t. Anyway, Joe is an idiot. Joe also has a tank in his garage, but it doesn’t run. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
Joe has apparently never heard of Hannibal Smith (you never know when their fame will precede them or not) and is not happy about our heroes usurping his block captain role after they take out the Biker Gang. Oh, and yeah, the bikers are working for drug lords, which means… side quest! It’s a quick hop on over to the airport to take out a drug shipment. This one’s free of charge because our good guys are good guys.
Meanwhile, back with our A-plot villains, Stevi’s producer is a bad guy! I mean, he’s a record producer so we should have seen that coming. Joe rats out our heroes (have I mentioned he’s an idiot?) and gets chucked out a second story window (into a pool, which my wife totally called) and it’s stand-off time.
Here’s where some brilliant writing comes into play. What originally seemed like just token added drama in the form of noisy neighbors, which then morphed into a coincidental but unrelated trouble in the form of drug lords, eventually matures into an ellaborate setup for an epic, block-busting battle! Face pits the bad guys holding him and Stevi against the now-fuming drug lords–how this plays out is terrific and we were laughing hysterically as the evil record producer walks into the monstrous trap laid for him. As things go quickly out of control, the tank our remaining heroes have montaged up (with rockets) only adds to the mayhem.
In the end, I vastly underestimated this episode. Not only was it not just another MTV ep, but more important, the whole neighborhood was wrecked, not just the one house. I’ve never been happier to have been proven so wrong with explosions. My only remaining closing thought is that not only is Joe a total idiot for several of the things he says, but also for what he doesn’t say–which is “my home-made tank was upgraded by the A-Team!”