#67 "Things We Said Today" (Season 4 #12)

#67 "Things We Said Today" (Season 4 #12)

Original Air Date: Dec. 18, 1989

Writer: Glen Morgan & James Wong

Director: Tucker Gates

Production Code: 16333

Things To Note: Filmed during Season 3 and held back.

Opening Theme:

Closing Theme:

LOD:

Regulars:

Friends, Family & Guests: Shannen Doherty [ Unknown ], Stephen Godwin [ Unknown ], Dirk Blocker [ Unknown ], Lise Cutter [ Unknown ], Keith Coogan [ Unknown ]

Episode Summary from The 21 Jump Street Episode Guide:

NOTE: Stop with this one if you don’t want spoilers.

Ioki is confronted by a teenage boy with a gun, who three years earlier Ioki had talked into turning in his drug abusing family.

Detailed Episode Review (contains spoilers!):

(NOTE: I am doing these from the FX repeats. Email me with missing scenes & I’ll add them).

Ioki is getting gas, and the kid working at the gas station recognizes his name from his credit card. He follows Ioki to his apartment and gets in his car, putting a gun to Ioki’s head and asking "do you remember me?" The rest of the story is told in flashback - 3 years ago, in January 1986. Ioki is undercover in a high school trying to bust a drug dealer. Shannen Doherty plays a girl who has/does/sells drugs. The kid Ioki is targeting is her brother. It turns out that the brother is the only drug-free person in his family - the others (mom, dad and sis) all do drugs, together sometimes. Ioki pressures the kid to turn them in, as per the Nancy Reagan anti-drug movement in the mid 1980’s. He doesn’t realize Ioki is a cop and decides to follow his advice. His dad sends him out to pick up a package of cocaine, and he takes it to the police station. Sis is taken to a detention center, and Mom and Dad are put in jail. Then we cut back to the present, and the kid tells Ioki that his life has been ruined because Ioki talked him into this. His dad is still in prison, his sister is pregnant and fanatically religious, and his mother is dead of cancer. Ioki struggles with the kid, and the gun goes off. Ioki is shot in the arm, but he chases the kid anyway as he runs; he tackles him and arrests him. That is when the kid finds out he was a cop all along. The kid is jailed, and Ioki apologizes for being overzealous and even pleads for leniency in the sentencing for the charge of shooting a police officer (he gets out of control, yells and has to be dragged out of court). In a subplot, back in 1986, he had a red-haired girlfriend, and they broke up. Now, as he is dealing with all this, he tries to get her back.

Commentary:

Cyndi Glass: This one is an interesting and complex episode overall, though marred by a lot of continuity problems. The good stuff here is that it’s a Morgan/Wong episode, which are usually quite well done and entertaining. Great dialogue, direction and plot, and for once it stars Ioki, which is pretty rare. I think it’s really sad that this was a held-over show from Season 3, that someone had previously decided not to use for some reason, and it was an Ioki one. At least we finally got to see it. However, there are some terrible continuity problems. They seem to have tried to fix it somewhat by holding it back a year (this was filmed during Season 3), but still, someone goofed badly. Season 1 was Spring 1987, and Jenko was the captain when Ioki was hired. Yet the flashback parts are from 1986 (they watch the Challenger explode in the school auditorium) and show Fuller being the new captain. I think they could have hired Forrest to come back for ONE episode. They’re all griping about the sterile office and Fuller’s new rules, which is right, but it shouldn’t be January 1986. Also, Ioki did not confess to ANYONE that he was really Vietnamese until halfway through Season 2 (#24 "Christmas in Saigon"). He even lied to the police department, his captains, his friends, and his co-workers, to the extent of taking the Japanese name Harry Ioki. We never saw him with a girlfriend in Season 1. Yet, in flashback, he is making casual conversation with his girlfriend about how he lost so many family members and others in Vietnam and how it makes him want a family of his own. I began to wonder if this was one of those episodes that Depp refused to do in Season 3 -maybe he originally was talking to a girlfriend about how losing his dad made him want a family. I did notice that Ioki’s car is much improved over that heap of machinery he drove at the beginning of the series.

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