MSTed by Brendan Herlihy and Steve Weinberg

Take me to this MSTing NOW!

Our feature presentation is… excuse while I shudder for even thinking about this… a fanfic that sends the members of "The A-Team" to dance at Chippendales (see objectification). It's called "Something in the String of G" (see objectification), and is 80's television distilled to 100 proof.

The team has to protect one of its investments, a glass factory that got diversified and cross-pollinated and now is basically nothing more than a empty husk kept afloat by profits from a mysterious, hugely successful night club. And the club's short-staffed this weekend. So factory owner and operator Clayton Ardoyne, a name so ludicrous he may be a real person (don't see objectification) asks Hannibal to have the Team fill in as waiters, without telling him the nature of the business. They agree, and thus start the procession of approximately one hundred and forty-six ultra-painful 80's-television-style "comedy" situations, where a non-sentient fungus such as a morel or a toadstool would know they were in a male strip club, but Hannibal and Face don't. Plus Face is written as the most annoying whiny little puss you would ever want to give a purple nurple, and the big scene is where Murdock strips all the way down to his no, I don’t really have to finish that sentence. Hey, you can stop reading anytime you want. I had to muck through it twelve times.

Thank god for Steve Weinberg. His co-writing saved me at least six more re-reads of this- unique vision of Stephen J. Cannel's paramilitary franchise.

This was by far the hardest piece I've ever had MST. To even suggest that Dwight "Murdock" Schultz was the sexy member of the A-Team- ugh. But to then take the supposed babe magnet, Face or Peck or Starbuck or whoever the hell he is, and deliberately make him the most avocado-brained, gratingly unappealing human being to ever prowl the face of a catwalk, seems to me to mock the implied contract between the fanfic author and his/her characters. And as to this "Face and Hannibal don't know they're in a strip club" angle- for god's sake! THEY'RE IN A STRIP CLUB! How can this fact not come up in conversation at some point? Say what you will about the intellectual capacity of the male gender, I have always maintained that one of the evolutionary characteristics of the development of our half of the genome pool was that when one of our members was present in a strip club, we damn well knew about it, occasionally without even having to be told.

Scratch really finds himself in this episode. I love the lug. He came out of simple necessity- there was no one for Pearl to boss around and act evil with up on the Satellite. She can't intimidate Gypsy, master of the ship's higher functions, and she can't control Magic Voice, what with her not having a body. Bottom line, while the chemistry between the three was interesting, it needed another element. So in comes Scratch, a familiar endentured to serve Pearl's every whim, and not exactly thrilled with the prospect.

Scratch isn't really evil, although he professes to be an amoral schemer. He's got that tough Brooklyn accent, but he's got "sensitive skin" and implies he's a soap opera junkie. He's a supplicant, a coward, and not exactly the sharpest nail in hell's carton. So sometimes he'll help Pearl out with her nefarious plots, and sometimes he'll accidentally cut off her head and shoot her body out the airlock. And he is from hell- I mean how cool is that?