Briefly returning home to Los Angeles, the A-Team are sitting in their hotel room when they suddenly get a call from Stockwell's assistant. Stockwell has been taken captive by Ivan Trigorin, a freelance intelligence operative that Stockwell had been attempting to bring into his own operation. Ivan is working with China, and wants Stockwell to reveal the location of a top-secret stealth bomber that the A-Team recently stole from behind the Iron Curtain. The A-Team are informed that if Stockwell isn't back within 36 hours, then his entire operation will be scrubbed and the promise of a Presidential pardon for the A-Team will disappear. Naturally, the team has no choice but to rescue him.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Actor Allusion: The entire episode runs on this trope as not only was Robert Vaughn a series regular and David McCallum playing the villain of the week, but the episode was structured to parody and reference episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E..
- Badass in Distress: General Stockwell, who was clever enough to capture the A-Team and force them to work for him, gets captured by Ivan and spends most of the episode on a torture rack in a dimly lit room.
- Diplomatic Impunity: Attempted by some KGB spooks, who burst into the A-Team's hotel room hoping to find Stockwell themselves. The team captures them and they insist that they were sent by the Russian consulate and therefore have diplomatic immunity and can't be questioned. Hannibal reminds them that he's a fugitive and not a representative of the United States government, and therefore under no obligation to respect diplomatic immunity.
- Homage: This episode paired Robert "Napoleon Solo" Vaughn (playing regular character General Hunt Stockwell) with former co-star David "Illya Kuryakin" McCallum.
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Robert Vaughn is kidnapped by his "former partner" David McCallum.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
- The A-Team questions the KGB operatives they capture by dunking their heads in a bathtub full of water.
- The Chinese operatives who captured Stockwell take a more organized but no more civilized approach, strapping him into a chair under bright lights and giving him regular injections of some unknown chemical. They then spin his chair around, with the lights, chemicals, and suggestions from Ivan causing him to hallucinate traumatic events from his past.
- Napoleon Delusion: Murdock infiltrates the psychiatric hospital where the villains are holding Stockwell, by pretending to be an insane man who think he's Frank Sinatra. Despite insisting he's not looney anymore, he gets really into it.
- Nobody Can Die: A notable aversion. Stockwell shoots out Ivan's tires and causes him to crash his jeep, as per usual on the show. However, this time the jeep bursts into flames with Ivan unable to escape, and the characters stating afterward that yes, Stockwell killed him.
- Repressed Memories: While being tortured by the villains, Stockwell begins to hallucinate memories of his past and his previous work with Ivan on Project Javelin, in which they were both captured and Ivan gave in under interrogation, selling out their team and resulting in the deaths of 27 operatives. Stockwell had actually forgotten this because of the trauma of it all, and had convinced himself that Ivan selling them out was only a bad dream he'd had.
- Shout-Out:
- The title of the episode, the inclusion of David McCallum as a guest star, and the storytelling structure, are all direct references to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. There is no actual crossover of characters or plot, however.
- Murdock infiltrates the psychiatric hospital where the villains are holding Stockwell, pretending to be an insane man who thinks he's Frank Sinatra. He spends a large part of the episode singing Sinatra songs.
- We Used to Be Friends: Stockwell and Ivan worked together before, which is why Stockwell was trying to bring Ivan into his current operation, before Ivan betrayed him and kidnapped him. It's later revealed, when the torture causes Stockwell to hallucinate their past together, that Ivan's betrayal happened earlier than that. They were previously involved with a Project Javelin in Cuba, when they were both captured and interrogated. Stockwell refused to break under torture, but Ivan gave in and gave the enemy information that led to the deaths of 27 operatives. Ivan considers this incident to be My Greatest Failure himself... but only insofar as the fact that it humiliated him and destroyed his career as an intelligence operative.
