Rewatching 21 Jump Street! Time for the past to come back to screw with us. It’s season four, episode twelve: “Things We Said Today.”

What’s goin’ down: Some punk kid pulls a gun on Ioki, asking to remember him. From there, we flash back to one of Ioki’s first cases, just after Fuller took over as captain at Jump Street. It’s your basic drug case, but it’s really all about Ioki learning what it means to work undercover.

“It’s a flashback episode, so I’m wearing my ‘disco years’ shirt.”

Here’s Hanson: Another Depp no-show. Are we to believe Hanson was still a beat cop at this point?

Penhall’s prerogatives: They put a wig on Penhall to make him look like his season one self. It’s pretty embarrassing.

Bad wig day.

Undercover blues: Ioki gets a high school kid to rat out his drug-dealing dad to the cops. Only this has far-reaching consequences, separating the family and making the kid miserable, which leads back to him going after Ioki in the present.

Goin’ to the chapel: Personality-wise, this one looks back on a time before the Jump Street cops became a family of sorts, so Fuller is back to being the hardass captain, and Ioki is paranoid about his secret past. Continuity-wise, there are a lot of goofs, in that it takes place one year before the show began, but it skips and/or rewrites a lot of what happened in season one.

Also, this is the episode with the weird Bergman-inspired dream sequence.

Torn from today’s headlines: The flashback story takes place on the day of the Challenger explosion, and there’s a lot of talk about death and loss. Nancy Reagan’s famous “Just Say No” campaign gets a lot of mentions.

Trivia time: It’s Shannen Doherty! Here she is about a year or so away from hitting the big time on 90210.

“Your show is named after an address? My show is named after a zip code.”

Jumpin’ or not: For a show that has done such an excellent job maintaining continuity, with tons of fun nods to past episodes and character beats, it’s frustrating to see history rewritten like this. If we can get beyond that, though, it’s a great dramatic performance by Dustin Nguyen. It’s jumpin’!

Next week: Synthesis.  

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