Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Crockett and Tubbs leave Miami!

Episode 1.10 “Glades”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on November 30th, 1984)

Episode ten opens with the Animals’s “We’ve Got To Get Out Of This Place” playing on the soundtrack and the camera tracking down some of the less glamorous sections of Miami.  This is a far different part of the city than the viewer is used to seeing on Miami Vice.  The sleek art deco architecture has been replaced by vacant lots, run-down apartments, and torn-up streets.  It serves as a reminder that, while some people in Miami are getting very rich, others are still trapped in the cycle of poverty.

Joey Bramlette (Keith Szarabajka) is staying in a  cheap motel room, courtesy of the Vice Squad.  Joey is due to testify in court against his former boss, a Colombian drug lord named Ruiz.  Joey’s testimony is the key to the entire case but, when he receives a mysterious letter, he escapes the safehouse and flees back to his home in the Everglades.  Though it was Zito and Switek who allowed him to escape, Crockett and Tubbs are the ones who head down to the Everglades to find him.

That’s right …. Crockett and Tubbs aren’t in Miami anymore!

As Crockett and Tubbs soon discover, the Everglades is full of rednecks, smugglers, and enforcers.  Safely hidden away from civilization, it’s a place where there is no law.  After a group of rednecks (led by John Pankow) trick Sonny and Tubbs into getting lost in the wilderness (“Moss grows on the north side of a tree!” Crockett announces as he tries to figure out how to return to civilization), the two cops are found by Joey and his wife, Cassie (Margaret Whitton).  Joey reveals that he still wants to testify but that Ruiz’s men have kidnapped his daughter.  Working together with Joey and his family, Crockett and Tubbs have to figure out how to storm Ruiz’s heavily guarded compound and rescue Joey’s daughter.

This episode was a bit of a change of pace but I enjoyed it.  Some of that is because, when I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in the country and I’ve still got a lot of family out there, working on their farms and living in communities much like the one that Crockett and Tubbs visited in this episode.  I may now be a city girl but I’ve still got my country side.  I can still remember what it was like, walking around the tall grass while wearing short shorts and a tank top.  Though I cringed a bit when it first appeared that this episode was going to portray rural Florida as being the equivalent of Deliverance, I was happy to see that it was ultimately a celebration of the resilience of country people.

There was an interesting subtext to this episode as everyone that Sonny and Tubbs met was a smuggler, either working for Ruiz or independently running marijuana into Florida.  Later, one of the older smugglers mentioned that he used to run moonshine, therefore suggesting that there wasn’t much difference between the War on Drugs of the 1980s and the doomed effort at prohibition of the 1920s.  Miami Vice is a cop show that often suggests that it’s sometimes best not to get too hung up on rigidly enforcing the law.  That’s quite a contrast to most other cop shows that I’ve seen.  Even modern cop shows tend to take the attitude that anyone who violates the law has to be punished in some way, whether by incarceration or death.  Miami Vice may have been about law enforcement but its heart belonged to the libertarians.

Next week’s episode of Miami Vice guest stars Burt Young, Michael Madsen, Lenny Von Dohlen, and Terry O’Quinn!