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 can be purchased on Prime!

This week, the Vice Squad gets a big assignment.

Episode 2.21 “Free Verse”

(Dir by John Nicollela, originally aired on April 4th, 1986)

The wheelchair-bound poet, Hector Sandoval (played by Byrne Piven), is coming to Miami so that he can testify before a Congressional committee about the human rights abuses that are occurring in his home country, abuses that Hector claims have been partially funded by American interests.  Hector is a world-famous poet but his history as an outspoken political dissident has made him politically important as well.  He’s been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.  Meanwhile, the right-wing death squads from his own country want him dead.  Because Sandoval is equally critical of his country’s rebels, the left wants him dead as well.  They feel he has more value as a martyr than as a living dissident.

With so many people trying to kill this important, world-famous person, his safety in America is the government’s top-most concern.  So, naturally, the task of protecting Sandoval is assigned not to the FBI, the CIA, or the Secret Service.  Instead, it’s given to the Miami Vice Squad.  You read that correctly.  A bunch of undercover cops are assigned to protect one of the most important men in the world.  They meet him when he lands in the airport and their pictures are immediately taken by the horde of reporters waiting for Sandoval’s arrival.  I guess everyone’s cover is blown now.

This is not a particularly interesting episode.  Obviously, the show was looking to make a point about not only the political situation in Central America but also the role of the U.S. government in propping up various dictators and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses.  That’s fine.  Indeed, watching an episode like this today serves as a good reminder that Chavez and Maduro were hardly the first dictators to take power in South and Central America.  But this episode gets so caught up in making its political points that it forgets to be interesting.

A huge part of the problem is that the members of the Vice Squad spend a lot of this episode in the background.  The emphasis is on Hector Sandoval and his daughter, Bianca (Yamil Borges).  Unfortunately, Byrne Piven goes so over-the-top as Sandoval that it’s impossible to take the character seriously.  It’s a genuinely bad performance and it makes the episode a bit of a chore to sit through.  (Admittedly, it is entertaining watching Edward James Olmos refuse to show a hint of emotion while Sandoval devours all of the scenery in their scenes together.)

For celebrity watchers, Bianca Jagger shows up as an assassin but she doesn’t really get to do much.  Luis Guzman and future director Michael Bay play the imaginatively named “Goon #1” and “Goon #3.”  Otherwise — and especially when compared to the episodes that came before it — this is a surprisingly forgettable episode of Miami Vice.