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!

I saw the title of this week’s episode and I immediately called my sister….

Episode 4.14 “Baseballs of Death”

(Dir by Bill Duke, originally aired on February 19th, 1988)

“Watch this with me,” I told Erin, “it’s a baseball episode!”

“It is?” Erin asked.

“Look at the title!”

I was excited.  I always like to find things that I can watch with my sister and, as we all know, she loves baseball.  She certainly loves baseball more than she loves tv shows about bombs that blow up when you step on them.

Unfortunately, it turned out that this episode was not about baseball.  Instead, it featured a bunch of bombs that blow up when you step on them.  According to this episode, those bombs are known as baseballs.  Sorry, Erin!  Honest mistake….

Misleading title aside, this is a really good episode.  It features Tony Plana as a Chilean diplomat who is trying to buy a shipment of weapons, including the explosive baseballs.  Plana is a chilling villain.  In fact, he’s the first villain of season 4 to actually feel dangerous.  When we first meet him, he’s coldly executing the girlfriend of a tabloid reporter.  Plana’s lack of emotion as he kills and plots to kill feels like a throwback to the soulless sociopaths who made the first season’s rogue gallery.  A very young Oliver Platt shows up as an arms dealer and his nerdy confidence adds to some comedy to what is an otherwise fairly grim episode.  Just as with Plana’s cold villainy, Platt’s cheerful amorality felt like a throwback to the first season.

Indeed, this entire episode felt like a return to what the show used to be.  After a season that’s involved televangelists, bull semen, UFOs, and Crockett getting married to Sheena Easton, it was nice to see an episode that actually felt like an episode of Miami Vice.  Director Bill Dule gave this episode a stylish and, at times, almost surrealistic feel.  Crockett was back to be a cynic.  Castillo stared at the floor and spoke through clenched teeth while Switek actually got to put his phone-tapping skills to good use.  In the end, Tony Plana may have been the villain but, in old school Miami Vice style, the majority of the blame was still put on the U.S. government.  The episode even ended with an exciting boat chase.  All this episode needed was Phil Collins on the soundtrack and it could have passed for something from the first two seasons.

Season 4 has been uneven but this episode felt like classic Vice.  Erin thought the episode would have been better with actual baseballs and I agree with her that the title was misleading.  That said, this was still an enjoyable throwback to what the show used to be.