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, a man kills for his dolls.
Episode 4.16 “Honor Among Thieves?”
(Dir by Jim Johnston, originally aired on March 4th, 1988)
A serial killer named Paul Delgado (John Bowman and no, we’re not related as far as I know) is killing girls in Miami. He believes that he’s being ordered to kill by his collection of dolls and, when he’s speaking as a doll, he uses a high-pitched voice. He picks women up at carnivals or on the beach and he kills them by injecting them with 100% pure cocaine. He poses their bodies with a doll beside them.
Because of the cocaine connection, homicide detective Jarrell (Dylan Baker) approaches Castillo. Castillo explains that his best men are working deep undercover, trying to take down a drug lord named Palmo (Ramy Zada). That’s right, this is yet another episode where Crockett pretends to be Burnett and Tubbs pretends to be Cooper and somehow, they’re able to get away with it despite the fact that their cover has been blown in almost every previous episode.
Delgado works for Palmo and things get even more complicated when it turns out that Delgado is Crockett and Tubbs’s connection inside Palmo’s operation. When Palmo discovers that Delgado is the killer, he puts Delgado on trial. The jury is made up of other drug dealers. Since Crockett is pretending to be a lawyer, he’s assigned to serve as Delgado’s defense counsel. Palmo tells Crockett that, unless he’s acquitted by the drug dealer jury, he’ll reveal that Crockett and Tubbs are working undercover….
This was a weird episode, It didn’t really work because Delgado was a bit too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Perhaps if the show had just made him a serial killer who killed women with cocaine, it would have worked. But the show had to go the extra step and have him talk to his dolls in a high-pitched voice. As well, this was yet another episode where we were forced to wonder if people in the Miami underworld just don’t communicate with each other. After all the drug lords that have been busted by Crockett and Tubbs, you would think that word would eventually get out about “Burnett” and “Cooper.” I mean, their cover gets blown in nearly every episode. Frank Zappa put a bounty on Crockett’s head in season 2! And yet somehow, Crockett and Tubbs are still able to walk into a drug lord’s mansion, introduce themselves as Burnett and Cooper, and not automatically get shot.
There were some definite problems with this episode but it was weird enough to at least hold one’s attention. As opposed to the episodes with the aliens and the bull semen, this episode didn’t seem like it was trying too hard to be weird. Instead, it just was genuinely weird. It was watchable and, as far as the fourth season of Miami Vice is concerned, that definitely counts as an accomplishment.
Through the Shattered Lens 