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, Vice helps the communists once again.

Episode 5.5 “Borrasca”

(Dir by Vern Gillum, originally aired on December 9th, 1988)

Martillo Borrasca (Juan Fernandez) is a drug dealer who uses the money to fund anti-communist revolutionaries in his native South American country.  Castillo, Tubbs, and Switek want to arrest him, especially after Barrisco and his men use a machete to hack an undercover cop to death.  CIA agent Reese (Brion James) wants the Vice Squad to lay off Barrisco because Barrisco is working to overthrow a communist.

Personally, I’m on Reese’s side.  Sure, Borrasca is a bad guy and he deserves to be punished for his crimes but the communist dictators in South and Central America were just as bad.  Just because they quoted Marx and spouted a lot of anti-imperialist propaganda, that didn’t change the fact that they oppressed their own people and many of them were involved in the drug trade themselves.  This episode aired long before the rise of Hugh Chavez but one need only look at the state of Venezuela today to see that the CIA perhaps had a point.

Castillo, of course, doesn’t see it that way.  He assassinated Barrisco while the latter is trying to make an escape via helicopter.  “I have a code,” Castillo says.  Really, Castillo?  That’s your code?  Assassinate a drug dealer but don’t do anything about the dictators who would have allowed the Russians to plant nuclear missiles in their countries?

This episode was actually pretty routine.  How many times have we been through the whole “The Vice Squad is after a drug dealer who has friends in the government” thing?  On the one hand, I always appreciate Miami Vice’s cynicism about the War on Drugs.  On the other hand, it’s frequent defense of communism has always been one of the show’s more glaring blind spots.  Communists make just as much money from the drug trade as capitalists.

Crockett was not in this episode.  Instead, Tubbs worked with Switek.  It was nice to see Switek get to more than usual but, in the end, this was definitely a Castillo episode.