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, Crockett and Tubbs — or is it Burnett and Cooper? — enter the art world.

Episode 5.14 “The Lost Madonna”

(Dir by Chip Chalmers, originally aired on March 17th, 1989)

When Crockett and Tubbs take down what they think is a drug deal, they’re shocked to discover that Stanley Costa (Stephen G. Anthony) was actually smuggling two paintings!  They could always ask Stanley what’s going on but — whoops!  They killed him during the show’s precredit sequence.

Detective Whitehead (Michael Chiklis) comes down from New York City and explains that the two paintings are the side pieces for a triptych called The Last Madonna.  It was recently stolen from a Paris museum and Whitehead is convinced that theft was masterminded by Joey Scianti (Peter Dobson).

It’s time for Tubbs and Crockett to — *sigh* — go undercover.  Why they’re still always going undercover, I have never really understood.  Every time they go undercover, their cover gets blown.  Do the members of the Miami underworld just not communicate with each other?  Shouldn’t everyone know, by this point, that Tubbs and Crockett are cops?  In this case, Tubbs goes undercover as someone who appreciates art.  Crockett goes undercover as the crude Sonny Burnett….

Yes, Crockett is still using the Burnett cover.  He’s doing this despite the fact that he just recently had a mental breakdown that led to him not only thinking that he actually was Burnett but also becoming Miami’s biggest drug lord.  Even if the Scianti family was dumb enough to not know that Crockett was a cop, surely they would have heard enough about drug lord Sonny Burnett to wonder why he would be hanging out with a connoisseur of fine art.

(Indeed, it’s hard not to notice that everyone has apparently moved on rather quickly from Sonny’s mental breakdown and his time as a drug lord.  For that matter, Sonny certainly doesn’t seem to ever give much thought to his dead second wife.  Remember her?  The world-famous singer who was literally gunned down in front of him?  She appears to have been forgotten.)

This episode was dull, largely because the Scianti family was never really a credible threat.  They came across as being a bunch of buffoons and, as such, it was hard to really get that concerned about whether or not they would figure out that Crockett and Tubbs were actually cops.  This is another episode that features a twist that you’ll see coming from miles away.  From the minute Michael Chiklis first showed up, I knew that he was eventually going to try to steal the The Lost Madonna for himself.

Considering that there was a lot of humor in this episode (Crockett, not surprisingly, struggled with understanding modern art), there’s also some surprisingly graphic violence.  Crockett and Tubbs gun down Stanley Costa and blood splatters all over the wall.  Whitehead shoots Joey Scianti and the shocked Joey looks down at his wound and says that it’s “real blood.”  Tonally, this episode is all over the place.

Everyone seemed kind of bored with this episode.  This was definitely a final season entry.