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 investigates a baby broker!

Episode 3.9 “Baby Blues”

(Dir by Danial Attias, originally aired on November 21st, 1986)

In honor Miami Vice‘s violent nature (and in recognition of the fact that it’s the holidays and I’ve got a lot of things that I need to do), I’m going to review this week’s episode bullet-point style!

• The episode starts in Colombia.  Babies are being kidnapped from local villages.  In  some cases, they’re literally snatched from the arms of their mothers.  The babies are taken to Miami where a sleazy lawyer named Howard Famiglia (Tommy Koenig) essentially sells them to wealthy families.
• Maria Escobar (Patrice Martinez) illegally crosses the border to search for her son in Miami.  She nearly dies in the attempt.  When she and a planeload of babies are discovered on a Miami runway, law enforcement gets involved.
• Castillo doesn’t think that the case is one that Vice should be investigating.  Gina and Trudy set him straight.
• It doesn’t take long for the Vice Squad to discover that Famiglia is a baby broker.  One of his customers is played by a young Stanley Tucci.  The customer is willing to testify against Famiglia.
• Famiglia sends his henchmen out to intimidate and kill all of the witnesses.
• Famiglia also kills his main hitman and then booby traps his apartment.  When Crockett and Tubbs jump out of the exploding apartment, it looked like Tubbs leg caught on fire.  “Wow,” I said, “that really looked real!”
• It turns that it was real.  Philip Michael Thomas’s stunt double was severely burned as a result.
• Eventually, the Vice Squad is able to trick Famiglia into believing that Maria is being kept at a local hospital.  Famiglia sets up a meeting for women looking to adopt.  While the women watch an educational film, Famiglia crawls through a ventilation shaft and tries to enter Maria’s room.
• SURPRISE!  That’s not Maria in that hospital bed …. it’s Gina!  The Vice Squad shoots Famglia dead, leaving his corpse awkwardly hanging out of the hospital room wall.  For some reason, that sight really disturbed me.
• Maria is reunited with her son but, upon realizing that he now has a life and a family in America, she decides to let him stay with his new parents.  She is then deported back to Colombia, where she will probably be killed by the same people who stole her baby in the first place.
• Overall, this episode suffered because the villain was miscast.  Looking at the imdb, the majority of Tommy Koenig’s credits appear to have been comedic.  He’s an actor who looks like he should be on a sketch comedy show and not a gritty crime drama.  Even when Famiglia is crawling through an air duct with a gun, he just looks goofy.  Plus, considering that he had a people working for him who were willing to murder, would Famiglia really have gone to the hospital himself?
• Stanley Tucci and Tommy Koenig should have switched roles.
• This episode gave Trudy, Gina, Switek, and Zito more to do than usual.  That was good.  This show often underused its supporting cast.
• Miami Vice was often a cop show with a political subtext.  In this case (and I’m just pointing it out, I’m not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing), the subtext was that America’s immigration system sucked, as Maria only had a limited amount of time to  find her son before being deported.  But then she decided to leave him in America rather than take him back to Colombia.  Miami Vice was not just political.  It was also usually kind of depressing.

Next week’s episode features Bill Paxton and Wesley Snipes!  I’m looking forward to it!