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 tries to find himself.
Episode 5.4 “Bad Timing”
(Dir by Virgil W. Vogel, originally aired on December 2nd, 1988)
With the case against him still unresolved, Crockett goes on vacation. He doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going, which is a bit unfortunate as he ends up being taken hostage in the Bayous by a group of cartoonishly evil escaped convicts. (Pruitt Taylor Vince plays one of the hostage-takers but is fairly forgettable. A young Melissa Leo appears as a fellow hostage and shows none of the grit that made her so memorable as Sgt. Kay Howard on Homicide.) Somehow, Tubbs still shows up at the last moment and, looking resplendent in a white suit, he shoots the final convict before the latter shoots Crockett. Crockett doesn’t even ask Tubbs how he knew where Crockett was. (If Tubbs had been following Crockett the entire time, why would he have allowed Crockett to have been taken hostage to begin with?) This episode might as well have been called Dues Ex Tubbs.
Watching this episode, it occurred to me that, as a character, Crockett really doesn’t have anywhere left to go. By having him turn into Burnett and become one of Miami’s most powerful drug dealers, the show pretty much pushed the character as far as possible. It’s impossible for Crockett to come back from that and it’s equally impossible to watch an episode like this one and not wonder why Crockett wasn’t in prison. He’s suspected of committing four murders. He was witnessed shooting a cop. He attempted to kill his own partner, twice. The episode begins with several high-ranking cops saying that they don’t buy Crockett’s excuse that he had amnesia. And yet, Crockett is allowed to leave Miami while the department tries to figure out what to do with him.
Really, the whole idea that Crockett — a minor celebrity due to his college football career — could maintain his Burnett cover for five seasons was already pretty hard to believe. Crockett and Tubbs’s cover got blown in nearly every episode during the first three seasons. Having Sonny “Burnett” marry a world-famous singer without anyone noting that Burnett looked just like Crockett was probably this show’s true shark jumping moment. Once that happened, it became increasingly difficult to take Miami Vice seriously. The whole arc of Sonny thinking he was Burnett was fun to watch and Don Johnson gave a good performance as a conflicted bad guy but it’s also left the show with nowhere to go. With this episode, Crockett has been reduced to being taken hostage by a group of backwoods yokels and waiting for Tubbs to materialize from out of nowhere.
In short, it’s time for Sonny to move on. And seeing as how this is the final season …. well, we’ll see what happens!
1934. Chicago. The FBI guns down a man outside of a movie theater and announces that they have finally killed John Dillinger. What the FBI doesn’t realize it that they didn’t get Dillinger. Instead they killed Dillinger’s look-alike brother. The real John Dillinger (played by Martin Sheen) has escaped. Over the next five years, under an assumed name, Dillinger goes straight, gets married, starts a farm, and lives an upstanding life. Only a few people know his secret and, unfortunately, one of them is Al Capone (F. Murray Abraham). Only recently released from prison and being driven mad by syphilis, Capone demands that Dillinger come out of retirement and pull one last job. Capone has millions of dollars stashed away in a hotel vault and he wants Dillinger to steal it for him. Just to make sure that Dillinger comes through for him, Capone is holding Dillinger’s family hostage.
Chicago. 1915. Up-and-coming gangster Al Capone (Eric Roberts) berates his younger brother, Jimmy (Adrian Pasdar), for not being aggressive enough in a street fight. Not wanting to follow his brothers into a life of organized crime, Jimmy runs away from home and eventually finds himself in Harmony, Nebraska. Claiming to be a World War I vet named Richard Hart, Jimmy impresses everyone with both his marksmanship and his incorruptible nature. Soon, the new Richard Hart has been named town marshal. While Al Capone is taking over the Chicago rackets, Richard is keeping the town safe with his Native American deputy, Joseph Littlecloud (Jimmie F. Skaggs), and starting a family with the local school teacher, Kathleen (Ally Sheedy). When illegal liquor from Chicago starts to show up on a nearby Indian reservation, Richard Hart comes into conflict with the Chicago Outfit and his secret is finally revealed.
Through the Shattered Lens 