Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 5.10 “To Have And To Hold”

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

The 100th episode of Miami Vice finds Crockett and Tubbs pursuing separate stories.

Episode 5.10 “To Have And To Hold”

(Dir by Eugene Corr, originally aired on February 10th, 1989)

When Sonny learns that his now-teenage son (Clayton Barclay Jones) is acting out at school, he hops on a plane and flies to wherever it is that his ex-wife (Belinda Montgomery) and her new husband (Parris Buckner) are supposed to be living now. Sonny discovers that his ex-wife is pregnant and that his son is having a hard time adjusting to the idea of being an older brother. He also doesn’t get along with his stepfather. Sonny and his son watch the original, Boris Karloff-starring Frankenstein in a movie theater and have a discussion about family.

(Sonny’s son says that he relates to the Monster because the Monster doesn’t mean to kill people but he does. Today, that would probably lead to the kid getting suspended from school and sent to a boot camp. In 1989, though, that just meant the kid was feeling misunderstood.)

With Crockett gone, it falls to Tubbs — using his “Cooper” persona and his fake Jamaican accent — to investigate who is responsible for killing a just-married drug kingpin. Tubbs meets the kingpin’s ruthless son (Miguel Ferrer, looking intense) and he also falls in love with the kingpin’s widow (Elpidia Carrillo). Tubbs is in love and thinking of leaving Vice? Needless to say, the widow is dead by the end of the episode.

This episode concludes with Tubbs and Crockett fishing on Crockett’s boat. They’re both feeling disillusioned. Crockett is still in love with his ex-wife. Tubbs is realizing that he’ll probably never find happiness as long as he’s working undercover in Miami. It’s a bit of a bittersweet ending. Neither Crockett nor Tubbs seems to be particularly happy. Miami Vice was always at its best when it ended on a down note.

This episode managed to give Crockett and Tubbs an equal amount of screentime and both Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas gave good performances. Unfortunately, the divided format of the episode meant that both stories ended up feeling a bit rushed and incomplete. The ending was effective and Miguel Ferrer gave a typically strong performance but otherwise, this was a pretty uneven episode.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.8 “Like A Hurricane”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Crockett gets married! Huh?

Episode 4.8 “Like a Hurricane”

(Dir by Colin Bucksey, originally aired on November 20th, 1987)

Crockett is upset when he’s assigned to serve as a bodyguard to singer Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton). Caitlin is a witness to the criminal activity of music industry executive Tommy Lowell (Xander Berkeley) and the Vice Squad is worried that he might send someone to kill her. Crockett doesn’t have much use for celebrities and Caitlin doesn’t have much use for a cop continually telling her what to do. But after Crockett saves Caitlin’s life multiple times, they fall in love and the episode ends with Crockett and Caitlin getting married.

Wow, Crockett got married!

I mean, is Caitlin going to live on his boat? Is the crocodile going to be okay with this? For that matter, wouldn’t the fact that he just married a celebrity make it difficult for Crockett to continue his undercover work as Sonny Burnett? I mean, I imagine there was a lot of press coverage of the marriage. Caitlin, we’re told, is a pretty big deal.

Honestly, Crockett getting married should have been a big moment but this episode just fell flat. The main problem is that Don Johnson and Sheena Easton didn’t have much romantic chemistry so their sudden love for each felt as if it came out of nowhere. Sonny getting married that quickly seemed a bit out-of-character for him. This episode, like much of season 4, felt like it was mostly the result of the writers grasping at straws to find something new to do with the show. Last week, Trudy got kidnapped by aliens. This week, Crockett got married. Maybe next week, Tubbs will take on the Yakuza. Who knows? At this point, it all feels random.

We’ll see what happens. For now, here’s Sheena Easton performing one of my favorite Bond songs.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.5 “Child’s Play”

Posted on May 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Sonny is too quick to fire his gun.

Episode 4.5 “Child’s Play”

(Dir by Vern Gillum, originally aired on October 30th, 1987)

This is a dark, dark episode.

While breaking up what appears to be a case of domestic violence between Annette McAllister (Danitra Vance) and Walker Monroe (Ving Rhames), Sonny thinks that he spots someone holding a gun in the next room. Sonny fires through the wall, hitting a 13 year-old boy who Annette claims is her son, Jeffrey. While Jeffrey McCallister lies in a coma, a guilt-ridden Sonny starts to think about his ex-wife and their son, Billy. They live upstate and it’s been a while since Sonny visited. When Sonny does visit, he learns that his ex-wife’s fiancé wants to adopt Billy after the wedding.

Meanwhile, back in Miami, it turns out that there is no Jeffrey McAllister and that the boy who Sonny shot was actually a child soldier, recruited into a gang at an early age so that he couldn’t be sent to prison if arrested. It turns out that Walker and Annette are both involved in a gunrunning operation that is headed up by Holliday (Isaac Hayes). It all leads to one of those patented Miami Vice-style action sequences where Crockett, more or less, allows Walker to fall to his death. Sonny is definitely not in a good mood for the majority of this episode.

Child’s Play could have just as easily been titled The Don Johnson Emmy Submission Episode. This episode revolves entirely around Crockett and his feelings of guilt over shooting a child and also his fear of losing his son. Johnson does a pretty good job in this episode. Over the course of season 3 and the first few episodes of season 4, it really has sometimes seemed as if Crockett was losing his edge. This episode presents us with the return of self-destructive, end-of-his-rope Sonny and not even Johnson’s mullet can distract from the drama.

Thematically, this episode is pretty bleak. We never really learn much about the kid who was shot by Crockett, other than that he has a pretty sizable criminal record for a 13 year-old. By the end of the episode, he’s woken up from his coma but, assuming that he is capable of leaving the hospital, he’s still wanted on several murder charges. The kid basically has no future, even if he does make it to adulthood. Meanwhile, Sonny’s son is growing up without his father and, when Sonny does visit him, there’s really not much of a connection between the two of them.

In other words, everyone’s doomed. This was not a happy episode but, then again, Miami Vice was rarely a happy show.