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!

Well, this sucks!  Tubi is no longer streaming Miami Vice.  Hopefully, the show will soon have a new streaming home.  As for the episode that I reviewed below, I had to buy it on Prime.  It cost next to nothing but still, there’s a larger issue, namely my desire to watch stuff for free.

Episode 2.4 “The Dutch Oven”

(Dir by Abel Ferrara, originally aired on October 25th, 1985)

This week’s episode of Miami Vice opens with a typical Vice situation.  Trudy is undercover as a prostitute.  Tubbs is undercover as a drug buyer.  When the dealers try to rip Tubbs off, it leads to an exciting and well-shot car chase that ends in an alley.  One of the dealers points his gun at Sonny and Trudy and, four shots later, he’s lying dead on the ground.

For once, though, it’s not Sonny who did the shooting.  Instead, all four shots were fired by Trudy.  This time, it’s Trudy who is shaken by taking someone’s life and it’s Trudy who finds herself being harassed by Internal Affairs.  Feeling lost, Trudy goes to a party hosted by her ex-boyfriend, David (Cleavant Derricks).  Soon, Trudy and David are back together but, when Trudy discovers that someone is dealing drugs at David’s parties, she is forced to confront the fact that her boyfriend might not be an innocent bystander.

A young Giancarlo Esposito appears in this episode, playing an up-and-coming dealer named Adonis.  Adonis is an old friend of David’s and he’s also the one who is responsible for selling the drugs at the parties.  (It turns out that David actually is innocent.)  Sonny, realizing that Trudy is too close to the case and still emotionally shaken by the earlier shooting, goes undercover to take Adonis down.  Of course, Adonis doesn’t surrender easily and the episode ends with him literally daring Trudy to shoot him.  Trudy hesitates so Sonny sends Adonis to the ground with one punch.  As far as endings go, it doesn’t quite feel like a Miami Vice ending.  Season one, for instance, had no hesitation about ending with gunshots.  Gina shot Burt Young in cold blood.  Pam Grier killed several drug dealers and apparently got away with it.  Bruce Willis’s wife shot him on the courthouse steps.  Dennis Farina was shot in his car at the end of Lombard.  This episode, though, ends with Sonny demonstrating that he can make arrests without killing people and with Trudy still not having to deal with her fear of using her weapon.  It feels a bit wishy-washy, to be honest.

On the plus side, Abel Ferrara does a good job directing this episode.  The opening action scene is genuinely exciting and the entire episode is permeated with a melancholy atmosphere.  This episode deserves some credit for acknowledging that the Vice detectives spend a lot of time investigating and arresting people with whom they’ve become friends.  And it’s good that, after spending so much time in the background, Trudy finally got a showcase episode and Olivia Brown got a chance to prove she could carry a story.  This is an effective episode, even if it never quite becomes a classic.