Jackson Davis | Through the Shattered Lens

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, Tubbs has an adventure!

Episode 3.17 “The Afternoon Plane”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on February 20th, 1987)

While attending a New Age-y wedding with his latest girlfriend Alicia (Maria McDonald), Tubbs wins a vacation to a tropical island!

It’s about time something …. well, I was going to say something good but honestly, I guess we should just be happy that anything is happening to Tubbs at all. When this show started, Tubbs was the audience surrogate. He was the one who came down to Miami and learned about the drug scene. We saw Miami through his eyes. But, by the time the third season rolled around, it was pretty clear that Miami Vice hard largely become the Crockett show. Don Johnson was the star and Philip Michael Thomas often seemed like a supporting character. Tubbs may have been cooler than Switek but, often times, both of them took a backseat to Crockett. This week, however, Tubbs finally get his own episode. Crockett shows up for a few minutes at the start of the episode and that’s it. This is the Tubbs show!

Of course, it turns out that the vacation does not go the way that Tubbs was expecting. He runs into a drug dealer named Leon Wolf (Vincent D’Onofrio, making his television acting debut), someone who Tubbs previously put in jail. Tubbs soon discovers that his old enemies, the Calderone family, are on the Island and they’re looking forward to getting their revenge on Tubbs. Tubbs, of course, has no legal jurisdiction on the island and the local police certainly aren’t going to help him out. In fact, many people on the island resent Tubbs because they blame America’s war on drugs for their poverty. Drug smuggling is big business and it provides an income to a lot of people who would starve otherwise.

Orlando Calderone (John Leguizamo) is coming on the next afternoon plane and no one is willing to defy Orlando by helping Tubbs get off the island. The episode becomes a Caribbean High Noon, with the clock ticking down and no one willing to stand up and help the endangered law man. There are some on the island who want to fight back and drive away the Calderones. But no one is willing to take the chance.

It would have been a lot more compelling if Orlando had been played by someone other than John Leguizamo, who is just as cartoonishly unconvincing here as he was the first time that he appeared on the show. I know that Miami Vice was early in Leguizamo’s career but his performance here is so unconvincing that it really does make the Calderones just seem like a bunch of low-level punks instead of a feared criminal syndicate. The final gun battle between Tubbs and the Calderones is handled well-enough but it’s never quite as compelling as it would be if Orlando Calderone was actually an intimidating villain. In typical Miami Vice fashion, Alicia is seriously wounded in the battle. It pays not to get involved with either Tubbs or Crockett.

This episode was a slight change of pace. Apparently, everyone but Philip Michael Thomas got to take some time off during filming and, as a result, Thomas gets to show his own unique style as Rico Tubbs. Still, this episode was never as compelling as it needed to be. Hopefully, we are now done with the Calderones.

Ever since the start of this month, I have been cleaning out my DVR and I am happy to say that I’ve managed to go from only having 9 hours of space available to now having 17 hours. Progress is a wonderful thing!

Last night, I decided, after watching Picnic, to take a two-hour break from watching movies that I had recorded off of TCM. Instead, I watched a film that I recorded off of Lifetime way back in January, The Wrong Car.

If you’ve watched enough Lifetime movies, you know that there are three things that all Lifetime movies distrust: men, teenagers, and technology. The Wrong Car doesn’t feature any teenagers but it does feature some really bad men who use technology to do some really bad things. In the past, Lifetime has exposed the dangers of Facebook, Match.com, twitter, and YouTube. With this movie, they take on Uber.

Except, of course, they don’t actually call it Uber. Instead, they call it “NetCar.” But it’s totally Uber.

Trudy (Danielle Savre) is a law student who doesn’t have much of a social life because she is always either too busy studying or arguing that criminals can be reformed. Her best friend, Gretchen (Francia Raisa), is constantly begging her to go out and have a good time but Trudy refuses. (Isn’t that always the role of a best friend in a Lifetime movie?) Finally, Gretchen is somehow able to convince Trudy to go to a club with her. However, Trudy get bored and decides to leave. Standing outside the club, she calls for a NetCar.

Usually, whenever Trudy uses NetCar, her driver is another law student named Charles (Kevin G. Cox). However, this time, she doesn’t know the driver. However, she still gets in the car and accepts his offer of bottled water. The next thing that Trudy knows, she’s waking up naked in a totally sleazy motel.

With the police unable to help, Trudy takes matters into her own hands. In this case, that means that she decides to become a NetCar driver herself. She now spends her time driving around the city, looking for the man who raped her. Along the way, she lectures two women about proper car safety, deals with an angry but later helpful criminal, and meets a cute investment manager (Jackson Davis).

She also has flashbacks to her rape and these are pure nightmare fuel. The man who assaulted her is frequently seeing wearing a giant baby mask, much like the one pictured below:

Technically, the scene above is from Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian satire Brazil. But it’s the same baby mask! AGCK!

To be honest, though, the entire film is nightmare fuel. The Wrong Car is one of the few genuinely disturbing Lifetime films that I’ve ever seen because it does get at some very important truths. We all give out way too much information about ourselves to total strangers. And, much like Trudy, I probably would have gotten into that NetCar and drank that bottled water. Nobody wants to spend their life paranoid but The Wrong Car suggests that perhaps a little paranoia might be justified.

Director John Stimpson fills the screen with shadowy and menacing images while Danielle Savre does an excellent job in the sometimes difficult role of Trudy. The entire film is well-cast, with Rhett Kidd turning in a memorable performance in the small role of the world’s sleaziest desk clerk. And that baby mask … at the risk of repeating myself, AGCK!

The Wrong Car is definitely a Lifetime film to keep an eye out for.