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, Sonny and Rico somehow still manage to work undercover.

Episode 2.7 “Junk Love”

(Dir by Michael O’Herlihy, originally aired on November 8th, 1985)

“What’s a four letter word for dirt?” Switek asks, while on a stakeout.

“Mud,” Zito offers before correcting himself, “I mean …. sand!”

However, according to Switek, the correct answer is Vice!

And indeed, there’s a lot of dirt to be found in this week’s rather sordid episode of Miami Vice.  A raid on a brothel leads the Vice Squad to arrest a notorious smuggler and pimp named Ivory Jones (legendary Jazz musician, Miles Davis) and one of Ivory’s girls, a strung-out junkie named Rosella (Ely Pouget).  When they find out that Rosella is apparently the girlfriend of a notorious dealer named Juan Carlos Silva (Jose Perez), they decide to use her and Ivory to take Silva down.  While Tubbs is convinced that Rosella will say anything get her next fix, Crockett is convinced that Rosella is someone who truly wants to change her life.  Hmmm …. isn’t Crockett usually the cynical one?

Silva is sexually obsessed with Rosella, to the extent that he’ll even kill the members of his own organization if he thinks they’re interested in her.  The episode’s twist comes towards the end, when Gina does some research and discovers that Silva is not only Rosella’s lover but also her …. ick! …. father!  Ewwwww!  As with so many episodes of Miami Vice, Junk Love ends with Sonny watching helplessly as a victimized woman throws away her freedom so that she can shoot her tormenter.  Miami Vice was a show that always managed to be downbeat, even when the bad guys met a deserved end.

This episode felt like an attempt to recreate the emotional drama of the season one episode that featured Bruce Willis as an arms dealer with an abused wife.  Both episodes even feature the same basic ending, just with the setting moved from the courthouse steps to a yacht.  Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t work anywhere half as well as any of the episodes that aired during the first season.  Jose Perez may be playing an evil character but he simply does not have an intimidating enough screen presence to be convincing in the role.  Miles Davis, meanwhile, delivers his lines convincingly enough but his character disappears in such a way that it almost feels as if he left the set before all of his scenes were filmed.

The main thing that I found myself thinking about, as I watched this episode, was how could Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs still convincingly go undercover after two years of busting drug kingpin after drug kingpin.  You would think the entire Miami underworld would be on the lookout for them.  Instead, Sonny is still somehow convincing everyone that he’s actually “Sonny Burnett,” aspiring drug dealer.  I’m starting to think the criminals in Miami might not be that smart.