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 is currently streaming on Tubi!

It was not easy but I managed to rouse myself from my sickbed long enough to stumble into my home office so I could watch and review this week’s episode of Miami Vice!

Episode 1.17 “The Maze”

(Dir by Tim Zinnemann, originally aired on February 22nd, 1985)

This episode of Miami Vice gets off to a good start, with an exciting and, even by the standards of today, surprisingly violent shoot-out in downtown Miami.  The shoot-out leaves one cop dead, one partner embittered, and Crockett and Tubbs looking for the perpetrators, the Escobars.  As Tubbs explains it, the Escobars were strictly small-timers but it appears that they’ve recently gotten out of prison and now they are trying to make a name for themselves in Miami.

The search for the Escobars leads Crockett and Tubbs to a seemingly abandoned apartment building that has been nicknamed “The Maze.”  The Escobars have taken over the building and now, the handful of people who were previously living in the Maze are virtual hostages.  With the police surrounding the Maze, Tubbs decides to go undercover as a drifter who just happens to drop by the Maze in search of a place to stay.  Of course, no sooner has Tubbs entered into the Maze then a renegade cop named Duryea (Jay O. Sanders) decides to rush the building himself and the police are forced to reveal themselves.  Realizing that they’re surrounded, the Escobars demand a helicopter to the Bahamas and $10,000.  (Personally, I think they should have just asked for the helicopter.  People will give up helicopters much quicker than money.)  They hold every person in the building hostage, including Tubbs.

As I previously mentioned while reviewing T and T, I’m not a fan of shows that center around hostage situations, largely because they almost always end up being dramatically inert.  There’s only so many times that you can watch a sweaty criminal demand a helicopter before you get bored with listening to him.  That is certainly the case here.  The show gets off to a good start and even the scenes with Tubbs breaking into the Maze and pretending to be a Jamaican drifter had some flair to them.  But once the tense hostage situation started up, I got bored.  I appreciated the fact that the Escobars, as opposes to being hardened criminals, were really just as scared as the people they were holding hostage but otherwise, this episode was just a bit too slow for me.

That said, this episode does feature Breakin 2‘s Adolfo ‘Shabba-Doo’ Quinones as a dancing informant, early performances from Joe Morton and Ving Rahmes, and a really cool moment where Tubbs smirks and says, “Nobody’s going to the Bahamas.”  Even a lesser episode of Miami Vice still had style to burn.