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!

This week, we learn how Sonny affords all of those wonderful toys.

Episode 2.3 “Whatever Works”

(Dir by John Nicolella, originally aired on October 4th, 1985)

Have you ever wondered how Sonny Crockett afford that nice Ferrari on just a cop’s salary?  To be honest, it hadn’t really occurred to me.  I just assumed that everyone in the 80s owned a Ferrari.  I’ve been more concerned with how Sonny manages to maintain his undercover identity despite the fact that he spends almost all of his time hanging out with his fellow cops.  I mean, surely, someone in the Miami underworld has noticed that “Sonny Burnett” sure does seem to have a lot of friends who worked Vice.

Regardless, in this episode, we learn that Sonny doesn’t actually own the Ferrari.  Instead, it’s a vehicle that the department loans to Sonny so that he can maintain his cover.  Apparently, the Ferrari once belonged to an actual drug dealer.  Unfortunately, the Miami Police Department desperately needs to make some money at their next police auction so Maxwell Dierks (Robert Trebor), a weaselly bureaucrat, decides to repossess Sonny’s Ferrari and auction it off.

Sonny spends most of this episode obsessing on his car.  While the rest of the Vice Squad laughs at Sonny’s misfortune, local informant Izzy Moreno tries to trick Dierks into giving him the car so that he can return it to Sonny.  I hope Sonny appreciates who his true friends are.  Anyway, Castillo eventually pulls some strings to save Sonny’s car.  Maybe Sonny should have gone to him in the first place but, then again, Castillo is kind of intimidating.  He literally never smiles.

While Sonny is obsessing on his car, someone is killing cops and leaving behind Santeria charms.  Despite having grown up in Florida and being a veteran vice detective, it appears that Sonny has never before heard of Santeria.  However, Castillo and Tubbs know all about it.  Castillo is even friends with a Santeria priestess (Eartha Kitt) who explains that the killers did not view the cops as being policemen but instead as being fellow criminals.

It turns out that there’s a group of cops who have been shaking down drug dealers and now, they’re being killed one-by-one.  For all the talk of Santeria, the solution to the problem is actually pretty straight forward.  The Vice squad tracks down the people doing the killing and, after a shoot-out, the bad guys surrender.  And that’s the end of that.

Oh, this episode.  It had potential but it just fell flat.  The Santeria stuff felt tacked on and it was pretty obvious that the episode’s writers were more interested in Sonny trying to get his car back than in the episode’s main storyline.  Even the Eartha Kitt cameo felt a bit perfunctory.

On the plus side, this episode did feature a band singing Bang A Gong in the middle of a bar fight.  That was pretty cool.  The band was called Power Station and apparently, it was an off-shoot of Duran Duran.  What’s interesting is that the members of the band are portrayed as being old friends of Sonny, to the extent that they applaud him as he beats up a bad cop.  It brings a real “The name is Dalton” energy to the scene.

This week’s episode was a bit disappointing but next week’s episode is apparently a classic.  I look forward to watching and reviewing Out Where The Buses Don’t Run.