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 is too quick to fire his gun.

Episode 4.5 “Child’s Play”

(Dir by Vern Gillum, originally aired on October 30th, 1987)

This is a dark, dark episode.

While breaking up what appears to be a case of domestic violence between Annette McAllister (Danitra Vance) and Walker Monroe (Ving Rhames), Sonny thinks that he spots someone holding a gun in the next room.  Sonny fires through the wall, hitting a 13 year-old boy who Annette claims is her son, Jeffrey.  While Jeffrey McCallister lies in a coma, a guilt-ridden Sonny starts to think about his ex-wife and their son, Billy.  They live upstate and it’s been a while since Sonny visited.  When Sonny does visit, he learns that his ex-wife’s fiancé wants to adopt Billy after the wedding.

Meanwhile, back in Miami, it turns out that there is no Jeffrey McAllister and that the boy who Sonny shot was actually a child soldier, recruited into a gang at an early age so that he couldn’t be sent to prison if arrested.  It turns out that Walker and Annette are both involved in a gunrunning operation that is headed up by Holliday (Isaac Hayes).  It all leads to one of those patented Miami Vice-style action sequences where Crockett, more or less, allows Walker to fall to his death.  Sonny is definitely not in a good mood for the majority of this episode.

Child’s Play could have just as easily been titled The Don Johnson Emmy Submission Episode.  This episode revolves entirely around Crockett and his feelings of guilt over shooting a child and also his fear of losing his son.  Johnson does a pretty good job in this episode.  Over the course of season 3 and the first few episodes of season 4, it really has sometimes seemed as if Crockett was losing his edge.  This episode presents us with the return of self-destructive, end-of-his-rope Sonny and not even Johnson’s mullet can distract from the drama.

Thematically, this episode is pretty bleak.  We never really learn much about the kid who was shot by Crockett, other than that he has a pretty sizable criminal record for a 13 year-old.  By the end of the episode, he’s woken up from his coma but, assuming that he is capable of leaving the hospital, he’s still wanted on several murder charges.  The kid basically has no future, even if he does make it to adulthood.  Meanwhile, Sonny’s son is growing up without his father and, when Sonny does visit him, there’s really not much of a connection between the two of them.

In other words, everyone’s doomed.  This was not a happy episode but, then again, Miami Vice was rarely a happy show.