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, Trudy is once again the main character.  Fortunately, there’s no UFOs this time around.

Episode 4.17 “Hell Hath No Fury”

(Dir by Virgil W. Vogel, originally aired on March 11th, 1988)

Alan Beaks (Don Harvey), the scion of a prominent Florida family, has been released from prison after serving only a few years for raping a black school teacher named Ellen Mason (Carla Brothers).  Beaks claims that he’s reformed and, at the start of the episode, he appears on a talk show where the audience agrees that Alan Beaks is the perfect example of someone who has straightened out his life.

“I wouldn’t want it to happen to me,” one woman in the audience says, “but if it did, I would hope he would be as charming as Alan Beaks.”

Beaks now wants to make a public apology to Ellen.  However, she refuses to see him.  When she starts to get threatening phone calls, both she and her best friend Trudy are convinced that Beaks is the one calling.

Castillo, however, doesn’t want Trudy to have anything to do with Ellen or Beaks.  It’ll make the Vice Quad look bad, he says.  (Since when has Castillo ever used that type of logic?)  Still, when Ellen hires a hitman (John Finn) to kill Beaks, the Vice Squad finds itself involved.  No one on the Squad has any sympathy for Beaks and they don’t make much of an effort to protect him.  When a shootout leaves both Beaks and the hitman dead, Castillo tells the members of the Squad that they have failed and if they’re not going to full commit themselves to the job, they can transfer to another department.  Meanwhile, even with Beaks dead, Ellen is still getting phone calls, implying the Beaks was actually not her stalker.  The episode ends with a terrified Ellen listening as the caller threatens her….

Here’s my number one question about this episode: Why didn’t anyone trace the calls?  Ellen, the victim in a high-profile rape case, is getting calls from someone threatening to harm her.  That right there seems like the sort of thing that the police would normally investigate.  Trudy is Ellen’s best friend.  Trudy knows about the calls.  Trudy is a cop.  So, why didn’t the Vice Squad try to track down the caller?  If they could have proven that Beaks was the caller, Beaks would have gone back to prison.  If it turned out that someone else was the caller, that person would have gone to prison.  Beaks would still be free but at least Ellen wouldn’t be getting threatened every ten minutes.  In the past, that’s what would have happened on this show.  For some reason, this episode features everyone forgetting how to act like a cop.

In the end, this episode tried to deal with a lot of issues — tabloid journalism, rehabilitation, vigilante justice, racism, classism — but it ultimately felt like fan faction that was written by someone who really didn’t know much about the show or the characters.  (One would think that Gina, a rape survivor who gunned down her rapist during the first season, would have some thoughts on Ellen’s plan but instead, she spends the episode cheerfully exchanging one-liners with Switek.)  This was another Season 4 disappointment.