Robert MacBeth | Through the Shattered Lens

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, Crockett tries to find himself.

Episode 5.4 “Bad Timing”

(Dir by Virgil W. Vogel, originally aired on December 2nd, 1988)

With the case against him still unresolved, Crockett goes on vacation. He doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going, which is a bit unfortunate as he ends up being taken hostage in the Bayous by a group of cartoonishly evil escaped convicts. (Pruitt Taylor Vince plays one of the hostage-takers but is fairly forgettable. A young Melissa Leo appears as a fellow hostage and shows none of the grit that made her so memorable as Sgt. Kay Howard on Homicide.) Somehow, Tubbs still shows up at the last moment and, looking resplendent in a white suit, he shoots the final convict before the latter shoots Crockett. Crockett doesn’t even ask Tubbs how he knew where Crockett was. (If Tubbs had been following Crockett the entire time, why would he have allowed Crockett to have been taken hostage to begin with?) This episode might as well have been called Dues Ex Tubbs.

Watching this episode, it occurred to me that, as a character, Crockett really doesn’t have anywhere left to go. By having him turn into Burnett and become one of Miami’s most powerful drug dealers, the show pretty much pushed the character as far as possible. It’s impossible for Crockett to come back from that and it’s equally impossible to watch an episode like this one and not wonder why Crockett wasn’t in prison. He’s suspected of committing four murders. He was witnessed shooting a cop. He attempted to kill his own partner, twice. The episode begins with several high-ranking cops saying that they don’t buy Crockett’s excuse that he had amnesia. And yet, Crockett is allowed to leave Miami while the department tries to figure out what to do with him.

Really, the whole idea that Crockett — a minor celebrity due to his college football career — could maintain his Burnett cover for five seasons was already pretty hard to believe. Crockett and Tubbs’s cover got blown in nearly every episode during the first three seasons. Having Sonny “Burnett” marry a world-famous singer without anyone noting that Burnett looked just like Crockett was probably this show’s true shark jumping moment. Once that happened, it became increasingly difficult to take Miami Vice seriously. The whole arc of Sonny thinking he was Burnett was fun to watch and Don Johnson gave a good performance as a conflicted bad guy but it’s also left the show with nowhere to go. With this episode, Crockett has been reduced to being taken hostage by a group of backwoods yokels and waiting for Tubbs to materialize from out of nowhere.

In short, it’s time for Sonny to move on. And seeing as how this is the final season …. well, we’ll see what happens!

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.