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 Burnett continues his reign of terror!

Episode 5.2 “Redemption in Blood”

(DIr by Paul Krasny, originally aired on November 11th, 1988)

When last we checked in with Miami Vice, Sonny thought he was a drug lord named Sonny Burnett and he was firing his gun at Tubbs, who he had just recognized as a cop.  This episode reveals that Sonny didn’t shoot Tubbs.  Instead, he aimed at a wall, firing while Tubbs made his escape.

Working with the psychotic Cliff King (Matt Frewer), Sonny takes over his late boss’s drug empire and continue to fight a war against El Gato (Jon Polito).  El Gato is meant to be a “flamboyant” drug dealer, which is a polite way of saying that Polito overacts through the entire episode.

The show hedges its bets by having Cliff commit all of the murders while Sonny rises to power.  In fact, when Sonny catches Cliff torturing two of El Gato’s men, Sonny orders Cliff to stop and then offers them jobs in the Burnett operation.  Amazingly, over the course of the entire three-episode Burnett arc, Sonny manages to get through the whole thing only killing people in self-defense.  Even the cop that he killed at the end of the previous season was a dirty cop who had been sent to kill him.  I get that the show couldn’t take Sonny totally over to the dark side but it’s still hard to believe that Burnett took over the Miami underworld without getting his hands a bit more dirty than he did.

A car bomb (courtesy of El Gato) knocks Sonny unconscious and, when he wakes up, he suddenly starts to remember who he actually is.  Finally realizing that his name is Crockett, Sonny turns himself into the Vice Squad and is promptly arrested while Kate Bush sings, “Don’t give up.”  Sonny tells Castillo, Switek, and Tubbs that he’s ready to acccept the consequences of whatever he did during his previous bout of amnesia.  But then Sonny escapes custody and sets up both Cliff and El Gato for a great fall so I guess he wasn’t totally ready to turn himself in and head off to prison.

Tubbs, who now trusts Sonny, helps him take out Cliff King and the Burnett organization.  Sonny shoots Cliff to save Tubbs.  With Tubbs dangling off of a walkway, Sonny pulls him back up to safety.  Sonny then goes back to his mansion where he and his girlfriend (Debra Feuer) are taking hostage by a gun-wielding El Gato.  “Where is the safe?” El Gato demands.  Sonny tricks El Gato into thinking the safe is in the room where he keeps his pet panther.  (Apparently, all drug lords were given either a tiger, a panther, a cheetah, or a leopard.)  El Gato gets mauled to death as the episode ends.

This episode suggests that Sonny is going to be let off the hook because he finally remembered he was.  I don’t really think that it would really work like that.  Sonny has multiple warrants out and he also killed a cop, albeit a corrupt one.  If Sonny isn’t on trial in next week’s episode, I’m going to be a little annoyed.

This episode ended the Burnett trilogy about as well as it could be ended.  The idea that all Sonny needed was to survive a second near-fatal explosion made me smile.  What if El Gato hadn’t tried to blow him up?  I guess it’s a good thing that he did!  While Polito went overboard, Matt Frewer gave a very good performance as the villainous Cliff King.  It’s a bit of a shame that he died so dramatically because Cliff would have made a good recurring villain.

This episode was definitely better than anything from season 4.  It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of season 5 plays out.