Ruben Rabasa | 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, Vice helps the communists once again.

Episode 5.5 “Borrasca”

(Dir by Vern Gillum, originally aired on December 9th, 1988)

Martillo Borrasca (Juan Fernandez) is a drug dealer who uses the money to fund anti-communist revolutionaries in his native South American country. Castillo, Tubbs, and Switek want to arrest him, especially after Barrisco and his men use a machete to hack an undercover cop to death. CIA agent Reese (Brion James) wants the Vice Squad to lay off Barrisco because Barrisco is working to overthrow a communist.

Personally, I’m on Reese’s side. Sure, Borrasca is a bad guy and he deserves to be punished for his crimes but the communist dictators in South and Central America were just as bad. Just because they quoted Marx and spouted a lot of anti-imperialist propaganda, that didn’t change the fact that they oppressed their own people and many of them were involved in the drug trade themselves. This episode aired long before the rise of Hugh Chavez but one need only look at the state of Venezuela today to see that the CIA perhaps had a point.

Castillo, of course, doesn’t see it that way. He assassinated Barrisco while the latter is trying to make an escape via helicopter. “I have a code,” Castillo says. Really, Castillo? That’s your code? Assassinate a drug dealer but don’t do anything about the dictators who would have allowed the Russians to plant nuclear missiles in their countries?

This episode was actually pretty routine. How many times have we been through the whole “The Vice Squad is after a drug dealer who has friends in the government” thing? On the one hand, I always appreciate Miami Vice’s cynicism about the War on Drugs. On the other hand, it’s frequent defense of communism has always been one of the show’s more glaring blind spots. Communists make just as much money from the drug trade as capitalists.

Crockett was not in this episode. Instead, Tubbs worked with Switek. It was nice to see Switek get to more than usual but, in the end, this was definitely a Castillo episode.

This week, Castillo goes undercover!

Episode 4.15 “Indian Wars”

(Dir by Leon Ichaso, originally aired on February 26th, 1988)

The Vice Squad is trying to take down Colombian drug dealer Acosta (Joe Lala). Acosta does not trust gringos so Crockett can’t pretend to be Burnett this week. Instead, he’s temporarily promoted to head of the Vice Squad while Castillo goes undercover. Castillo explains to his bosses that, as a Latino, he’s the only one who can do it. I’m not sure that I really buy Castillo’s argument. Do you mean to tell me that, in Miami, there’s only one Latino detective working Vice? If that’s true, someone really needs to talk to whoever is in charge of giving the detectives their assignments.

Acosta is soon taken out of the picture and replaced by the even more evil Levec (played by the great character actor, Joe Turkel). Castillo discovers that both Acosta and Levec are being attacked by a paramilitary force that is made up of Native Americans. Tubbs goes undercover as an anthropologist and discovers that the local Indian chief has made a deal with the drug dealers and his son (Patrick Bishop) is not happy about it. However, it turns out that the chief’s son is actually an aspiring drug lord himself and that his whole vigilante act is really just his way of getting rid of the competition.

This was not a bad episode, particularly when compared to some of the other episodes that aired during the fourth season. Joe Turkel made for a great villain and the scenes of the Indians attacking the drug dealers were properly atmospheric. The episode even includes a small homage to the final showdown from Scarface. Philip Michael Thomas was mildly amusing when he pretended to be a nerdy anthropologist. Meanwhile, Don Johnson was barely in this episode at all. This episode was all about Edward James Olmos’s smoldering intensity as Castillo.

Again, it wasn’t a bad episode but it still felt like it was missing something. As with so much of season 4, it felt like the show was just growing through the motions. In this case, it went through those motions with a bit more skill than it did in some of the season’s other installments. This episode didn’t feature any aliens or any bull semen. That made it a definite improvement over at least two season 4 episodes. Still, this episode largely felt like Miami Vice on autopilot.