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, another friend of Sonny’s gets killed.

Episode 3.2 “Stone’s War”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on October 3rd, 1986)

Sonny Crockett’s old friend, journalist Ira Stone (Bob Balaban), returns to Miami and he’s in trouble once again.

The last time we saw Stone, he appeared to be dying as the result of being severely wounded by Col. William Maynard (G. Gordon Liddy).  I guess Stone survived because this episode opens with him and a cameraman in Nicaragua, filming anti-Communist rebels opening fire on a village.  They even gun down a priest!  However, it turns out that the rebels have got some help from some men who appear to be American.  Stone’s cameraman is shot.  Apparently leaving him to die, Stone grabs the tape of the attack and then flees to Miami.

In Miami, Stone tracks down Sonny, who is reluctant to get involved with Stone.  However, when it becomes obvious that some agents of the government are not only following Stone but also trying to assassinate him, Crockett changes his mind.  It turns out that the men in Nicaragua do indeed work for Col. Maynard.  Maynard makes a return appearance, showing off a necklace of ears that have been chopped off of communists in an attempt to get businessmen to invest in his army.  This episode drops some very obvious hints that Maynard is now working for the U.S. government.

In their efforts to help Stone get his tape to the public, Crockett and Tubbs get a few people killed.  Local reporter Alica Mena (Lonette McKee) is murdered after Maynard’s men break into her office to search for the tape.  In the end, Stone himself is once again wounded by Maynard’s man and this time, he actually dies on-camera.  As for Maynard, he once again boards a private plane and escapes.  The episode ends on a properly cynical note, with Crockett listening to reports blaming the death of the priest on the Nicaraguan government.

Actually, this whole episode feels a bit cynical.  On the one hand, this episode criticizes the American government for being so anti-communist that it tries to overthrow the governments of other counties.  On the other hand, a good deal of the episode’s running time is devoted to showing off Sonny’s new car, a 1986 Ferrari Testarossa.  There’s even an extended chase scene that seems to exist largely so the show can work in as many close-ups of Sonny changing gears as possible.  It’s a cool car but just try to get one in Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba.  (Or, I should say, try to get one without being related to someone who is in power.)

Ira Stone was a bit more compelling in his previous appearance on the show.  In this episode, Balaban’s performance is almost too low-key.  It lacks the manic instability of his first appearance, in which Stone was portrayed as being almost as mad as Maynard.  This time out, he’s just another independent journalist who is convinced the government is out to get him.  Fortunately, G. Gordon Liddy returns to Maynard and takes so much obvious joy in the role that he’s fun to watch.  As I mentioned when Liddy last appeared on this episode, my father had a “G. Gordon Liddy for President” bumper sticker.  As far as Watergate felons are concerned, Liddy was certainly less annoyingly self-righteous and more honest about his amorality than John Dean has turned out to be.

As a whole, this wasn’t a bad episode.  Like last week’s episode, it was serviceable but it still seemed to be lacking the spark that distinguished the show’s first two seasons.  For the second week in a row, Miami Vice puts more emphasis on its guest stars than the main cast and, perhaps as a result, the main cast seems to largely be going through the motions.  (Zito and Gina don’t even appear in this episode.  Castillo is barely present, which is interesting considering that the character is supposed to have connections in U.S. intelligence that would have perhaps been a bit helpful this time around.)  Still, it was good to see both Stone and Maynard return to the show and remind the viewers that the vice in Miami is often the result of conflicts happening elsewhere.