The Dark Heart Of America, Pumping Putrefied Pastels (Miami Vice) [Part 2]

(Continued from Part 1)

As mentioned previously, we are in precipitous territory when it comes to Seasons 3 to 5. It can be tempting and reductive to put everything that is to come at the feet of Dick Wolf, he of Law and Order superfame. This would be incorrect, but it's not hard to see how the correlation was made: Dick Wolf joins the show, and then slowly everything begins to change. The aesthetic of the show changes as the mid-1980s become the late 1980s, and the famous "no earth tones" rule for the color palette and fashion is broken. In addition, there's just a general darkening of the proceedings that can be felt, and it gets worse and worse as time goes on. All of these things are correct, but one is not the cause of the other and I'll prove it to you. To do so, it's important to quantify just what gets emphasized in these years. Grab your shovel, because we're about to unearth some real putrefied shit from the ground here.

I don't wanna be a candidate, for Vietnam or Watergate...

One of the darkest episodes to date comes just two stories into the new season, with "Stone's War." The titular Stone, a reporter buddy of Crockett's, is looking to expose heinous war crimes being committed by the US as they fight against Nicaraguan freedom fighters. That's Iran-Contra. Like, this is literally just the Iran-Contra fiasco that Miami Vice is going up against. A series of bloody and vengeful cover-ups and murders occur over the episode, spearheaded by the villainous Maynard. Maynard is played by actual Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, in case you needed even more nightmares to scream at during the abyss. To make a long story short, this episode ends with one of the bleakest endings the show has pulled. There's not one speck of light at the end of the tunnel here: Stone dies in the climax, Maynard and his mercenary squad get away to commit more atrocities against the Nicaraguans, and the war crimes Stone captured on tape are twisted by the system as having been committed by the Sandanistas to further American propaganda and support for the fight. Miami Vice faces off against the full might of American imperialism and anti-communism, the dark heart of Reagan's presidency beating before them... and is utterly defeated by it.

This bleakness gets at another major theme which the show is going to love mining for all its misery as it goes on. I have not mentioned the undercover side of the Miami Vice squad up to this point, but here it's important to note. The squad will frequently pretend to be drug dealers or other flavors of petty lowlife in order to infiltrate the ranks of the underworld, gain the trust of whatever crook of the week needs to be brought to justice, and then catch them in the thrilling climax. Our main boys even have recurring alter egos: Ricardo Tubbs will go by "Ricardo Cooper", and Sonny Crockett will go by "Sonny Burnett". This blurring of the lines of identity, of stepping one foot into the shadows and pretending to be the monstrous things which lurk there, will dwell on our boys. There is always the Nietzschian threat of the abyss corrupting them, turning them into the very evil they swore to protect and serve the citizens of Miami against. We will talk about how this plays out, but first I need to drop the other shoe. I promised proof that would reject the auteur theory of Dick Wolf having brought all of this to the table in a grand master stroke, and here it is.

Everything I just mentioned in the last two paragraphs is present in Seasons 1 and 2.

Let's go back to the horrific example of imperialism at play in "Stone's War". I left out one key detail in my quick summation of it, which is that both Stone and Maynard are returning characters from a Season 2 episode called "Back In The World" in which Maynard is running a drug smuggling ring and evades capture at the end. The episode isn't as bleak as Stone's War and this does disrupt Maynard's plan to some degree, but it's still given a starring role to an actual ghoul like Liddy. It's the example of Miami Vice going up against the dark heart of America itself and losing that I want to highlight, however, and to do that we can go to the Season 2 premiere, "The Prodigal Son" (which, by sheer coincidence, aired on the literal day I was born. Synchronicities abound...). After close to 90 minutes of mishaps and mayhem in New York City chasing down rogue drug lords, Crockett and Tubbs go to confront a banker who's keyed in to the whole sordid affair, and this happens.

If you don't have 5 minutes to spare or that video goes down, the gist is that this rich banker, this literal 1%er of Wall Street, basically says that Crockett and Tubbs aren't allowed to bust these drug lords and their operation. They aren't allowed because these drug lords borrowed a lot of money from America, they can only pay it back by committing crimes, and to prevent them from paying it back would make America less rich. "We would be decimated, and we are America", he says, and he's depressingly not wrong. Crockett is apoplectic, but he can do little more than call out this banker, say that one day he'll nail him, and then leave. It's less of a downer ending than Stone's War, but the sentiment is the same. Crockett and Tubbs have a showdown with the dark heart of America, and they can do nothing to stop its beating. Put that sentiment in your back pocket for the end of the show.

As for the notion of Nietzsche dangling over the Vice squad, a phenomenon that will intensify over the remaining three seasons... it's ever-present in the first two seasons. We should give it a snappy name, and thankfully a friend already has. My pal Sean called it The Dark Night Of The Soul, and from hereon I shall do the same. There is somewhat of a divide to how it's played between Seasons 1-2 and Seasons 3-5. We shall examine the latter in great detail in a bit, but the former often has guest stars who act as dark mirrors of Crockett and Tubbs. With tragic backstories and even more tragic endings in their episodes, they serve as a reminder of what Crockett and Tubbs, as well as anyone else in the Vice squad, could become if they let the Dark Night Of The Soul erode and hollow them out to take shape there. This takes shape as far back as the second episode ever, which is literally called "Heart Of Darkness" in case you need the theme hammered into your skull. The episode deals with an undercover FBI agent who's going rogue, making his own choices, and both he and our heroes are unsure of what side of the law he's on any more. It wears those themes on its sleeve, and other episodes like "Rites of Passage" and "Out Where The Buses Don't Run" continue the trend.

And now I'm mirroring you.

So, that gets us right back where we started. Dick Wolf joins the show, and a paradigm shift of sorts happens. It's not solely because of him, and those elements were present in earlier iterations of the show, but there is a fundamental changeup in the chemistry of what Miami Vice is. Things were bleak and bad before, but they are about to get a lot worse. I actually have to pull my punches at this point, unfortunately. There is an episode that perfectly encapsulates the Dark Night Of The Soul concept, a Miami Vice horror story that feels Nietzschean by way of Lovecraft. It is called "Shadow In The Dark", it aired on Halloween night in 1986, and it may be my favorite episode of the show for how spooky and atmospheric it is, as well as what it has to say about toeing the line of the abyss. I am not going into detail for two reasons. The first is that I really want to let loose about it, and I have so much to discuss already that I don't want to bloat this thing. If I talked about every episode of the show, and then some, we'd be here for something like 38 hours. The second reason? I want to save something in the tank for the spooky marathon in October. We will talk about "Shadow In The Dark" then, so look forward to it.

With all that settled, there's a shadow of my own to confront. I want to stress upfront, before we end this segment, that I enjoyed my time with this show in all of its iterations. I just said that what may be my favorite episode of the show comes from this period of it, in season 3. We are leading into the segment of this retrospective, or trip report, or whatever the hell I'm calling it these days, where I get a little more critical of the show and the things it is doing. Certain decisions are about to be made, here at the exact midpoint of Miami Vice. The choices will ripple throughout the rest of the series, inspiring more choices and more avenues for drama and pathos. We are about to confront the most terrible shadows, and I am about to confront them with the full power of my critique.

The Dark Night Of The Soul has begun, and its falters and failings must be called out.

(Continued in Part 3)