An almost perfect episode with an ending that guts like a fish knife.
Milk Run is the episode that Little Prince wanted to be, and it's super weird to me that they're back to back. It's better written, better paced, and commits much more strongly to its message, so it feels a bit like you watch the rough draft of an idea and then the final draft right in a row.
It's also significantly more fun than Little Prince, which both makes it more enjoyable to watch, and makes the tragedy that much more painful. The first half of the episode is played very light-- jokes and smiles and sunshine-- and then by the final quarter you're left with the cold, sinking feeling that something terrible is going to happen and it's going to fuck everyone up forever.
(it does)
The episode opens with Sonny creeping on a lady who bends over at the airport, and Rico walking (crotch first) into his line of view and giving him a serious Sitcom Wife look. It's hard to shake the sense that this is a "Rico shoots his shot and Sonny straight up doesn't notice" episode; the smile he gives Sonny when he tells Sloane they're partners is shy and flirty as all get out, he literally grabs Sonny and walks with him arm and arm as they cross the street, he brushes his fingers against Sonny's and pivots around him a centimeter away as they lean on the hotel counter. Sonny ever so slightly leans into him after that, like there's some recognition of their closeness, and then they see Eddie and Sonny spends the rest of the episode freaking out about Justice(TM).
This is the episode where Rico reveals he is a vegetarian, and Sonny kind of brushes it off like "that's simply impossible, no such thing."
Tubbs says a bunch of stuff about a Colombian god who originated in Nigeria and seems to be surprisingly knowledgeable about folk religion, and then in the next scene he and Sonny have a conversation about Santeria that's so far removed from anything anyone has ever known about Santeria that you begin to wonder if he just made this "Colombian god" up to sound smart.
While Crockett speaks to the "Santeria Priestess" (a teenage punk who works at a movie theater and is absolutely not a Santeria Priestess), a bald woman behind him sports what appears to be leather bondage gear
A young Eric Bogosian roughs up Tubbs; later in the episode he says that Pepe Moya is "a freak" who "gets off on weeeeiiiiaaaahhhhd stuff." Okay, Worcester boy. Sure. That's how everyone in Massachusetts Miami talks.
The transition from Rico leaping into the car to the boxing gym, overlaid with Hit Me With Your Best Shot is just an absolute joy, A+ fun, silly, wholesome sequence.
Castillo asks Crockett to put surveillance in place and Sonny says he's already put "Mann and Terranova" on it. While I believe wholeheartedly that Miami Vice and Wiseguy take place in the same universe, it's a but strange to get your creator to do surveillance for you.
Tubbs makes the obligatory S1 "you will be sexually assaulted in prison" threat this episode, which is highly out of character and, as far as I can recall, never happens again. Sonny just screams at the kid.
Eddie tells Sonny that he can't speak to the police because his lawyer told him "you're just gonna use me."
Well.
Considering the ending.
It's almost
Like you shouldn't
Speak to the police
Without your lawyer
I think it's important to point out that Eddie, who is tragically killed in a way Sonny does not expect and cannot really have prevented (but feels like it could have been preventable to him), doesn't just share his first name with Sonny's prior partner. His last name is also Rivers-- too close to Riviera to be a coincidence. One of the themes of Vice is the cyclical and repetitive nature of tragedy for anyone who is involved in either criminality or the justice system (Mann generally posits these two things as mirror images or inexorably linked halves of one whole; see Heat). Eddie Riviera was a cop, thematically framed as an innocent, and Sonny couldn't save him, and Eddie Rivers was a criminal, thematically framed as an innocent, and Sonny couldn't save him. The only people who make it out are ones like Caroline, who divest themselves completely from that world. Anyone on either side of the law is equally damned.
From the time we see Eddie's body rolled away to the credits rolling is two full minutes of a 48 minute runtime; Sonny is sitting on the floor, mostly facing the camera, for the entirety of that two minutes. The amount of time from when the other characters leave and Rico sits down next to him to is itself a full minute, and the last 40 seconds of that minute are wordless. I don't think it can be overstated how endless a minute of hollow-eyed silence is in a television show feels.
So, about the Milk Run AU... yeah, Rodney inherited my grandmother's house. Or, more accurately, he inherited my grandmother's house as it still exists in my memory from my youth. The tiny piece of property is still in my family, the house is still there, but it's only my grandmother's house in the "axe of my grandfather" way now. The upright piano, the layout of the house, the heirloom fittings and furnishings, even the milk box and porches are all parts of my childhood. So John and Rodney are running around in my memories of this small coal-town, falling in love in a place I loved (and was loved, as well). And just for the record, the sticky buns are indeed award-winning, and entirely as delicious as described.
Thank you for the ask, @logicgunn <3
