Come Back Little Shiksa

This one was painful to watch. Most especially because it led up to the rest of the show with the primary characters separated from each other.

Disrespectful to the characters themselves, and it made for frustrating watching for the fans.

Disrespect all the way around!

Bruce Willis carries the show essentially by himself with a few regular characters. When you look at how this episode, and following episodes were developed, this is the beginning of when Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis refused to be in scenes together. As reported by Curtis Armstrong in his book.

Bruce and Cybil had so much anger and hatred toward each other, that in order to keep the show going, the writers and producers had to accommodate their demands.

Which suggest one thing. You can't have that much anger and hatred for somebody that you didn't love it one time. That's just how the human heart works.

The first three seasons of Moonlighting are the best: fun stories with lively dialog and silly interactions, with just some golden interactions between David and Maddie. And then all of that seems to be gone by season 4. There are a few enjoyable moments here and there but so far this is a slog to get through. You just have to slog through the the tedious relationship dialog that isn't entertaining at all.

Gone is so much of what made this series so enjoyable. I had forgotten about this shift in the series the first time I watched it back in the 80's, and now it just seems especially more painful to get through. I'm actually surprised the series made it to a 5th season.

Maddie does not respond to David's calls, worried he goes home and notices with sadness and confusion that she has packed her bags and left. In the midst of uncertainty, he receives a man at the agency who is after the whereabouts of a beautiful woman he met but of whom he has no clue. Maddie finally gets in touch with David and tells him that she has decided to take a break for a while to clear up her thoughts and feelings and to stay at her parents' house. The unfortunate beginning of the decline of one of the best espionage, romantic and adventure series of the 80s. From now on we will see a Bruce doing the impossible to sustain only one program without his counterpart, which leaves a great void since the combination of Bruce and Cibyll was explosive and both were the heart of the series. From now on nothing will be what it was. A shame.

As far as I know, most Moonlighting fans didn't like season 4 and downright HATE season 5.

I don't belong to that group.

To me, the charm of this show was mostly Bruce Willis's David Addison and Curtis Armstrong as Herbert "Bert" Viola. Probably because Mr. Armstrong is such a nice and sweet person in real life and Bruce at least used to be back then.

I was never such a huge fan of Cybill Shepherd. Similar to Amanda Bearse on "MWC", you could tell SHE was the problem of the stars.

For me, the less Maddie we get, the better. It's honestly tiring and exhausting to see anyone want David to end up with a woman who actually does not want to be happy.

She complains that she lost Sam, the man she was supposed to end up with. But she didn't lose him over David per se, she lost him because as usual, she needed "time to think".

Maddie ALWAYS demands time to think when she actually wants to say no. Sam, who knows her well must have realized, so he was smart enough to leave. David came close in "I am curious, Maddie", but ultimately fell for her (his speech that he realizes why she is still single at 36 and that she is the problem).

Maddie also says she can't be spontaneous, she ALWAYS has to think about things.

Yet she could spontaneously go to Argentina or spontaneously leave David hanging and go to Chicago. Or leave her own company out to dry.

This shows us that Maddie is actually kind of selfish. The world has to be the way SHE wants it to be and if she doesn't get her will, she is angry. There's a lot of examples of hipocrisy throughout the show and season 4 shows them all (although they existed before).

I like that Maddie's dad calls her out on this. Ultimately, HE is the man she basically wants. Someone just like her dad, although she clearly doesn't want who he really is (shown by her inacceptance to accept his cheating), she just likes the idea of him.

I think it's the same problem with David or Sam. Maddie likes that guys want her, but she doesn't actually want to settle down, because then that attention would dry up.

So yeah, for me, it's much nicer to see some actual cases and the sweet Curtis Armstrong growing into his role as detective than more of the same dance we have seen for 3 seasons. Because by now, anyone should already know that David and Maddie shouldn't be together.

Maddie needs some kind of therapy first or some consequences for her actions before she can understand what she really wants (and more importantly, still deserves). And David also needs to step back and ask himself why he keeps chasing a woman he doesn't have much in common with when he met much more suitable women along the way and why he has such anger issues (shown well in this episode with the BMW).

I ultimately give this episode a solid 8/10 because I really liked the guy time with David and Bert, the case and Maddie in smaller doses worked better for me.