- Title: Remington Steele – Vintage Steele
- IMDb: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to a con man pretending to be the world’s greatest detective in Remington Steele. “Vintage Steele” throws Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan) and Laura (Stephanie Zimbalist) together on an absurd case involving a dead body which keeps appearing and disappearing. The body is first discovered by Laura’s ex-boyfriend (David Huffman), a banker overseeing a deal with a local winery, who discovers the body floating in a vat of chardonnay. He successfully hides the body, which he fears will blow the deal, only to lose in on the road and later discover it again in the winery. With most of the story centered around either finding the body, which Steele takes to calling Harry, or preventing others from stumbling upon it, the mystery of how the man died (or who he is) remains on the back-burner.
The set-up stays away from several plots common enough to the series (there’s no Murphy to complain about Steele, Steele doesn’t butt in on a case, etc. this time around) while also flipping one of the show’s cornerstones by presenting a glimpse of a hidden past of Laura (rather than Steele) who we learn used to be far less button-down prior to a messy break-up. Along with the numerous times the intrepid detectives must either search for the body or hide it from others, the episode also provides a scene of Steele and Laura playing charades with a monk and ends with a trap which uses Harry as bait which keeps catching the wrong person until, eventually, nabbing a killer. While the episode drops a few clues to what is behind the bizarre occurrences at the winery, the mystery is really secondary to the wild antics of one of the show’s wackier episodes.
