Written by Julie Martin and Jorge Zamacona; story
by James Yoshimura and Bonnie Mark
Director: Tim Hunter
Putting the life of a character on a TV show
in jeopardy is a fairly common practice. But one wonders how seriously one can consider these threats to be
considering that creators of television dramas are attached to a
character. There are exceptions to this
rule (David E. Kelley has made something of a career of killing regulars on his
series) but for the most part they don’t kill them because they want to
consider the possibilities of bringing them back. (That may have been true in
the 90s when this review was written. It's now become something of a given in
almost every drama that airs, broadcast, cable or streaming.)
The creators of Homicide clearly didn’t have
a problem killing a character off. And they no doubt realized from the
emotional drama that they had managed to mine from ‘Crosetti’ showed that there
was enormous potential in playing with
the characters. They did, however, have a problem with using violence. Indeed
Tom Fontana was very reluctant to having a gun fired on the show, must less
having three of his characters get shot. It seemed out of sync with the original plan to keep Homicide from becoming a typical police
drama relying on guns being fired. But the show was coming to the end of its
third season (NBC was only committed to 13 episodes; they later added seven
more) and the ratings were still mediocre.
So, probably to goose the ratings more than anything else, a three part story arc was written involving the shooting of three of the series regulars
while they went to serve an arrest warrant.
The strategy worked; the episode got
some of the highest ratings in the show’s history, but no one on the staff was
particularly thrilled about what was done in order to get these numbers. For
the next three years, they would stay away from the detectives being hurt while
on the job.
As reluctant as the writers were
probably to write the opening teaser in ‘The City That Bleeds’ one can not deny
that it is a very effective scene.
Everything seems to be going perfectly normal as Bolander, Felton, Howard and
Munch go to arrest a pedophile for the murder of a ten year old. They talk
about last night at The Waterfront; Felton makes a show of letting Howard walk
in first. Then suddenly, in a series of fast cuts we see the detectives fired
upon. Interestingly enough, though we see the gun fired and the detectives
going down, we never actually see them
get shot.. In this way Homicide is playing against the grain.
A similar pattern occurs when Gee
hears about the shooting. Hearing that three of his men are shot Gee runs to
the hospital but he makes it clear that the few who remain must get themselves
ready to catch the shooter. Bayliss and
Lewis are particularly rocked by what has happened . Tim feels despair and
guilt that he wasn’t shot. Pembleton, however, shows the same cold and
professional detachment that he would as if the three detectives who had been
shot were strangers and seems annoyed
when Bayliss says he does. He knows
that this is wrong, but he can’t let
himself think about whether people he worked with may never come back. It is
how he works. (It will eventually hit him but not in this episode.)
Some detectives bear their feelings
in odd ways. As in the case with
Detective Mitch Drummond. Bolander’s
former partner (one who Munch was always being unfavorably compared to in the
first season) leaves his normal
assignment to try and catch the man who did this. He may not have always gotten
along with Stan but he’s pretty sure that his partner would do the same for
him.
His current partner is quite
understandably rattled by what has happened. When Gee goes to visit the
detectives in the hospital Munch is as close to going to pieces as he gets. He
obsesses about the fact that his friends
blood is on his shoes, and the way the
doctors refer to the condition Stan’s in (how they say ‘when he wakes up’ when
its really ‘if’)
The strongest reaction, and perhaps
the most stunning is Giardello. He seems all right on his first couple of trips
to the hospital, even puts up a brave face for Feltons kids when his mother
arrives but it soon becomes clear that this is the façade. When he learns from
Meldrick that the detectives went to the wrong address because the case report
was mistyped he demands that the woman who botched it be fired. He then praises
the strength and fortitude of his detectives while driving back. Than he asks
Meldrick to stop the car and he has a
minor meltdown. He compares the helplessness and the pain that he’s feeling to
that of an incident that happened to his
daughter Charise (his favorite daughter) eighteen years ago. He is responsible for his detectives but he
can not help them through their darkest hour.
And speaking of the detectives after
the shootings we don’t see a great deal of them
after they get shot. The writers know that while they care about the
conditions of their friends, they are police first and they want to get the man
who shot them. The obvious candidate for that title is Glenn Holton a repeat
sex offender who committed the murder of a ten year old boy. This leads into an
dark matter that crime shows don’t normally traffic in: child molestation. This
is a darker sin even than murder: even some of the criminals who they investigation
think that there’s something perverse about pedophilia. (This is brought out in
the one funny moment in the show; when
the owner of a pornographic theater says she wouldn’t cater to this sort
of individual.)We get more insight from sex crimes Detective Theresa Walker, an
expert on these sorts of people. She is a strong forceful person, one who is
not even afraid to go head to head with
Pembleton.
It is events like these that can
even unify the bosses. Captain Barnfather comes down to publicly offer support
to Lieutenant Russert and even holds a
press conference in which he prays for
them (But look how quickly he does an about face in the next episode )
It is not until the end of the
episode that we get any idea how the detectives are doing. Bolander was shot in
the head and will not even be conscious until two episodes later. Howard was
shot in the heart and is barely clinging to life. Felton escapes with minor
injuries and is conscious by the episodes end. His first concern is for his partner,
and he is already feeling guilt for what happened. This is how detectives think
they are always concerned for their partners.
‘The City That Bleeds’ ends with a
major operation to capture Holton at a train station but they come up empty.
Again ‘Homicide’ goes against the grain. Most other police shows that deals
with police getting shot would have
suspect in custody b the end of the episode. ‘Homicide’ does not. And as
we will learn in later, they will have
spent a couple of days searching for the wrong man. Aside from the violence,
almost everything related to the crime is spot on.
Fan Rating: 13th
My score: 4.5 stars.
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