Homicide Episode Guide: Thrill of the Kill

Written by Jorge Zamacona; story by Tom Fontana and Henry Bromell

Directed by Tim Hunter

     If ‘A Dolls Eyes’ represented the best aspects of Homicide, ‘Thrill of the Kill’ represented the weakest part of the ‘new’ series. Considering the qualities of this episodes one can not understand why NBC was  so hyped by it that they ran it out of sequence in time for the November Sweeps. Not only is it a vastly inferior episode, it is not even very good television by the standards of normal television mainly because of a couple of major logical flaws.

     The story involves a serial killer who, starting in Florida, begins driving north down the interstate, apparently slaughtering passengers every time that he stops for gas. The FBI learns about a murder in Virginia which isn’t that far from Maryland. Yet somehow Bayliss and Pembleton have time to talk to the FBI, practice at the firing range, drive to the crime scene, interrogate witnesses and drive back to Baltimore well before the killer arrives. This is a hole in the plot big enough to drive a pick-up through but nobody in the show says anything about it.

     The second flaw is more a problem of being able to suspend disbelief. Bayliss and Pembleton eventually catch up with their suspect Newton Dell, a man with a string of priors and a borderline sociopath.

He denies that he committed the murders, saying that he told ‘him’ not to do it. In the denoument it is revealed that  the ‘him’ is Newton’s twin brother. This means that Newton rode in the same car with his brother and did absolutely nothing to prevent him from committing the murders, other than tell him that it was wrong. I didn’t believe this when I first saw the episode six years ago  and I can’t believe it now.

This maybe the most unsatisfying ending of any case that the show ever did. (That said, those of you who were fans of Burn Notice will be stunned to see how young Jeffrey Donavan manages to get a handle both as the killer and his identical twin brother, even at this age.)

     While the case is not particularly exciting there are some very interesting character development that makes for some interest (though not enough to save the show from being mediocre) For the first time in the series we see the detectives doing qualifying for their firing proficiency exam. Here at last we see the one part of being a police where Pembleton is less than stellar: he is a very lousy shot. He says that using the gun has always been the part of the job he never liked. In more series this  would be a quirk, meaning little. As it turns out this foreshadows his greatest obstacle when he has to return to the job.

     More importantly is Gee’s meeting with his oldest daughter, Charisse making her first (and as it turns out, only appearance on the show. Gee is surprisingly nervous about seeing her for the first time in a couple of years and becomes understandably disturbed when she is late to her meeting. This leads to the tensest moment of the entire episode when we are led to suspect because of the editing that Charisse has become Dell’s victim. It comes as an immense relief to Gee (and to the viewer) when she turns up at his house. However, his relief fades when he learns that Charisse is planning to move even further away—all the way to San Francisco to get married to a man Gee has never met. Gee realized that time, combined with the job that he has, is taking his daughter away from him and he is understandably disturbed. (This will be explored to an extent in ‘Stakeout’ later this season.) Yaphet Kotto gets a chance to explore depths that he usually done it and he reveals in his speech and his very body language, how effective an actor he is. (We also learn some more information about Gee’s other two children which will later turn about to be false--- at least in regard to his son.)

     There are some tense moments and some funny sequences, including the opening where we see Frank and Tim being towed from a crime scene back to the station. But the writing and pacing of the show seem very ill-suited to the realism and quirkiness of Homicide from as recently as one episode ago and closer to a more conventional police drama. In many ways this is the weakest episode of the fourth season, though unfortunately there will be a couple of other claimants to that.

My score: 2 stars.