Homicide Episode Guide: Pit Bull Sessions

Written by Sean Whitesell ; story by James Yoshimura and Julia Martin

Directed by Barbara Kopple

  Over the course of season 6, it became clear that the writers of Homicide were grooming Jon Seda’s character of Paul Falsone  to be a more central character in future seasons. This was most likely due to the fact that Andre Braugher would be gone by seasons end and they were looking for someone to focus the series on, even though Falsone and Pembleton are on opposite poles as detectives and people. This was made particularly clear in ‘Pit Bull Sessions’, which threw the two detectives on the same case. Falsone isn’t as smart as Pembleton, but he is intelligent enough to note that Frank is a more thinking, ‘philosophical’ detective, while he is a man of action. Despite this vital difference in personality, the two have a more cordial relationship than Pembleton did with ‘shufflers’ like Lewis or Felton. Maybe Frank was starting to mellow or maybe Paul respects Frank more than the others did.

The case they are called in on isn’t quite a murder. An 82 year old man named Leonard Tjarks is found dead in his house, having been mauled to death by three pit bulls. The dogs belonged to the old man’s grandson, Harry, who is nowhere to be found. The question is, was this death accidental or was Harry responsible in some way? This seems like a remote possibility but in the first half of the episode we get the idea that Harry’s pretty much a lay-a-bout who doesn’t care much for people’s feelings. This is made clear when the detectives finally track him down and the first thing that he does is ask for his dogs back.

We’ve seen some pretty creepy and cold characters over the years but Harry Tjarks is something else. It isn’t because he doesn’t think he’s responsible for his grandfather’s death; it’s that he doesn’t care about anything. Not the fact that his father wants him in jail, not that he hasn’t succeeded at anything in his life, not even the fact that his grandfather is dead. He is completely vacant. Not indifferent, he’s empty. And because Falsone is more emotional than Frank, he can’t seem to process  this. In one of the longer interrogation sequences that he’s had this year, he does everything to try and force something from Harry. At first he wants a confession, but as he progresses and it becomes clear this isn’t a murder, he wants to get any response.  The only time he gets is when he informs Harry that because his dogs killed his grandfather, they are being put to sleep.  Harry is portrayed by a then unknown Paul Giamatti, an actor who has become famous for portraying comic schmucks in films like American Splendor and Sideways (and who later went on to considerable success playing characters with a far harder edge on television). Here he plays another kind of loser, but there is nothing funny about it, and it is an early showing of the range he would be capable of.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some funny material in this episode. Bayliss is working a shift at the Waterfront (because Meldrick is still MIA) and Gharty and Munch come over after clearing the case that involved a truly clueless felon. In this one, the suspect helped kill a cab driver and then remained on the scene for the detectives to catch. This leads to reflections on some of the dumber criminals that Baltimore seems to house, including a suspect who confesses when Bayliss tells him that they have a special camera that shows the last thing a killer saw before he died, and two men who killed each over which service branch was better in the Vietnam War--- a conflict both were two young to have fought in. Sound absurd? All of these examples were modifications of actual murders in David Simon’s book. Considering some of the would be devious felons that we’ve come across, it is comforting to know that there are felons whose brains are mostly tapioca. There is another twist on it when one of the Waterfront’s new employees is revealed to be a poet-artist who has been writing the names of the detectives and some of the victims in his book as art. Munch gets pissed because of this and fires him. It’s possible that this is a subtle way of showing how some of the detectives didn’t like Simon’s presence on the squad when he was writing his book. Or maybe I’m just seeing things.

Oh, and we have one other piece of business. Georgia Rae Mahoney’s civil suit, much to the surprise of everyone, has been given a court date by a district judge named Gerald Gibbons. Gibbons set Georgia Rae free on bail after Junior Bunk was caught shooting at them., and it turns out that he requested this case personally. Because of this Kellerman is convinced that Gibbons is on the Mahoney payroll, and visits his office only to get stonewalled by his secretary.  However, he and the judge are going to go round a couple of times before this is over.

 When all is said and done, what remains with you after ‘Pit Bull Sessions’ is how a person as vacant and empty as Harry Tjarks can be. As unfathomable as the young men  who deal and die in the drug wars and shrug off jail and death everyday, it seems more reasonable then a man like Tjarks who has been given everything advantage life has and is completely absent from responsibility. As Frank points out when Falsone asks him about the case in the episodes coda, the victim’s son will mourn the loss of his father for the rest of his life, and the grandson will mourn the loss of his dogs as long as it takes for him to find new dogs. Ultimately Harry Tjarks just doesn’t care about anything, and that can be as unsettling as any cold-blooded killer.

My score: 4.25 stars.