Homicide Rewatch: The Heart of A Saturday Night

 

Written by Henry Bromell

Directed by Whit Stillman

 

Ever since Season 2's 'Bop Gun'  Homicide's writers have typically given at least one episode in every subsequent season where they take a look at the murders from the perspective of those who are left behind to deal with their grief. These are without question some of the greatest episodes of the show's history.

The Heart of a Saturday Night represents by far the most fascinating variation on it we've yet seen. To this point all of the episodes have involved murders where more attention was paid to the families of the victims then the detectives. This episode takes a different approach. We look at the story in two time periods. The first is the Saturday night when three separate killings take place. We actually see the events proceeding either the murder or the discovery of the victim in the opening of the episode. We then follow each investigation as it takes place in more detail then usual.  None of them are easy to solve and indeed one will be left open. And we see as each investigator goes through the process of notifying the loved ones of the victims.

And on a parallel we see a group therapy session that takes place some time after the original murders. In a throwback to the early days of the show, the group therapy sessions take place in decolorized scenes while the action in the squad room is in full color.

This episode is in many ways closer to a feature film then we've seen on Homicide in a long time and that is in large part because this is another occasion when Homicide has chosen a notable film director to work behind the camera. In 1996 Whit Stillman was becoming known as a major voice in independent films. He had been nominated for an Oscar for his film debut Metropolitan, which would eventually win Best First Feature and the Independent Spirit awards. He'd followed that up with Barcelona in 1994and two years after that would do so with The Last Days of Disco in 1998. (He would make no other major films until the 2010s.) But unlike the movies he made throughout his career, which mostly focused on upper-class socialites 'Saturday Night' is arguably the grittiest and darkest work he has done in his entire career. Compared to such other film directors who worked for the show such as John McNaughton and Keith Gordon Stillman would seem to be an odd choice for the material. But as always he handles it well.

Because the show was a sweeps episode the series is also loaded with guest stars among those who grief. Rosanna Arquette is by far the biggest name but we also see two actors who have a sufficient TV imprint (See Hey, Isn't That…) Chris Eigeman and Polly Holiday.  All three actors are astonishing as they each give performances that show that they are all in different stages of grief.

Even more impressive is that this episode takes an in-depth look at every member of the squad while these investigations are going on as each of them has roots in them to an extent. For Lewis and Munch this is bad news because one of the deaths took place at the Waterfront in the midst of a bar brawl. ("That's the kind of publicity we don't need," Munch says accurately.) They are not assigned this case as Giardello makes it clear to Howard that he will handle it and she will hold down the fort. This surprises Howard (especially since the case will end up going under her name) but Al makes it clear he needs this one.

Jude Silvio is angrier than the others because his wife was killed in a carjacking. Carolyn Widmer seems depressed and seems to intuit something horrible has happened to her husband even before the notification takes place. And Mr. and Mrs. Rath the parents of the third victim are the most divided. The mother is in denial about the kind of child their daughter was and the father knew very clearly who she was. She's been missing for two days and the mother seems unwilling to acknowledge anything is wrong. Her father is the one who calls the cops.

Jude spends the entire episode, both in the present and the future, angry. He is angry at the cops because they couldn't find his daughter. When they do find his daughter he's infuriated that they can't catch the man who killed him. He calls them incompetent. The episode shows that Lewis spends the episode desperate to find a way to close a case which he knows in his heart is a stone cold whodunit. He focuses all his energy on finding the daughter and after that goes first to Cox for help, which she rightly says is a sign of desperation, and while cleaning up the Waterfront goes out of his way to engage in an elaborate plot to figure out exactly who the killer is. It's rare to see Meldrick this desperate to solve a case that is clearly never going to be solved – and then we remember he has no one to go to home to right now.

Giardello spends the night interviewing the drunken witnesses to the bar brawl, most of whom are too plastered, hung over or angry to be coherent. Finally he runs into a very hung over man who vaguely remembers seeing Jack Widmer hitting on a woman at a bar and he chose to cut in. He doesn't even remember hitting him with the beer bottle that killed him. Carolyn is very expansive about how she feels complete empathy for the man who did it and is the most open about how much of drunkard and womanizer her husband was. Her main reason for anger is that she was planning to leave him that night and instead her husband left her. Once again her husband left her with the last word and she hates him for it. (You gotta love the ways she says she slams The Waterfront in her last statement.)

After talking to them Bayliss says that according to her parents "Dad wouldn't be surprised if she was Satan's little disciple and Mom thinks she got lost on her way to the prom." Part of it is no doubt because the mother had her at 40 and like all mothers wants to see the best in her daughter. In the therapy session the two of them are sniping at each other but its clear that the father has a clearer perspective of Lila then her mother does. Lila hasn't been home in two days and her mother doesn't think anything's wrong even though she hasn't come home for her sixteenth birthday.  She refuses to accept what happened to her daughter even though her husband knows right away.

Pembleton has chafed at being chained to his desk but he's been trying to prove that he deserves to go back out. In the last few episodes he has been offering Bayliss advise on how to handle investigations but he stills trying to overreach. In the opening he tries to force Giardello to send him on the street and Al once again has to push him down. Kellerman is not much happier but he's willing to do the busy work when it counts. He agrees to go through the search to see if there are any carjackers and is more than willing to update Al about the progress of the cases. And he has yet to lose the sympathy for the job; when no one can clearly identify the victim he says its sometimes worse when they're anonymous. The Raths would beg to differ.

Its interesting to see the interactions between Kellerman and Pembleton in particular because ever since he was introduced the two men have rarely interacted, even on red balls. There's logic to this: both men have partners and as we've seen their personalities were diametrically opposite when we met Kellerman.

Interestingly while both have been chained to their desks for the past month we haven't seen them interact that much. Mike tries to make an effort to reach out to Frank and talk to him and Frank, in his inimitable fashion, thinks Mike is condescending to him. Mike tries hard to say things are alike: "We're both stuck at our desk. We're both pissed off about it. I'd say we have something in common."

And Frank demonstrating the delicacy he always does says: "You are accused of a crime. Not me." Now its worth noting this is the first time anyone in the squad has been direct to Mike about what's going on and Mike calls him on it: "I'm accused of being dirty, so I'm a class below you. And you're clean because all that happened is your brain frizzled and popped." 

This is by far the cruelest thing any one has said about Frank's condition since he returned to the unit, Even when Munch mocked him in the early episodes he was never this insulting.  But in the case of Mike its almost justifiable when he calls Frank on the bs he's been showing to everybody since he came back.

"You're not just arrogant. You're vain. You're like a pretty girl who never wants to show the bad sign of her face."

When Frank tries to modify it by saying he never said Mike was dirty and Mike fires back he never said otherwise, its one of the few times that Mike's superiority in the face of these charges is justifiable. And Frank clearly takes it as a challenge. Immediately afterward he goes into the aquarium and starts to interview the crackheads who haven't been telling the truth about what they saw in the alley.

That will eventually lead to him figuring out that the crackheads saw Gary Swern, the local scum in the ally, A convicted rapist just out of Jessup his aunt, the woman who raised him, is all but hoping that Bayliss can find the evidence in her house that would put her nephew away for good. Bayliss does find the evidence and though we don't see it play out, it's pretty clear that he manages to get Swern to confess to the murder.

Maybe the final scene between Kellerman and Pembleton isn't surprising. Considering that so many people in the squad have been ridiculously polite to him ever since he came back Frank no doubt appreciates someone saying to his face what he no doubt thinks the majority of the people in the department actively think of him coming back. Kellerman is the first person in a long time who tells Frank his pushing back against everybody since he got here that maybe the person he's been holding on to all this time wasn't particularly pleasant to begin with.

And so by the end of the episode when both men are looking at the sky he says: "Kellerman, you're okay by me." He doesn't say he believes Mike; he doesn't tell Mike he'll get through this intact. He just says that as far as he's concerned he has no problem with Kellerman. And for Mike that's actually enough at least tonight. He gives the first smile we've seen him give since this ordeal began and then lays on his back and looks at the moon.

Giardello tells Kay after he manages to close the Widmer's murder case that the reason he did it was that he still feels guilt for the murder of Raymond Dessassy. But the writers are too smart to argue that by solving this changes anything. Al knows that he still is good police but it doesn't change the fact he killed a man. When he asks Howard if because Webster made a lapse in judgment he's guilty Howard says he's responsible. Al knows he's responsible too and though it's never mentioned again (at least on the series) we know he will carry it forever.

It is not until the final scene that we find out what links to get her. In her last encounter at the morgue Juliana Cox tells Meldrick she has somewhere to be on a Saturday. Now in the final scene she tells us she's late and that she's been attending groups like this for weeks.

It is here we get the horrible truth behind her father's death. We assumed that when he passed in M.E., Myself and  I it was because he succumbed to an illness. In fact his car was run off the road several weeks ago in what appears to have been a deliberate act. He lingers for weeks refusing to die and then finally his body gave out. It's a stunning revelation that once again adds layers to Cox's character – and unfortunately will rarely be mentioned again.

I've little doubt that Juliana recognizes all four members of the group from her work at the morgue, even if she can't immediately put names to faces. (Carolyn makes the link immediately; its not clear if Jude and the Raths do.) Mr. Rath and Jude have been sniping at each other the entire episode and Juliana's remarks manage to cause a truth.

Carolyn has a fitting last remark about what's happened. "I'm all alone. But (Mr. Rath) you lost a child but you still have your wife and (Jude) lost a wife but you still have your child. There has to be some comfort in that."

And for the first time Jude lets his guard down and says the truth: "No there isn't." Mr. Rath agrees with him. The final moments show the four members of the group at their homes. Mr. Rath says he and his wife can't go home any more and when they do they can't sleep. "You have to be free to sleep. And we're trapped by this thing that happened to us."

The fact that the final image of the episode is of Gary Swern in lockup makes the metaphor clear. Everyone in this group is as much a prisoner as the people who took their loved ones lives. Just because there are no bars doesn't make it any less a cage

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

 

'Detective Munch'  In the midst of cleaning up the Waterfront Munch reveals the meaning of life to an uninterested Meldrick. The thing is with Munch it makes perfect sense.

"Life is basically an ironic experience. Let me give you an example. Say that you start out life trashing the establishment. Calling cops pigs, thumbing your nose at authority. What is the most ironic thing that could possibly happen to you? Becoming a cop, right? Well, look at me right. What am I?"

This may be the most self-aware John has ever been or will ever be on Homicide. Of course then he spoils it. "Ironies and Human Emotion by John Munch. I think J.P. Sartre's hearing footsteps, don't you?" Lewis, who is going through the wreckage of the Waterfront, demands Munch shut the hell up.

Hey Isn't That… This will be a long one.

Rosanna Arquette is the oldest sibling of the famous acting family with a career stretching back to her teenage years in ABC Afterschool specials, Eight is Enough and the role in the short-lived series Shirley. Her breakout role came as Nicole in the Emmy winning miniseries The Executioner's Song where she played the girlfriend of Gary Gilmore. She became a film sensation in 1985 when she starred in Desperately Seeking Susan, Silverado and After Hours. Her major work in television was in mini-series and TV movies such as Son of the Morning Star and Fear City.  Movie fans know her best as Jody, the heavily pierced girlfriend who reacts to Mia Wallace's adrenaline shot with the famous line "That was trippy."

She has acted with less frequency in the 21^st century, though she has worked somewhat in TV. She played Cherie in The L Word and played Nicole in the ABC drama What About Brian for two seasons. Her most prominent role was in the first season of Ray Donovan when she played Linda, Mick's girlfriend who meets the end of a gun  and then as the voice of a dolphin.(No it doesn't make sense even if I explain it.) She has since appeared as the mother of the title character in Ballard.

Chris Eigeman made his film debut in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and would also have roles in Stillman's Barcelona and Last Days of Disco. This role was relatively early in his career. Not long after he would be cast as Arthur in It's Like, You Know an ABC sitcom that aired one season. He appeared as Bill Moyers in the Emmy winning HBO film Path To War and Lionel over four seasons of Malcolm in the Middle. He also played Jason, one of Lorelai's potential love interests in Season 4 of Gilmore Girls. (Right before she and Luke finally got together.) A favorite of Amy Sherman-Palladino he had a guest appearance in Bunheads and the final two seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Aside from that he basically stopped acting after a 2012 appearance in Girls.

Polly Holiday was had starred in TV for several years before she had her break out role as Flo on the classic comedy Alice. With her famous line of 'Kiss My Grits' her character was so iconic she even had her own spinoff for one season. She never achieved that success again but was a constant force in television with numerous guest roles and several regular roles. The year before she was cast as Mrs. Rath she had played Momma Love on The Client. In her film career she starred in Gremlins, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Parent Trap. Her last film role was as Diane Plame in Fair Game. She passed away in September of 2025 at 88.

 

Get the DVD:  The montage sequence that shows what is happening during the long Saturday night from the victims deals with their grief to Meldrick bringing the baby home triumphantly in the streaming is absent the song that makes it a classic: The Eels 'Not Ready Yet'. Trust me it absolutely doesn't have the same power without it. She has since appeared as the mother of the title character in Ballard.