Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
This week, we take a trip into the past.
Episode 6.10 “Sins of the Father”
(Dir by Mary Harron, originally aired on January 9th, 1998)
A white advertising executive is found whipped and hung in an abandoned building in a black neighborhood. Lewis and Falsone (ugh) investigate. Lewis is disturbed when he visits the executive’s mansion and discovers that his library is full of pictures of family members of fought for the Confederacy. (The show makes sure to emphasize that a Confederate battle flag is hanging on a wall.) The man’s wife insists that the man was only interested in the history of his family and that he wasn’t a racist. Later, when Lewis and Falsone investigate the home of a suspect whose work van was seen near the crime scene, Lewis discovers that suspect’s bedroom is decorated with pictures of black activists. Lewis says that he instinctively knows that its all connected.
And it is! It turns out that the dead man was a descendent of Patty Ridenour, a notorious woman who, in the pre-Civil War days, used to capture free blacks and sell them into slavery. The man was murdered by Dennis Ribgy (Lawrence Mason), a descendant of one of Petty Ridenour’s victims. When Rigby is brought in for questioning, he confesses without much pressure. Every one has been very eager to confess this season.
This idea behind this episode was interesting, even if it didn’t quite pay off as well as it probably should have. (If any case ever called out for Lewis and Pembleton to work together, it was this one. But, of course, that would mean that Falsone wouldn’t be in the spotlight and we certainly couldn’t be fortunate enough to have that happen.) Maryland was a border state during the Civil War, one that tried to play it both ways by remaining both a slave state and a member of the Union. Even though it didn’t join the Confederacy, slave auctions were still occurring in Maryland during the Civil War. Because it didn’t secede, it was left out of the Emancipation Proclamation and slavery wasn’t actually outlawed in Maryland until a year later. Though Patty Ridenour was a fictional characters, there were no doubt many people like her in Maryland and the rest of the North as well.
(A lot of white people tend to assume that just because their ancestors lived up North, that somehow means there wasn’t a hint of racism to be found in their family tree. Historically, the opposite was often true.)
Again, the idea behind this episode is interesting. At the same time, Falsone feels out-of-place as Lewis’s partner. (Considering all of the interest that Falsone has shown in the Luther Mahoney shooting, it’s a little hard to believe he and Lewis would have the type of friendly relationship that they do in this episode.) This is a case that Lewis and Pembleton, two proud black men with different approaches to the job and the differing views of guilt and innocence, should have investigated together. Actually, if the show really wanted to get brave, it would have partnered Lewis with Gharty, who is the detective most likely not to understand why being in a house full of Confederate memorabilia would make Lewis feel uncomfortable. Either way, it would have led to a better debate about the legacy of slavery than having Lewis partner up with Falsone, a detective who doesn’t seem to have strong feelings about anything other than his ex-wife and the Luther Mahoney shooting.
This episode has a few arty flashbacks to Patty Ridenour riding her horse and whipping her victims. At first, I thought the flashbacks were out of place but, by the end of the episode, I better appreciated them and their purpose in the narrative. The flashbacks show how the evil of the Patty Ridenours of the world continued to infect everything that came since.
Finally, I should mention that this episode featured Bayliss and Ballard going out on a date. Gharty wasn’t happy about that. Personally, I think Bayliss and Ballard make for a cute couple!
