Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, Lisa will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

This week’s episode made me cry and cry.

Episode 4.4 “A Doll’s Eyes”

(Dir by Kenneth Fink, originally aired on December 1st, 1995)

Here in America, there’s recently been a lot of debate about how much of a problem crime actually is.  It’s a bit of an odd debate because much of it is based on telling people to ignore what they’re seeing and experiencing and to instead, just take comfort in abstract statistics and numbers.  “Actually,” we’re told, “crime is down from last year,” as if the claim that there’s slightly less of it being reported somehow negates the fact that it exists.

Those who say that crime is not a big deal often forget that crime is not just a matter of statistics and police reports.  Crime is something that happens to people.  It’s something that scars people.  It’s not something that most people can just shrug off.  Every crime is different and everyone reacts to being a victim in their own individual way but react, they do.  It’s easy to be dismissive of people’s concerns about crime when you’re not the one getting your house broken into or hearing gunshots in the night.  It’s easy to say “It was just a mugging,” when you’re not the one getting mugged and losing whatever trust you may have once had in the system. Seth Rogen once tweeted that he didn’t care that his car got broken into because he wasn’t into worrying about possessions.  That’s easy to say when you can just buy a new car whenever you feel like it.  For someone who can’t and is now stuck with the knowledge that they’re not even safe in their own car, it’s considerably more difficult to be so cavalier.   Crime is about more than just statistics and numbers.  For those who have been victimized, it’s about loss.  It’s about never feeling truly safe or secure again.

This week’s episode of Homicide fellows Pembleton and Bayliss as they investigate a shooting at a mall.  A young boy was caught in the crossfire and now, he’s on life support at the hospital.  For Pembleton and Bayliss, it starts out as another case.  Tracking down the shooters is not difficult.  Getting the shooters to confess is not difficult.  Pembleton and Bayliss aren’t dealing with master criminals here.

For the boy’s parents (played, in two heart-breaking performances, by Marcia Gay Harden and Gary Basaraba), the shooting of their son is the moment that their lives stopped.  They’re the one who eventually have to make the decision to take their son off of life support.  Hearing that their son’s organs were donated and are helping other people provides cold comfort.  Their only son is dead and, as this episode make clear, they’re not going to be okay.  Some would describe their son as just being another statistic, part of the count of how many people died in Baltimore during any given year.  For his parents, he’s Patrick, a 10 year-old who loved dinosaurs and science and whose life was ended because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  When Bayliss runs into the father of a girl who got an organ transplant as the result of the Patrick’s death, the girl’s father muses on how strange it is that one child died so that his girl could live.  It’s a powerful moment, one that really captures the humanity at the heart of this show’s best episodes.  Patrick’s parents will never recover but his murder has led to other people being saved.  Was it worth the cost?  The show is smart enough to leave the question for us to ponder.

This episode made me cry.  It reminded me a bit of season 2’s Bop Gun, with its mix of the family trying to deal with an unimaginable tragedy while, for Pembleton and Bayliss, it’s another day at work.  I would actually say this episode was superior to Bop Gun.  Bop Gun tried too hard to wrap things up.  A Doll’s Eyes understands that sometimes, this is no way to wrap things up.  Life just keeps moving.