Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.15 “End Game”

Posted on June 29, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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, the Homicide detective finally arrest the shooter but can they get a confession?

Episode 3.15 “End Game”

(Dir by Lee Bonner, originally aired on February 10th, 1995)

Finally, the Homicide detectives have figured out who actually shot Bolander, Howard, and Felton. Gordon Pratt (Steve Buscemi), who lived at the apartment that the detectives were accidentally sent to, is a gun-obsessed pseudo-intellectual whose apartment is full of books that he’s probably never read and a picture of himself posing like Lee Harvey Oswald with the rifle he used to kill JFK. Pratt also has an outstanding warrant for his arrest, explaining why he panicked when the cops accidentally knocked on his door.

Here’s my question. Why exactly did it not occur to anyone to see who lived in Apartment 201 when the shootings first happened? I understand that they were focused on a different suspect but it still seems strange that, with all the detectives assigned to the case, no one bothered to check out the guy who lived in Apartment 201.

Anyway, Bayliss and Mitch Drummond drop in on Pratt’s parents, who own a farmhouse and insist that Gordon would never shoot anyone. Meanwhile, Pratt’s co-workers all talk about how much they hate his guts with one guy mentioning that Pratt went out of his way to antagonize people. Pratt is finally tracked down at a massage parlor.

The majority of this episode centers around Pembleton and Bayliss interrogating Pratt. It’s an obvious attempt to recapture the intensity of the first season’s Three Men and Adena and it actually succeeds, thanks to some smart writing and the performances of Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor, and especially Steve Buscemi. Buscemi plays Pratt as being the ultimate uneducated know-it-all, someone who has picked bits and pieces of philosophy and who has learned that, if you deliver your mundane thoughts with a sneering contempt, some people will assume that you’re smarter than you actually are. Pembleton and Bayliss have fun picking apart Pratt’s arrogance but — and this is what sets Homicide apart from so many other cop shows — Pembleton ultimately goes too far. When he takes a look at Pratt’s copy of Plato’s The Republic and realizes that it’s written in Greek, Pembleton can’t help but taunt Pratt and point out that, unlike Pratt, he can actually read ancient Greek because he was educated by “the Jesuits,” while Pratt didn’t even mange to graduate high school.

“I want a lawyer!” Pratt shouts.

At this point, I realized that I had gotten so wrapped up in the interrogation scene that I had totally forgotten about the fact that all of the evidence linking Pratt to the shooting was circumstantial. Without a gun or a confession, there’s not enough evidence to hold Pratt. He pleads out to his outstanding assault warrant and he’s free within a few hours.

“You got too cute, Frank,” Munch says, leading to Pembleton physically attacking Munch and then storming out of the station. Munch goes to the hospital to see Bolander (who has woken up from his coma but who has no memory of who Much actually is) and Bayliss is the only person left to take the call when Gordon Pratt turns up dead in the lobby of his apartment building, shot in the head.

Who murdered Gordon Pratt and was it a cop? That’s what Bayliss — who sarcastically declares “I love my job!” before heading to the crime scene — will have to figure out.

Great episode! Not only was it wonderfully performed but, just when you thought to yourself, “There’s no way Pembleton could get away with this in real life,” it turns out that Pembleton couldn’t get away with it on Homicide either. That’s what makes Frank Pembleton such a fascinating character. He’s a brilliant detective but, in this episode, he let his desire to embarrass Pratt get in the way of doing his job. “He who loses control loses,” Pembleton says and, in this episode, he lost control. Pembleton’s reaction is to storm out of the station in a huff, leaving Bayliss the task of figuring out who killed Gordon Pratt.

My money’s on Munch, just because of how upset he was when Pratt walked and also that it would make sense for Munch to avenge Bolander’s head wound by shooting Pratt in the head. We’ll see if I’m correct next week!

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.14 “Dead End”

Posted on June 22, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the elusive Glenn Holton is captured but is really the shooter? Read on and find out!

Episode 3.13 “Dead End”

(Dir by Whitney Ransick, originally aired on February 3rd, 1995)

There’s a truly remarkable moment in this week’s episode of Homicide.

Glenn Holton (Steve Hofvendahl) has finally been arrested and is sitting in the Box. Holton is the pedophile who is suspected of murdering a child. Last week, Felton, Bolander, and Howard were all shot while trying to serve a warrant for his arrest. Bayliss and Pembleton are interviewing him, attempting to get him to confess to shooting the detectives.

At first, Holton is adamant that he did not shoot anyone. But as Pembleton and Bayliss shout at him and tell him about all the things that are going to happen to him as a sex offender in prison, Holton’s demeanor starts to change. He becomes desperate and confused and suddenly, he confesses to shooting the detectives. The only problem is that the story Holton comes up with doesn’t match the facts of the case. He claims that he shot the detectives on the roof of his apartment building. He claims they were coming at him. When asked what type of gun he used, Holton says it was just some gun that he bought on the street. The more Holton talks, the more obvious it becomes that, while he did murder the child, he didn’t shoot the detectives.

It’s an interesting scene because it shows just how easy it could be to get a false confession out of a suspect. It’s left ambiguous as to whether or not Holton was lying because he preferred to be sent to prison for shooting a cop instead of killing a kid or if maybe Holton actually had deluded himself into thinking he was the shooter. If Bayliss and Pembleton hadn’t asked him follow-up questions about the shooting, Holton probably would have been charged with the shooting. He did, after all, confess.

Holton’s going to jail for murder but the shooter is still out there. Who fired the gun? I suspect I know, just because next week’s episode features a special guest star. But we’ll talk about that next week!

The interrogation scene was the highlight of this week’s episode. Still, I enjoyed the scenes of Munch working with Bolander’s ex-partner Mitch and struggling to hide his jealousy. (Bolander is always complaining that Mitch was a far better partner than Munch.) I was a bit less interested in this week’s Russert plot. Megan was told to investigate whether or not Giardello was at fault for the detectives going to the wrong apartment. She discovered Giardello did approve and initial the warrant without double-checking the address. Giardello was prepared to take the blame but Russet instead lied and claimed that, because of budget cuts, she and Giardello were both often rushed into signing things without getting a chance to fully examine them. I’m not sure that’s a particularly good excuse but it worked.

At the hospital, Howard woke up from her coma. Bolander is still in his coma and was not present during this episode. (From what I’ve read, Ned Beatty was apparently not happy with the whole shooting storyling, feeling that it went against the realism that was supposed to be Homicide’s calling card.) Lewis and Felton had a heart-to-heart about what it’s like to lose one’s partner. It was an effective scene, even if Felton has become a bit of a one-note character.

This was a good episode and a marked improvement on last week. I look forward to seeing how things conclude (or if they even do conclude) in the next episode.

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.13 “The City That Bleeds”

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, it’s another red ball on Homicide!

Episode 3.12 “The City That Bleeds”

(Dir by Tim Hunter, originally aired on January 27th, 1995)

This week’s episode opens with Bolander, Munch, Howard, and Felton having a morning meeting outside of an apartment building. They put on bullet-proof vets because they (and several uniformed officers) are about to arrest Glenn Holton, a sex offender who is believed to have murdered a child. Unfortunately, because of a transcription error on the warrant, the detective go to Apartment 201 instead of 210. As they knock on the door to 201, someone on the stairwell opens fire on them. Bolander, Howard, and Felton are hit. Munch somehow avoids being shot.

It’s red ball time! We’re only 12 episodes into season 3 and this is our third “all hands on deck” red ball of the season. NBC reportedly wanted showrunner Tom Fontana to give them more drama in return for renewing the low-rated Homicide and Fontana delivered.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This was a compelling episode, featuring Pembleton tracking Glenn Holton across the city while Bayliss tried to deal with his guilt over being relieved that he wasn’t shot. After visiting the hospital, Giardello had an emotional breakdown while Lewis was driving him back to the station. Felton’s wife returned from Philadelphia to visit him in the hospital. Gloria Reuben and Tony Lo Bianco guest-starred as detectives who came in to help with the case and, for both of them, this episode felt like an audition to join the cast. Things ended with a cliffhanger. Holton is still at large. Felton is awake but hospitalized. Bolander and Kay are still in critical condition. It was an exciting episode.

And yet, one can understand why Ned Beatty later said, in an interview, that this was one of the episodes that eventually led to him leaving the show. First off, why the detectives would be serving the arrest warrant as opposed to the uniformed cops or, considering Holton’s crimes, even the SWAT team, I’m not sure. Munch makes a comment about how the four of them had served hundreds of arrest warrants in the past but it’s not something that we’ve ever seen them do on the show before. That the nonstop emotional drama was compelling was due to the strength of the cast and not the strength of the script, which was occasionally so overwrought that it felt almost like a parody of a cop show. This episode worked but, after it ended, I found myself thinking about how different it felt from the deliberately-paced and moody episodes the aired during the first and second seasons.

And finally, it’s hard not to get annoyed that, with everything going on, we still had to deal with all of Felton’s stupid domestic nonsense. I’m tried of hearing about Felton’s wife and kids and how he can’t make his marriage work. I’m even more tired of Megan Russert, a character who could be a total badass, being solely defined by her relationship with Felton.

This episode, the first of a three-parter, held my attention while I was watching it and it was only afterwards that I realized I kind of had mixed feelings about it overall. Homicide is changing. We’ll see where it goes.

Film Review: Lincoln (dir. by Steven Spielberg)

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I am a history nerd.

If you’ve read my previous reviews here on the Shattered Lens, that’s not necessarily a major revelation. Still, before I talk about Steven Spielberg’s latest film, the sure-to-be Oscar nominated Lincoln, you should know where I’m coming from as a reviewer. Cinema may be my number one love but history, and especially political history, runs a close second. To me, there is nothing more fascinating than learning how those in the past both viewed and dealt with the issues that we still face in the present. Whereas some people take pride in being able to name every player that’s ever played for the Dallas Cowboys, I take pride in the fact that I can not only name every President and Vice President in order but I can also tell you exactly who they had to defeat in order to serve in those offices.

I love history and therefore, it was hard for me not to feel as if Lincoln was a film that was made specifically for me. Covering the final four months of the life of the 16th president, this film tells the story of Lincoln’s struggle to pass the 13th Amendment and to bring an end to the U.S. Civil War. The film also documents Lincoln’s troubled marriage to the unstable Mary and his son’s decision to enlist in the Union Army. Even though Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner don’t include any vampires*, there’s still a lot going on in Lincoln and it is to their credit that the film remains compelling despite the fact that everyone already knows how the story is going to end.

Daniel Day-Lewis is getting a lot of critical acclaim for his performance in the title role and, for once, I actually have to agree with the critics. Abraham Lincoln is one of the most iconic figures in American history. He is such an icon that, at times, it’s hard to believe that this larger-than-life figure, with his stove-pipe hat and his homely face, was an actual human being who lived and breathed and died like any other human being. It’s easier to think of him in the same way that Jesus Christ used to be represented in films like Ben-Hur, as an inspiring character who is always standing just a little bit off-camera. The brilliance of Day-Lewis’s performance is that he makes us believe that this legendary figure could actually exist with all the rest of history’s mortals. For lack of a better term, Day-Lewis humanizes Lincoln. His performance contains all the bits of the Lincoln legend: the fatalistic melancholy, the steely resolve, the quick humor, and occasional flashes of self-doubt. The genius of the performance is the way that it takes all the legendary pieces and arranges them to create a portrait of a very believable man.

Though the film is dominated by Day-Lewis’s lead performance, the film’s supporting cast does a good job at bringing to life the people around Lincoln. Whenever one film can manage to find roles for Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Jared Harris, James Spader, John Hawkes, and Jackie Earle Haley, you’ve got good reason to be optimistic about what you’re about to see. Probably the film’s showiest supporting role goes to Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the firebrand abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Admittedly, Tommy Lee Jones gives a standard Tommy Lee Jones performance here but, especially when paired with Day-Lewis’s more internal acting style, the end result is still fun to watch. Also giving a good performance is Sally Field, who plays Lincoln’s mentally unstable wife. Historians have rarely been kind (or fair) to Mary Lincoln but Field makes her into a difficult but sympathetic figure. Finally, even though the role of Lincoln’s son is not a challenging one, I’m always happy whenever Joseph Gordon-Levitt shows up onscreen.

Ultimately, however, Lincoln is a Steven Spielberg film. Spielberg is a very good director but he’s also a very safe one. The same can be said of Lincoln as a film. The film’s cinematography, art design, and costume design are all brilliantly done and award-worthy but it’s still hard not to occasionally wish that Spielberg would have enough faith in his audience that he wouldn’t feel the need to have John Williams provide constant musical cues to let us know what we are supposed to be feeling about what we’re experiencing. If you’re looking for hints of moral ambiguity, an unflinching examination of the rivers of blood that flowed on the Civil War battlefield, or for an in-depth portrait of Lincoln’s personal demons (and most historians agree that he had a few), you might want to look elsewhere. This is not Martin Scorsese’s Lincoln. This is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. This is a film that is meant to be inspiring (as opposed to thought-provoking) and, for the most part, it succeeds.

I have to admit that I went into Lincoln expecting to be disappointed. Ever since the film first went into production in 2011, websites like Awards Daily have been hyping this film to death. Before many of them had even seen the completed film, online critics were announcing that both the film and Daniel Day-Lewis were the clear front-runners for the Oscars in 2013. As anyone who has read my previous reviews on this site knows, nothing turns me off more than the bandwagon mentality of the critical establishment. Often times, when a film is embraced as vehemently and as early as Lincoln has been, I feel almost honor-bound to be a hundred times more critical of it than I would be of a film like Step Up Revolution.

However, Lincoln is a rarity. It’s a film that, for the most part, actually lives up to all the hype.

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*I imagine that little joke will cause a lot of confusion to anyone who, ten years in the future, happens to stumble across this review. To you, future reader who has forgotten all about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I can only apologize.