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, Lewis solves a cold case.

Episode 4.6 “Hate Crimes”

(Dir by Peter Weller, originally aired on November 17th, 1995)

On the eve of Thanksgiving, a young man is killed outside of a gay night club.  Bayliss and Pembleton are investigating.  All of the witnesses say that the man was jumped by a group of skinheads.  While Pembleton, as usual, is set on capturing the guilty party, Bayliss is uncomfortable about the what he assumes to have been the victim’s identity.

Bayliss is a homophobe?  Really?

I guess this development doesn’t come totally out-of-nowhere.  There was an earlier episode where Bayliss was clearly uncomfortable dealing with an S&M-themed murder so he does have a history of getting weirded out by anything that goes against what he considers to be the straight and the conventional.  At the same time, it’s kind of hard to feel that Bayliss is often just whatever the writers need him to be at the moment.  For this episode, Pembleton needed a homophobe to deal with.  And, since Felton and Bolander are no longer on the show, the job fell to Bayliss, even though Bayliss — even at his most awkward and uncomfortable — has never been presented as being prejudiced before. For me, it’s hard not to feel that the episode would have been even more interesting if it was Pembleton — self-righteous, faith-struggling, Jesuit-trained Pembleton — was uncomfortable with the victim’s identity and if, for once, Bayliss could have been the tolerant one.  Pembleton’s a great character but occasionally, it’s hard not to feel that he’s almost too flawless.

That said, this storyline features a brilliant twist.  When Pembleton and Bayliss talk to the victim’s father (the great Terry O’Quinn), they ask him if he knew that his son was gay.  The father gets angry at them, says that if his son was gay then he deserved to die, and then kicks them out of the house.  Later, Bayliss and Pembleton learn that the victim was not gay.  Instead, the skinheads assumed he was gay and attacked him because he was outside of the nightclub.  Bayliss and Pembleton return to the victim’s father and tells him that his son wasn’t gay.  Only then does the victim’s father start to cry.  For him, his son was not worthy shedding a tear over until he was assured that his son wasn’t gay.  Of course, the father doesn’t realize that his prejudice is the same prejudice held by the skinheads who killed his son.  He’s stunned to hear his son was killed due to a mistake but it doesn’t occur to him that he rejected his son because he made the same mistake.

While that was going on, Lewis defied Howard and solved the Erica Chilton case.  (During the previous season, Howard was given the Chilton case after Crosetti committed suicide.  The since-departed Felton lost a key piece of evidence.)  When Erica Chilton’s daughter was brought to the office because she had been having dreams about her mother’s death, Lewis and Kellerman were the two detectives that talked to her.  Howard was not happy about this, saying that Lewis should have let her handle the interrogation.  Lewis. who has not been happy about Howard getting promoted to sergeant, told her to back off and to stop criticizing his former partner.  While the two of them were arguing, Kellerman got the little girl to remember that the murderer was wearing a monogrammed shirt and that his initials with “T.M.”  At the time of her murder, Erica was engaged to Tom Marans (Dean Winters).

Howard demanded that Lewis tell her before he interrogated Marans so that she could be in the Box.  So, of course, after Lewis and Kellerman tricked Tom into coming down to the station by telling him they needed him to look over some new evidence, Lewis proceeded to interrogate Tom without Howard being there.  With help of a new voice analysis machine, Lewis was able to get Tom to confess without much effort.  Lewis was also able to get a date with the voice analyst, Debbie Haskell (Allison Smith).  Sgt. Howard, meanwhile, got very, very pissed off.

Finally, Brodie (Max Perlich) — the cameraman who helped Lewis and Kellerman out a few episodes ago — got a new job when he was hired to help the Homicide Department film crime scenes.  I’m kind of amazed that they didn’t already have someone to do that.

This was a good episode, even if Bayliss’s homophobia did feel a bit forced.  While Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor were as great as always, I have to say that Clark Johnson really stole this episode as the cocky and rebellious Meldrick Lewis.  Howard is absolutely right about Lewis not treating her with the respect that she deserves.  At the same time, Lewis did finally solve the Chilton case.  So, maybe they’re even.

Probably not.