Steve Harper | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Youtube.

For this week’s episode, the dead rise and …. hey, wait a minute. Horrorthon’s over! And yet, here I am reviewing another show about zombies. Oh well, let’s get to it!

Episode 1.5 “My Zombie Lover”

(Dir by David Misch, originally aired on November 19th, 1988)

It’s the night of the dead!

In a small town, the dead rise once a year and feast on the flesh of the living. No one is sure why this happens. As one person explains it, some people think that it’s a gypsy curse and some people think that it’s due to radiation and others think that it’s just the result of poor embalming techniques. But every year, for one night, families in the town head out with their guns and they spend a few hours killing zombies.

Dottie (Tempestt Bledsoe) is home, visiting from college. She doesn’t want to go out and hunt zombies. Nor does she want to go see her old high school acquaintances. She just wants to stay on the couch while Dad (Ed Wheeler), Mom (Marcella Lowery, the terrible principal from City Guys), and her younger brother, Brad (Eugene Byrd), head outside. Dad can’t wait to kill some zombies. Brad, meanwhile, thinks that the zombies should be left alone and is carrying a protest sign.

After her family boards up the house and then leaves, Dottie is surprised to hear a knock at the door. She answers the door and finds Paul Nichols (Steve Harper) standing outside with some flowers. Paul was in Dottie’s French class but he died before he could graduate from high school. Now, he’s back in zombie form and he just wants Dottie to know that he always had a crush on her. Soon, Paul and Dottie are talking about old times. Unfortunately, Paul cannot resist the temptation to bite Dottie’s hand but Dottie forgives him.

Suddenly, Dad, Mom, and Brad return. Dad takes one look at Paul and aims his rifle. Shouting that she loves Paul, Dottie jumps in front of her zombie boyfriend and is killed by the bullet that was meant for him. However, since this is the night of the dead, Dottie immediately returns in zombie form. She and Paul are both hungry and they ask if there’s any meat in the house. Dad and Mom think for a moment and then they both look down at Brad and share a smile.

In other words, Brad was the only person in town who cared about the zombies and now, he’s going to be eaten.

I appreciated this episode’s rather macabre sense of humor and I especially liked the way Dad ran through all the possible reasons for the zombies returning. (They are all reasons that have been suggested in various Romero zombie films.) Unfortunately, a few too many of the jokes fell flat for this episode to really be considered a total success. Tempestt Bledsoe, in particular, seemed to be confused by the episode’s grotesque humor, giving a performance that never quite found the right balance between sincerity and humor. That said, I did like Steve Harper’s performance as the saddest zombie in the world. He only gets to eat once a year but, rather than do that, he just wants to let Dottie know that he liked her. Awwwwww!

Despite some tonal inconsistences, this was an entertaining episode, one that I appreciated as a fan of zombie films.