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, Homicide crosses over with Law & Order.

Law & Order 6.13 “Charm City”

(Dir by Ed Sherin, originally aired on February 7th, 1996)

Homicide 4.11 “For God and Country”

(Dir by Ed Sherin, originally aired on February 9th, 1996)

This week, we have a two-part cross-over between Law & Order and Homicide.

On Law & Order, things start in New York City.  A chemical attack on a subway train leaves 20 people dead.  Because the train was specifically heading into Harlem and all of the victims were black, it is suspected that the attack was racially motivated.  In Baltimore, Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss hear about the attack and are reminded of a similar attack on a black church, which occurred five years prior.  Pembleton was the primary on the church attack.  He and Bayliss head to New York City, where they meet and quickly get on the nerves of Detectives Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt).

Pembleton’s investigation uncovers that a man from Baltimore, Brian Egan (Kevin Geer), not only had access to the chemicals used in both attacks but also that’s he currently in New York.  When Briscoe and Curtis arrest Egan and fail to get him to confess, Pembleton asks for permission to interrogate him.  Pembleton, being Pembleton, rather easily gets Egan to confess to having committed the church bombing.  However, before getting the confession, Pembleton pretends not to hear Egan say that he no longer wants to continue talking.  In typical Law & Order (if not Homicide) fashion, the confession is tossed out.

Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) still get their conviction.  (And Claire gets an admirer in the form of Tim Bayliss.)  However, it’s obvious that Egan was not working alone.  Egan says that he will never name names.

That changes when his wife is murdered and his teenage son goes missing.  Homicide opens with Bayliss investigating the poisoning of Egan’s wife.  He and Pembleton eventually track down Egan’s son and they get him to admit that he saw his uncle, former NSA agent Col. Alexander Rausch (J.K. Simmons), murder his mother.  Because Brian Egan has said that he’ll only reveal the truth of the conspiracy if his son is brought to New York, Briscoe and Curtis show up in Baltimore.

While Curtis, Bayliss, and Pembleton track down Colonel Rausch, Briscoe hangs out with Munch.  Their friendly banter goes south as soon as Briscoe mentions that he once knew a Gwen Munch in New York.  Gwen is John Munch’s ex-wife and John is not happy when he finds out that Briscoe slept with Gwen.  John Munch spends the rest of the episode drinking heavily.  Stanley Bolander would not approve.

As for Col. Rausch, he is captured and he turns out to be a smug snake.  (He’s played by J.K. Simmons, after all.)  Pembleton wants to see Rausch prosecuted for the church bombing and he especially wants to see racist Rausch publicly humiliated.  New York, however, wants to prosecute him for the subway attack.  Claire comes down to Baltimore and gets a judge to agree that Rausch should first be sent to New York.

Rausch doesn’t care.  He has a heart condition so he simply stops taking his heart pills and then drops dead while waiting for the train to take him to the Big Apple.  The episodes ends with Pembleton sobbing as he realizes Rausch will never be humiliated at a trial.  The New York cops shrug and say, “Sorry, Frank.”

I enjoyed this crossover quite a bit.  It was interesting to see two police dramas, each with a very different style, come together to tell one big story.  As Homicide always celebrated the lengths that Pembleton would go to get a confession in the Box, it was amusing to see what would actually happen to one of those confessions if it was brought to court.  Jack McCoy is not at all amused by Pembleton’s tactics.  Meanwhile, Briscoe, Curtis, and Claire was allowed to loosen up a bit when they went to Homicide and I enjoyed watching them shed their “just-the-facts” personas.  If the Law & Order episode was ultimately superior to the the Homicide episode, that’s just because the Law & Order episode featured an actual mystery to be solved whereas the Homicide episode occasionally felt as if it was padded out a bit.  On Homicide, it was obvious that Colonel Rausch was guilty and, from the minute he started to cough during the interrogation, it was easy to guess what his ultimate fate would be.

(I also have to say that it was interesting to compare this episode of Law & Order to watch Law & Order has become today.  How this show went from featuring McCoy confidently doing his job to Nolan Price essentially begging his co-counsel, on a weekly basis, to actually do her job is something that is worth considering.)

Overall, this was a good crossover.  For those who want to watch it, the Law & Order episode is available on Hulu and Disney+ while Homicide can be found on Peacock and Tubi.