Homicide Rewatch: Blood Ties, Part 2

Season 6, Episode 2

Teleplay by David Simon ; story by Tom Fonatana & James Yoshimura

Directed by Nick Gomez

In the middle section of the three part opener of Season Six we find ourselves dealing with two stories. One is a subplot that is one of the most comic murders Homicide will deal with (and its dealt with some humorous ones. The other, which continues the investigation into Melia Brierre, is far more serious and at the time drew far more controversy among long time viewers.

The former, which bears the biggest imprint of the author, reminds the viewer the importance of setting of Homicide. Baltimore is not the main character of this show in the way that Simon would famously claim it was of The Wire five years later but it’s very much an important series regular. I’ve referred to this in passing in several of my reviews of this series but I don’t think I’ve emphasized how groundbreaking it was for a network drama to be shooting in Baltimore at a time when every other series was being filmed in LA. It had been just as groundbreaking when Law & Order had filmed in New York at the start of the decade but unlike the more iconic series while the writers and much of the staff were from Baltimore they rarely drew attention to in a particularly showy way. One of the handful of times that Baltimore was…