Title: The Librarian
Directed by: Noam Pitlik
Written by: Frank Dungan, Jeff Stein, and Tony Sheehan
Air Date: February 19, 1981
Previous: Stormy Weather
Next: Rachel
Guest Starring: Zachary Berger, Titos Vandis, Allan Miller, Miriam Byrd-Nethery
"The Librarian" is the 13th episode of the seventh season of Barney Miller.
Dietrich and Harris respond to a disturbance at a local library, and bring back Miss Austin, the librarian. It seems that Miss Austin got a little too stressed out over all the petty annoyances of being a librarian, things like books that aren't returned, homeless people sleeping in the reading rooms, teens making out in the aisles. So she pulled a gun.
The second wacky case is eventually revealed to be not wacky at all. Wojo was coming to work when he sees the smashed-in window of Mr. Zlinka's joke shop. Mr. Zlinka, a genial elderly fellow who sells novelty knick-knacks like dribble glasses and fake telephones, insists that it's not that big a deal. Still, someone is throwing bricks through his store front and spray-painting swastikas, so Wojo insists he come in and make a report.
Mr. Zlinka is still there when the alarm goes off at his joke shop. Wojo and Harris respond and bring back one Stefan Beruit, another older man. Mr. Beruit then reveals why he's been vandalizing Mr. Zlinka's shop: Mr. Beruit was an inmate at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in World War II, and Mr. Zlinka was the SS guard in charge of his work detail.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: Mr. Zlinka getting his store wrecked by someone spray-painting swastikas leads the men of the 12th to assume he's the victim of a Nazi hate crime; Barney even asks "Are you Jewish?" It turns out that actually, Mr. Zlinka is the Nazi.
- Continuity Nod: Another reference to the almost series-long plot thread about Harris writing a book about the 12th Precinct. Miss Austin the librarian recognizes Harris from the dust jacket photo on "Blood on the Badge". She says that no one has ever checked out his book.
- Darker and Edgier: A Birkenau death camp guard hiding out in the 12th Precinct is certainly darker than the usual Barney Miller storyline.
- Job Title: "The Librarian." Miss Austin is a particularly stressed-out one.
- Mood Whiplash: The jokes comes to a screeching halt when Mr. Beruit identifies Mr. Zlinka as a Birkenau guard. Then there's some more whiplash when the show cuts back and forth from that extremely dark story to that of Miss Austin the gun-toting librarian.
- Nazi Grandpa: Played for Drama. Mr. Zlinka, a cheerful old guy who sells stuff like fake sugar packets that won't open, turns out to be a former Nazi death camp guard.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The story of Mr. Zlinka, a nice old man who is revealed to have been a guard at a Nazi death camp, is obviously inspired by the case of Cleveland auto worker and former Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk
. - Tension-Cutting Laughter: An extraordinarily tense scene has Mr. Beruit tell about how Mr. Zlinka took a construction work detail of over a thousand Romani and worked them for six months until only fifteen were left alive. After all this goes down, and just as Mr. Beruit is leaving for prints and processing—he's still under arrest for vandalizing the joke shop—Mr. Beruit has one last thing to tell.Mr. Beruit: I have over seven hundred parking tickets.
