Title: Blizzard
Directed by: Danny Arnold
Written by: Tony Sheehan
Air Date: November 3, 1977
Previous: Copycat
Next: Chase
Guest Starring: Alex Henteloff, Lou Cutell, Lewis Charles
"Blizzard" is the seventh episode of the fourth season of Barney Miller.
Winter has hit New York, as the detectives of the 12th Precinct look out the window and watch the snow fall. Wojo has brought in a thief, one Mr. Lujak, who was caught robbing drunks passed out in the snow. Mr. Lujak compalains of tightness in his chest while Wojo is writing up the report. Wojo is distracted for a moment, and when he comes back to his desk he realizes that Mr. Lujak, still sitting in his chair on the other side of the desk, has died.
Wojo is horrified and wonders if he is responsible for Mr. Lujak's death by chasing him down in the street. The whole squad room is horrified when the coroner's office says that streets are impassable due to the blizzard, so they're going to have to keep Mr. Lujak there for a while. Things get worse when slimy defense lawyer Arnold Ripner shows up with Mr. Lujak's bail ticket, finds his client dead, and starts threatening to sue Wojo and everyone at the 12th.
The B-plot involves a kook, Jerome Grodin, who was arrested for creating a public disturbance. It turns out he was trying to raise awareness of the "global cooling
" phenomenon. In the C-plot Harris, who is always making pretenses to be a Great Writer, has decided to incorporate himself as Ronald N. Harris, Inc.
Tropes:
- Bad to the Last Drop: Yemana mixes it up in this episode: instead of making terrible coffee, he makes terrible ginseng tea. Judging by the look of horror on Barney's face the tea is much worse than Yemana's coffee.Barney: Don't ever do that to me again.
- Big Storm Episode: A big blizzard is shutting down transportation in New York, which becomes a real problem for the 12th when the coroner's office says they can't send a truck to get Mr. Lujak.
- Black Comedy: A lot, after a hoodlum dies in the squad room. A panicky Wojo wonders how long it will take for the body to "turn". When the coroner's van finally does make it at the end of the episode, the guy who arrives for the body says "Hope he didn't cause you any trouble!"
- Foreshadowing: When Harris offers to let Barney invest in Ronald N. Harris, Inc., Dietrich points out that this could make Barney responsible for Harris's debts if Harris ever went bankrupt. Barney declines to join the "corporation", which pisses Harris off. Harris does go bankrupt three seasons down the road, when the long arc about his novel Blood on the Badge results in him losing a libel suit to Ripner.
- Frivolous Lawsuit: Ripner starts threatening all sorts of absurd lawsuits when he finds out that Mr. Lujak died. He threatens to sue for "loss of future earnings", only for Barney to retort that Kujak "rolled drunks for a living!"
- Incurable Cough of Death: Mr. Lujak complains of tightness in his chest as Wojo is interviewing him. When Wojo gets back to his desk moments later, Lujak is dead.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The nonsense about "global cooling" that Mr. Grodin is babbling is based on real reporting from the 1970s. While "global cooling" was never an idea that gained support in the scientific community, which by then was already starting to raise alarms about very real anthropogenic global warming, global cooling caught on for a while in pop culture, with reports in TIME and Newsweek in 1974 and 1975 respectively.
