"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
Had reached a objective where the actors had become so assured in their roles, and the writers were having so much fun fueling the interplay between them, that the fruit cake development was driving the show. You can see that trend continuing to concentrate in this episode, and you can see something else: how attached the whole cast and crew had become to the bishopric of Baltimore. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is bookended by cameo appearances by two of Balmer's terrestrial saints: H. L. Mencken, whose home, identified as such by a badge designating it as a historic landmark, appears in the first landscape, and John Waters, who turns up towards the end as a bartender, plying a depressed Bolander with drinks and politely listening to him go on and on on about Elvis Presley."Smoke", which was intended to be the irrefutable episode of the first season (and, so far as anyone knew at the time, perhaps the final episode, period), feels as if it was meant to point of view as a tribute to Baltimore--not because it's full of local landmarks and noteworthy restaurants and other sights to gladden the heart of a Sightseer Board publicist, but because it's a time capsule of what it was like to breathing day to day in this particular city in 1993. (Sometimes, as when Pembleton is seen willingly smoking a cigarette while eating lunch in a diner, it makes 1993 sense very far away indeed, especially since the place looks enough like the site of Barry Levinson's classic Baltimore talkie where Cristina Ricci, having made the blunder of venturing to Manhattan, looks at the trendy phonies and degenerates around her and cries, "I don't have a proper place in here. I'm a Baltimore girl!" I don't suppose it looks like much in put out, but the way Ricci delivers that line, she sounds like the join against at Rick's Café Américain, singing "La Marseillaise" in the faces of Nazi bastards. This instalment has some of that spirit. The crime rate is up, the weather looks broken-hearted throughout, and strange motor-mouthed persons keep intruding on your deprecating tranquility. But screw it, it's home.