the "See No Evil" script so that it would be morally questionable whether the police handling of both main subplots—the assisted suicide and the suspected police shooting—were done in an ethically correct way. "Black and Blue" was written by James Yoshimura, who continued working on Homicide throughout the entire life of the show, but considered that episode his favorite script. A story arc in "See No Evil" and "Black and Blue" featured Pembleton investigating a suspected police-related shooting. This was based on a real-life 1988 shooting and subsequent investigation by Baltimore Police Department Detective Donald Worden featured in David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Several members of the Baltimore Police Department publicly criticized Homicide for its negative portrayal of the police in the storyline, and 22 detectives wrote a formal letter of protest to Levinson over the matter. "A Many Splendored Thing" was written by Noel Behn, who became consulting producer with the series. That episode featured a subplot about a man who killed another man over a pen, which was inspired by a real-life murder in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in which a 23-year-old man shot another man 10 times in a doughnut shop when the victim refused to sell the shooter his pen. Since NBC had not decided on whether to renew Homicide until after the four episodes aired, the screenwriters did not start working on any scripts for the third season until after the second season concluded. As a result, once NBC was committed to renewal, the scripts had to be written later and the Homicide producers were not able to turn around new shows until the fall. Additionally, Fontana was working on other projects, including Philly Heat, an ABC miniseries about members of the Philadelphia Fire Department. Some media outlets criticized NBC for not commissioning Fontana and Levinson to write back-up scripts, which prevented Homicide from starting earlier once the show was renewed. Alan Pergament of The Buffalo News wrote, "Understandably, Fontana didn't sit by idly and wait for NBC to make its decision on Homicide." Filming The four second-season episodes were filmed during the summer of 1993. The last of them, "Bop Gun", was filmed in late September 1993, with Fontana just having returned from accepting an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for the script of first-season episode "Three Men and Adena". Like the first season, they