Homicide Rewatch: Full Court Press

 

Written by Philip B. Epstein ; story by Philip B. Epstein & David Simon

Directed by Clark Johnson

 

On its own merits Full Court Press is a brilliant episode that deals with a subject that if anything is more pressing today then before. It argues that even before the era of social media, active shooter drills and the helicopter parenting that drives everything high school has and always will be a hierarchy that allows the athletically gifted to coast by because of their talent and let a multitude of other sins go unchecked. This is made clear even through the detectives themselves: Gharty is more than shocked about the death of a high school athlete who's literally called 'Mr. Basketball' while Munch is cynical throughout about how nothing has changed since he went there.

Underlying this episode is the fact that the Mahoney storyline is now taken up speed towards its horrific climax that is already starting to touch beyond those detectives who already know about and a brilliant comic subplot involving Bayliss and Pembleton who almost never get to have funny storylines during their entire tenure on the show.

We see Marc McCarron, senior at Mencken High in what is clearly a photo shoot for himself as Mr. Basketball with what is the entire faculty staring at him. Then we find him dead in the shower with two bullets in the chest.  We get the impression that Marc is a good kid from the janitor whose impressed by how early he comes into practice and how polite he is to him. His coach is impressed by how good a teammate he is  but he only knows about his grades and family casually – and it turns out not as well as he thinks. The McCarron's make it seem like everybody loved their son and that everybody wanted to be a part of his success. His father, however, tells them something interesting. Despite the fact that every single college was calling him with recruitment offers, Marc was planning to go pro right out of high school. It's there his father's subtle racism becomes clear as he says that the pros would want Marc because he's white, arguing that the scouts wanted the next Larry Bird more than the next Michael Jordan. Munch can sense this immediately but Gharty still fixated on the power of McCarron as a player, ignores it – maybe because of his own less then enlightened racial views.

Munch's attitude is genuine: he can't understand why his father's reaction is that its such a tragedy he didn't sign an NBA contract. Gharty actually seems more upset than Munch doesn't seem to think very highly of sports or of McCarron as an athlete.  Munch does care about sports but its clear he thinks that we spend too much time focused on athletes then we do intelligent or musical prodigies. I actually agree with him about our national priority about it, though I'm not sure I can tie it to the world coming to the end.

The larger truth comes when after talking to most of the students they learn that Mark has so prioritize sports that's he failed his SATs twice. When they go to the principal and point that this doesn't jive with his B average. It turns out the high school has been letting him coast for awhile because his extra-curriculars don't leave him time to study.  And the principal makes it clear they've also been covering up his disciplinary problems which neither Munch nor Gharty will let go. Talking to the other students they make it clear he was a jerk who just seemed to pick on kids at random because he knew he could get away with it. He seems to have random 'pals' and the most recent is David Ternowsky.

Its when they find David and they understand that Marc used to pick on him that David responds: "He can't pick on me anymore." David is the first person we've met who doesn't speak about Mark with reticence and they bring him into the box.

David is played by Steve Burns, who at the time was known to millions of preschoolers for his work on the Nick Jr show Blue's Clues. Here we get one of those senses of powerful performances from unlikely sources in a brilliant interrogation scene that is essentially a monologue from Burns. The detectives try to tell David about his rights about what happens and he doesn't seem to care that much. When they ask him to get a lawyer he says: "What's he gonna do? Take a beating for me? I'm protected. Now." He gives a sample of what had to have been weeks and weeks of bullying, how the principal prioritized the star athlete over the child he was bullying, and that his father wouldn't have a chance dealing with McCarron in a fight – and its clear who the school would back in that battle. He brings up an example of horrible bullying done by the entire team and humiliates him in front of the girls. He says how he got a gun just to scare McCarron.  David makes it clear he's been thinking of killing himself to end the bullying  and he just wants to scare him. Marc gave him the same smile he's given everyone else, that clearly has fooled everyone in school, the college recruiters, his parents – and then David just goes blank.

Munch tells him everything changes now. David just makes it clear he isn't sorry about a damn thing. And it's hard not to look at this nearly thirty years later and see that this kind of violence is fictional only in the sense that it ended with only one dead student and the shooter going to prison.

As we enter what will be the final phase of the Mahoney storyline I think it's important to keep looking how much the detectives at the center of it have changes. And by far the most notable one is Kellerman.

My own view has changed over time as well. Twenty years ago I could justify Mike's behavior during this period as a result of having been dragged through the system and coming out the other side. Now watching Kellerman with fresh eyes it’s a lot harder to make that argument.

The main reason Mike was so insistent on not being tarnished as 'a dirty cop' was because being a good cop was all that mattered to him. Now in the aftermath of violating his badge there's been a huge amount of collateral damage already and he seems increasingly indifferent not only to it but even being a cop at all. He doesn't seem that interesting in investigating the case of Calvin Barnes even before he knows who it is. Ballard who he's partnered with points out just how much of a bear he's been and she's genuinely trying to help him. Once again someone is offering him a chance to open up and his reaction is to tell her to go to hell.  His response to Ballard: "Screw the dead. What have their moldering asses ever done for me?" is arguably the most shocking line we've heard any detective on this show ever deliver and you can see just how shocked Ballard is to hear it.  Two weeks ago he told Meldrick that they were about to come out on the other side but now we genuinely wonder what that matters if the job itself is essentially meaningless to him.

The way he is seems so willing to mock Calvin Barnes is repulsive and you can appreciate how much is must be taking for Ballard to withhold her disgust. To be fair the fact that Barnes, who was alive when they got there, doesn't seem to care who killed him is kind of impressive. When he says he doesn't deserve a cop standing over him if he won't bother to speak for himself and Ballard reminds him its not about deserving, he just brushes it off. And the way he decides to take a picture with 'the birthday boy' with a big smile on his face and whistling Happy Birthday is a level of mockery that we've never seen any detective show. Even Beau Felton had the common courtesy to wait to the safety of the squad room to talk this meanly about the dead.

He doesn't care about solving Barnes' murder even for the perspective of his job even when Ballard points out that he worked for Mahoney. She tells him five bodies have fallen and that this might be a drug war. Kellerman's reaction that we're just the garbagemen. This causes Ballard to be genuinely appalled: "Are you out of your mind?" is practically mild at this point. It begs the question why Mike is still so determined to hang on his badge. If he's not even interested in doing what he's paid to do as a homicide detective, then why is he even showing up to work?

Stivers and Ballard made it clear that the people dying in the shootings aren't soldiers but lieutenants. Kellerman seems fine with the street law working better than the law of the land. Then Falsone comes in with a double murder in what seems to be a firefight at a Mahoney stash house. It appears the two victims shot each other.  This seems to indicate the Mahoney organization has turned on each other and Kellerman actually says, in front of his lieutenant, that they just let it play out and let them kill each other. Giardello has no illusions of their being any innocent bystanders but he's more worried about someone winning it then losing it. When he tells everyone to "work their cases…hard" he's looking right at Kellerman when he says it. But as we see Kellerman doesn't even bother waiting to go along with it. Kellerman actually seems to blame them for not wanting to make his life easier and seems perfectly fine letting Ballard talk to the victim's mother herself.

Kellerman then goes to the FBI determined to play both ends against the middle. He plays the recording he made. The FBI points out that this tape is almost certainly inadmissible in court and they tell him what Meldrick did: that it's hardly definitive. Kellerman now seems determined to make the FBI do their jobs and they treat him with more courtesy then he deserves. One of the Feds then tells him that they have Gibbons under investigation for four months and that they think he can give him Georgia Rae. They're actually polite when they tell him this and Kellerman gives his first genuine smile all season as he seems to get proof things are finally turning a corner.

But for who? At this point Mike has essentially burned his bridges with much of the squad save for Munch, who still has no real idea of how much his partner is drowning. The only people he hasn't isolated yet are the ones who haven't worked closely with him this season – and perhaps not coincidentally, have not handled any of the cases dealing with the Mahoney family during the last two years.  He's now officially torched his relationship with Ballard and by the time this case comes up again its clear they're not even speaking any more.

Which brings us to Lewis and Falsone. During the episode  we see that Lewis has been following the Mahoney organization around with the photos Falsone gave him. When Paul meets with Meldrick he points out what we've already suspected: that the names that are on the board in red are some of the very names Paul has been giving to him ever since the two met in secret a few months ago.  Falsone asks him outright if he's killing them himself and Meldrick says he's a cop and doesn't play by those rules. When Falsone asks what rules he plays by Meldrick seems perfectly fine by saying he's letting information be told to other members of the crew. No matter how you slice it, though, Meldrick is essentially killing  the Mahoney organization by proxy which in itself is a violation of the badge – and doesn't seem bothered by it.

But just as appalling is Falsone's actions. If he was able to engage in willful blindness that what he was doing was shady before he acknowledges during this exchange that he is aware of the consequences. His involvement to this point is at the best conspiracy and at worse could make him an accessory to murder. And yet he still came to Meldrick with more information on the Mahoney's and despite his clear reluctance as well as knowledge of the consequences of his actions, he still gives Meldrick another group of files.  The only thing he says is to tell Meldrick to be careful. He knows that people are dying as a result of his partners actions but he cares only about Meldrick's safety. This episode wipes off most of the shine on any halo Falsone had at the start of the season and in a few more episodes, it will be gone forever.

Because of all this tension we're grateful every time the writers cut to Tim and Frank. At the start of the episode they're under pressure from Gee to close the murder of Reggie Gaynor. They have a suspect Manuel Rendeiros but the suspect has never been arrested as he's only been in Baltimore a year. but they have only a vague description of him, an idea of where he hangs out and his pager number. (This case, I should mention, could only work in the 1990s.) They don't have a picture all they know is that he hangs out at the Derby on the East Side where every thug in Baltimore does, according to Frank. Finally Bayliss comes up with a clever plan. When Frank mocks him, as he does, Bayliss's response of: "Do you have a plan?" causes Frank to admit he has no plan.

The plan is for Bayliss to go in and use the pager – but when he finds out the clientele of the Derby is all black – he immediately goes back out and says: "Change of plan." Pembleton goes inside places a drink order and Bayliss uses the pager. A black man answers the phone then goes outside. Bayliss and Pembleton are in pursuit. They could snatch him up right now, but they want to find out where he lives so with an address they can find a murder weapon.

Ah the best laid plans of mice and homicide detectives. They follow Renderos for hours and he stops and starts with countersurveillance. This finally irritates Frank and Tim and they decide to haul him in. They arrest Manny who doesn't know what they're talking about. They've actually arrested Bernard Weeks and made the biggest drug bust in Baltimore history – by accident. This utterly astonishes Weeks, who can't believe that this happened to him after such hard work, nonplusses are two detectives who realize what's happened. And sure enough after taking a photo op with Bonfather (during which he argues that this has been planned for months, of course) as well as commendations in their jacket. Giardello congratulates them – and send them back out on the street because they've done nothing to help him. (Spoiler: The Gaynor case is never close and Bernard Weeks will be back on the street in less then two years. No doubt he ended up working for the Barksdale's after this.)

The episode ends with Gharty and Munch at the Waterfront decompressing after the case. But this is different then usual. Munch says he completely gets where David was coming from, that it wasn't a picnic for a Jew going to high school in the 50s.  Munch tells Gharty in a bit of earnestness we rarely see just how frequently and often he was bullied at high school. Gharty essentially says its part of growing up and is actually open about how when he was growing up he was a bully. It was testosterone. Munch says he hated morons like him.

What happens next is shocking. Gharty seems willing to let John take his best shot at him. We're used to Munch being a lightweight, the first guy to hit the floor when things get tough and its clear Gharty doesn't take him seriously. So when Munch grabs an ashtray and says: "You said my best shot!" it stuns the viewer as much as Gharty. And yet amazingly we're on Munch's side: both Gharty and Munch are cynical men roughly the same age, but Gharty's has always been mixed with a kind of bigotry and we wonder if John has sensed it as well. Gharty manages to calm him down but this represents a fissure between the two men and they'll never get along after this.

The episode ends with Stivers having caught a triple homicide. The Mahoney killings just hit double digits. What she doesn't know – but the viewer does – is Lewis is watching from down the block. What the viewer knows is that things can only get worse from here.

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

Calvin Leroy Barnes's saying 'Stick it" for his last words when asked who shot him actually comes from Simon's book when one citizen was killed and a detective asked. To be sure he used language that couldn't be broadcast on NBC but it was part of a larger trend of how those who were found on the verge of death never had anything useful to say to help arrest their killers.

"Detective Munch": Those two words, emphasized with a  big slur, come from Dr. Dyer who has by far the best moments involving Munch in this episode. She clearly hasn't gotten over their relationship. "This is one hunky specimen," she tells Munch. "Kind of refreshing to see one who's in shape. If you had this kids pecs, you and I'd still be an item." When Munch says: "At least I'm not stone cold dead," Dyer responds: "Matter of opinion."  She delivers the response of the body result as if she's about to start crying.  It ends with Munch asking Dyer to call him if she finds anything new on the autopsy. "You call me," Dyer says. Munch is honest with Gharty. "I'm always put in the position of having to make the first move. Then I learn there's no percentage in that." Gharty's reaction is absolutely perfect: "You're a bitter man. A bitter, bitter man."

 

Hey, Isn't That…Reg E. Cathey who plays Bernard Weeks began his acting career in 1984's A Doctor's Story. His most prominent TV role (and the one this viewer grew up with was) his work on PBS's brilliant math related TV Show Square One TV which aired from 1987-1992. After that he made appearances in films as diverse as Airheads, Clear and Present Danger and The Mask with his most famous appearance as the ME in Seven.

However once you made the acquaintance of both Tom Fontana and David Simon they don't forget. In 2000 he appeared as Martin Querns who briefly took over running Em City on Oz and Scalio in The Corner. While he kept working in film in TV Simon used him to great effect again in The Wire as Norman Wilson the campaign advisor to Carcetti's political career. He had a role in the FX series Lights Out in 2011. But the world really took note of him as Freddy, the man Frank Underwood buys ribs from for the first two seasons and who becomes emmeshed in the political rise of Underwood. He received three Emmy nominations for Best Guest Actor in A Drama winning in 2015. His career was truly hitting meteoric status – he'd starred in the Cinemax series Outcast and had been cast as James Lucas in Like Cage. Sadly he passed away from lung cancer in February of 2018 at the untimely age of 2018. He is much missed.

NOTE: There have been some very changes to the soundtrack between the DVD and what you get on streaming and syndication just as with the rest of the series. But honestly I can't in good conscience say any of the changes have affected the atmosphere the way they clearly did in past episodes. I'll let you know going forward if my opinion changes and if so which episodes.

 

Dominic West and Sienna Miller Go to War In What Potentially May Be HBO's Next Great Drama

 

 

When American viewers first met Dominic West in The Wire we were led to believe his Jimmy McNulty was the typical detective in a broken system who just cared too much. Even before the first season was over it became clear he was a drinking, womanizing narcissistic personality who thought he was smarter than anyone in the Baltimore Police department and who pissed on authority as a matter of course in order to prove that point.

Since then he has used his roguish good looks and charm to become one of the most brilliant forces in television someone whose handsome appearance belies a self-centered and frequently hollow man. He has used it to play such historical figures as Oliver Cromwell and most famously Prince Charles in the final two seasons of The Crown, the untrustworthy news anchor in The Hour and in his other major American TV role Noah Solloway in The Affair a married father whose midlife crisis leads him to first blow up his marriage and then his entire life.

Sienna Miller is also British but has frequently portrayed American roles in quite a few TV series. She played the romantic lead in the cult hit Keen Eddie, a complicated Tippi Hedren who had a different view of Hitchcock in the HBO TV movie The Girl, Beth Ailes, who stood by her man and may have been willfully blind to him in The Loudest Voice. Her most recent work – in Netflix's Anatomy Of a Scandal had her playing a British socialite at the center of a sexual consent case.

For all their brilliant work neither Miller nor West have gotten their fair amount of recognition in American television. West has been nominated for several Golden Globes but only received his first and only Emmy nomination for the final season of The Crown and Miller has received nothing from the Emmys over her twenty year career. That both of them have been cast as leads in HBO in War is the biggest draw of this collaboration between American and British Television that on HBO frequently leads to brilliant drama.

 

War is planned to be an anthology drama that every season will focus on a  battle between two rival British law firms: Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne. In a page from the playbook of the work of Armando Iannucci both firms see each other as the real enemy and their clients are always the chess pieces in their battles even though they are titans of industry elsewhere. On one side Taylor and Byrne are played by James McCardle and Phoebe Fox respectively, though essentially they take marching orders from Joy Budge (the always brilliant Celia Imrie). On the other side are the main players of John Smallwood (Pip Torrens) and Bella Croft (Honor Byrne). Both are essentially playing for publicity and billable hours and both care more about winning then what it is best for the marriage or in many cases the client.

One such case is Taylor and Byrne's new hire Johnny Warren (Archie Renaux). Back in London working blue collar jobs after as of yet still undisclosed failure in New York that blew up his career he has been hired by Taylor & Byrne to work their most recent divorce case. All bluster and very little ability they don't know yet that he's been hired as a mole to gain advantage in the most recent divorce case by Cathcart. My mind immediately goes back to Damages where Ellen Parsons seemingly impressed Patty Hewes with her ability but was only being used by the firm as a pawn to gain an advantage in a high profile class action. Johnny knows his role in this game but it's not clear in the first two episodes how far he'll go.

West plays Morgan Henderson a social media guru who receives a major award in the opening of the Pilot. Not long after he goes back to his hotel with a woman, who is very clearly not his wife, says he doesn't do this and then goes to bed with her. The woman in question takes a selfie with the two in bed and then makes a call. "It's done," she says.

She is in fact a friend of Carla Duval, played by Miller in a way that is clearly meant to remind us of Nicole Kidman. Carla then goes to great subterranean lengths to se Taylor and Byrne and tell them that her husband has been having multiple affairs and she wanted to learn the truth.  "I want to take him for every  penny he has," she tells them. "And he's got quite a few." Taylor and Byrne go back to their firm to realize the legality of this – or more appropriately, how they can get around without admitting they have – and are worried because Morgan's firm is Cathcart.

Morgan knows what is going on and he then sees Smallwood to discuss his situation. He doesn't reveal that he's had an affair, of course, and he wants to discuss the level of exposure in regard to his prenup. Smallwood tells him its ironclad and there's no way to break it, save for infidelity. Morgan assures him he's been faithful. Smallwood goes back to his firm now certain that Morgan is lying to him and to prepare for the worst – or rather what Taylor and Byrne will do.

And sure enough Johnny reveals the truth about Flora to them which is a leak. This leads to the turning of the tables where rather then Flora serving papers to Morgan on her red carpet, Morgan's lawyers do so to her. The next step is mediation which neither attorney wants because it will offset their billable hours. "There's no such thing as an amicable divorce," Croft says. "Not at these price points," Smallwood points out.

The mediator as always is the only one thinking clearly, pointing out that if they can resolve this now this will end up being a financial and emotional drain on everybody involved. Morgan doesn't want to settle and West is very good showing the disdain he has for the whole process as well as the fact he can't get out of his own way. There's always a common theme of a manchild at the center of all of West's work, something that neither money nor power can ever fill and its wonderful watching Smallwood and Croft  time and again take the piss out of him as they urge him to settle because they clearly know their client. "I know he's coming around. There are fewer expletives with each no," Smallwood says.

War is a brilliant chess match in which we watch so many people who are the masters of the universe unable to control their pieces because of the randomness of their clients and those involved. This is particularly clear with Flora, who is an out of work actress who Carla was more than willing to use as a pawn and didn't really care what happened to her afterwards.  When Taylor tries to find a way to get her to sign the NDA her mother (against Flora's advice) demands a shakedown of 20,000 pounds. Johnny intercepts this and gives the information to Cathcart first shaking things up, then giving the information to his bosses. The writers make it very clear he is more than willing to use her as much as anyone else, but Flora seems unwilling to acknowledge that she has clearly fallen for Morgan – and its increasingly becoming clear that Johnny feels the same for Flora.

This is a deceptively simple series that inverts the idea of the legal drama and takes a look at a part of it we haven't seen on TV in years: corporate law and criminal law are very much the level of broadcast drama, but family law has rarely even gotten storylines on TV much less its own series. It also helps that, as with nearly everything else, the British do everything so much better than we Americans do: I can't see War possibly working without all the subtlety and wit of the lines and the way so many of the digs are delivered with accents. And I already find it an improvement on Succession where the primary draw seemed to be Brian Cox saying "F--- off!" a record none of times. Its so much more effective when Smallwood asked about a response to a proffer says it wasn't appropriate: "But it begins with F and ends in 'you?" So much funnier and it actually has a payoff that same episode.

War has already been renewed for a second season even before the first season debuted, something that has increasingly gone out of style with freshmen series as the market of television continues to contract.  And this is easily the first new show of the 2026 fall season that genuinely has the seeds of brilliance in it. I don't know what chances Miller and West have for award nominations in the months to come but War shows that neither has lost a step in two decades. To paraphrase the mediator, that's the ideal outcome for these actors I'd like to see and for the show itself.

My score: 4.25 stars.

The Winter of Discontent for Zohran Mamdani Seems To Have Arrived A Couple Months Early

 

 

Living in New York City I have a more upfront view of Zohran Mamdani who in a very short time has becoming one of the most galvanizing and polarizing figures in American politics. I argued strongly his nomination and victory in the race for Mayor last year had far more to do with the weaknesses in the New York Democratic Party then any real desire for his politics. And I knew that his agenda was going to run into the brick wall that is the reality of governing the moment he took office.

It didn't take a genius to know that a 33 year old man who had managed a staff of five in his biggest job on the City Council was biting off far more than he could chew in a city where so many equally qualified men of both parties have tried and usually failed to be effective leaders. And like so many of the Justice Democrats of which he associated and the DSA of which he is a proud member his appeal was more due to his charisma and the idea that youth can succeed where age has failed. That this has nothing to do with being a good, elected official, much less mayor of one of the biggest and most complicated cities in America, did nothing to blunt his appeal to the young college educated (and overwhelmingly white) voters and there was enough resistance to putting Andrew Cuomo in to give him a victory and some grace.

The problem came as to how he chose to spend his political capital. When you're elected mayor you have a certain grace window to get your agenda through office. While the City Council and state officials like Governor Hochul might have conflicted opinions about their new mayor they were on the same team, as either fellow Democrats or fellow New Yorkers. Many of Mamdani's campaign promises might not have been able to get passed in their purist form but he could have used his political capital and the media to help get them done.

Instead he chose to spend most of his first six months in his office burning bridges with so many of the people who thought they were allies with him. This was by far the most clear when it came to the Congressional primaries this summer as I wrote last June:

Claire Valdez, another Democratic Socialist who was elected to the 37^th district in 2025 would attempt to run for New York 7^th to succeed Nydia Velasquez. She would be challenging Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Queens Councilwoman Julie Won. In the 13^th Darializa Avila Chevalier would be running to challenge Adriano Espaillat, who has represented the district since 2017 and is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Valdez and her chief competitor Antonio Reynoso agreed on everything: abolishing ICE, taxing the rich, Medicare for All and the War in Gaza. And considering Reynoso had early on endorsed Mamdani for Mayone one would have thought he would pick his colleague. Instead he chose Valdez who was, like him a fellow Democratic socialist.

Chevalier came under fire for deleted social media posts in which she bashed mainstream Democrats, questioned the view Israel had the right to exist and criticized Joe Biden leading up to the 2020 election.

Espaillat it's worth noting is one of the most progressive members of Congress, who has introduced bills to abolish the Death Penalty. He is a strong advocated for affordable housing and economic development, immigrant rights and the dream act, voted against passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act

Chevalier is one of the most prominent anti-Gaza protestors who has been one of Mamdani's lead organizers so it was clear that this race would be a test of his endorsement powers as well as the Justice Democrats reach. Espaillat thought that Mamdani had his word to back him. Instead Mamdani chose to elevate Chevalier who like him was as vehement a critic on Israel as him.

This infuriated Hakeem Jeffries and Latino leaders. Considering that Chevalier and Valdez refused to commit to back him for House leader he is justifiably afraid that their victories could be turned into cudgels by Republicans in swing districts.

"Every Democrat in a competitive race will have to answer for our most extreme voices," said Howard Wolfson. "And it will make the party as a whole seem extreme and out of touch.

The results do seem to have worked in the short term: Valdez won her primary overwhelmingly and Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat. But yet again it demonstrates the inability of far left candidates like Mamdani to take anything but the immediate view. Already there are signs this has done much to hurt Mamdani's reputation at a state level. Many of the people who supported him early such as Velasquez are infuriated by how Mamdani seems more interested in putting it early supporters who are unknown in politics that may hurt the party. One can't escape the fact that Mamdani seems determined to remake the Democratic Party in New York in his image… (and) in Mamdani's case it seems the definition of pennywise gains in favor of pound foolish decisions state wide.

At this point it seems the national party's as well as those for New York Democrats were ill-founded: the party seems on the verge of taking both houses of Congress back and many of the swing district candidates such as Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen and Cait Conley seem certain to win their races. And despite the increasingly frantic efforts of Republicans to use the brand of socialist on every Democrat running it is clear that its not playing the way it used.

 Furthermore after the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayid in the Senate primary in Michigan and Francesca Hong's shocking defeat for Wisconsin governor to David Crowley – where polling in both states showed the left wing candidate with a  huge lead going into election day, many in the media are finally questioning where the left-wing agenda that Mamdani and the Justice Democrats have been trumpeting are as popular as with the electorate as has been believed. And when you combine in with the spectacular disaster that was Graham Platner senate campaign in Maine – who was looked for very much in the metric of a Mamdani type candidate – the Democratic leadership now has more than enough ammunition to argue that labeling candidates as 'the next Mamdani' is a loser.

So even before November the idea of Mamdani as a national figure had taken more than a few hits. And it didn't help that October has been a very bad month for Mamdani as; to use a very appropriate phrase, the left-wing chickens are coming home to roost.

The first real blow came, as you might have expected, last Wednesday, when after posting even a half-hearted statement against antisemitism Mamdani online Mamdani was torched by many of his strongest left-wing supporters for making a gesture that was at best symbolic, given his known position on Gaza. Then later that day when he attending a memorial held my many New York Jews the inevitable pro-Palestinian protest showed up and directed some of their harshest comments on him, calling him a traitor. The normally smiling Mayor is seen on footage all over the internet looking stone-faced if not ashen as he leaves the meeting.

Considering just how adamant Mamdani has been on his positions both on Palestine and Gaza that none of the protestors gave a second thought at cheering one of their biggest allies on the national stage should have been the clearest lesson of the transactional nature of the left in general. Many of them said they did it "to keep him honest." Translation: "What have you done for us lately?"

Furthermore in recent weeks Mamdani has been under pressure from his supporters and base, including the New York City chapter of the DSA to remove Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Last week  federal immigration officers shot and injured a man in the Bronx. This operation didn't involve the NYPD but nevertheless Chevalier appeared at a protest movement, getting into a violent confrontation aggressively pushing Chevalier to the ground.

To be clear Chevalier owes Mamdani for the fact she's likely going to be going to Congress this November. But she's made it clear she's more devote to the cause – or to be more accurate, gathering content for the cause – then any loyalty to her patron. She has demanded Tisch be removed because in her eyes Tisch is the enemy.

Earlier this week Mamdani also said he was committed to disband the NYPD's  Strategic Response group, which is established to handle counter-terrorism operations, active shooters and city wide mobilizations for major public disorder. As you suspect the left is more upset about that last part, as major public disorder is the left's stock and trade. And considering how many members of the DSA consider any action against a protest as a deliberate suppression of free speech and since you can never push back against the left in an argument, much less when they are causing disorder it was inevitable that they would demand that this unit be dissolved.

Mamdani and Tisch are ideologically opposed but so far during the first ten months of his administration they have managed to keep a working relationship that has helped delivered some of the lowest crime rates in the city's history. Crime is a major issue to most people in New York. To people like Chevalier, who think that some crimes are justifiable because of white supremacy, Mamdani no doubt was supposed to have his first budget defund it.

One of Mamdani's promises was that he was going to reshape the police department by shifting some responsibilities from officers to teams of social workers. Indeed he initially envisioned a $1 billion per year agency to dispatch civilian workers. Instead he launched a new office which had just two staff members and few immediate plans to shift the city's approach to 911 calls. There was neither enough funding nor support for the policy in the  city's budget.

As you'd expect Mamdani was immediately attacked by the president of the Police Union who argued that "the mayor's radical base wants a wholesale dismantling of the NYPD and its clear this announcement is an attempt to appease them." There's a certain truth to that, as well as the statement: "It won't work." Mamdani learned this last week but he's still trying. It's a waste of time.

What Mamdani is learning is the exact lesson multiple Republican house leaders have had to learn over and over (and over) and that Pelosi and Jeffries learned during Biden's administration: the most extreme members of your own party don't feel they owe loyalty to anyone in the leadership. In Mamdani's case it has to cut even deeper: he used his own political capital to lift Chevalier into Congress and she didn't even have the courtesy to wait until she was elected to turn on him.

It's not like Chevalier has any real interest of being a good representative either: it's clear she's auditioning to be the kind of scary left wing socialist Fox News says all Democrats are. (Now that Jasmine Crockett is a lame duck and AOC is getting a bit older I'll admit theirs an opening for that position.) One hopes that if the majority is sizable enough that the influence of members like Chevalier and Valdez will be limited at best.

The more practical lesson is that Mamdani's power as a kingmaker in New York politics may been tarnished. Being able to make political careers only works if those you mint answer to you when you call on them.  Say what you will about Trump (and many have) at the height of his political power he had a lock on the loyalty of those Congressman and senators he gave rise too. They did what he said when he said it and when they were no longer useful to him he had them disposed of.

Mamdani either doesn't have or is unwilling to use that same power to control those such as Chevalier. And since he is no better at controlling them its unlikely he'll able to use it to flex against other candidates in 2028.  If he had wants to primary Jeffries (as in fact he was considering earlier this cycle before dropping it) he will have to deal with the reality then those he choose to knight owe him know loyalty as well as the fact that both New York and national Democrats now see him as part of the problem and will be prepared to take action should he try this play again.

The gospel according to organization like the DSA has always been that if a candidate goes to the center, either when running in a general election or after winning office while governing, they are in fact going to the right. That is the justification that for decades they have chosen to label successful Democrats such as Clinton or Obama "neoliberals" and labeled moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema, DINOS. This has played out most recently in John Fetterman's tenure as Senator and there are signs the left has begun to turn on the more recently elected Ruben Gallego for working with Republicans as well.

The implication, never stated directly, is that a genuine left-wing candidate could not only run as a leftist but govern as one. And since left-wing candidates almost always lose in statewide elections as well most Congressional primaries it was one that they never had to test. Mamdani's victory in 2025 was the first real chance the far left has ever had to prove that it was possible to follow their own doctrine. I have little doubt Mamdani himself believed he could do so.

What his first year in office has proven is that governing has a centrist bias and the warmth of collectivism will always be chilled by the reality of money and politics. Mamdani has spent most of his first year in office doing everything possible to try and keep what got him there – mostly using social media and press opportunities – to make it seem like he was doing everything he promised. That he was isolating the power structure of New York at every turn as well as doing nothing to win over constituents who hadn't voted for him – as well as those who thought his candidacy was dangerous – was irrelevant to him; it seemed more important that not try to triangulate the right or the center then to actually get things done.

He may become a successful or at least competent mayor of New York City but it is clear given the last few weeks that his juggling act has instead pissed off everybody and he has gotten no grace from even those who should by any logic have some measure of fealty to him.  That he seems more interested in trying to appease those who are still deluded on how government should work and are most interested in burning the whole thing done – even as they prepare to take national office – then trying to move to the center shows where his priorities are.

It would hardly stun me if Mamdani were primaried himself in 2029, perhaps from the right, definitely from the left.  That this was the exact fate of his predecessor is an irony that he would hardly appreciate but I suspect many New Yorkers, moderates and the Democratic establishment itself would enjoy. He'll still be a figure the right will use to scare working class Americans into voting Republican for the foreseeable future.  The sad part is that I suspect within a short time many of the people he endorsed will be calling him the worst name possible: a neoliberal. That they themselves will likely remain the fringe element they have always been is something they will never see – but that Democrats really have to.

 

 

 

What My Parents Think About My Positions Politically And What They're Doing to Help Democracy

 

 

Every so often, indirectly and sometimes directly, I mention my parents in my writing. My father is 85 and my mother is 83. They're both at the age where the body starts to fail them and their mental capacities are not what they once were but they'll still very sharp on certain subjects, to the point I would trust their opinions on today's politics infinitely more than 90 to 95 percent of the people on sites like this one.

If this offends the sensibilities of the readers on this site or elsewhere, I'm used to that and have an incredibly thick hide. The truth is, even as a teenager I always trusted the opinions of people much older than me and got along with them far better than people my own age.  I was always raised to respect my elders and betters out of basic courtesy and to hear people out even if I disagreed with them, styles have essentially expired because this generation thinks it knows everything because it can use an iPhone and their parents can't.

Just to be clear my parents do  have iPhones and will use them to look things up online but its basically to refresh their often failing memories. I'll use it for the same purposes which is basically research. Neither of us are using it as a replacement for education and all kinds of information and we certainly don't believe that just because you see something on YouTube its gospel. Indeed my parents have no idea how to use Twitter or TikTok or Instagram and I have assured them they are the lucky ones on this planet, not the ones who refresh it every minute of every day.

There are some areas in which I disagree with my parents as well as somewhere they are well behind me in certain areas of culture but at the end of the day I still trust them more than the people on the Internet. Like Farmer's said, they know a thing or two because they've seen a thing or two. And that essentially applies to politics today.

Now I should mention that my parents, like me, are lifelong Democrats. We've occasionally voted for Republicans in some elections – my father refused to vote for Carter in 1980 because of his disgust at handling the hostage crisis, for example – but we're loyal to the party.  Both of them were part of left-wing environments – my father was a law professor;  my mother was raised in a household where her parents were actually Communists at one point – but they've always been fine with the Democratic Party as it is. Neither is thrilled with the direction the Republicans have taken under Trump and they are, like so many people concerned about the country at large in recent years, but they've never really gone in to the complete left-wing agenda that is held by Bernie Sanders and AOC the way that so many other progressives these days they have. They may disagree with me about how much of a problem they are to the Democratic Party as a whole – we've had some lively debates on the subject – but they are based in reality in a way I'm really not convinced so many of the people who call themselves progressives are either in journals or in film.

My father, because he is a historian, has often tried to look at so much of this in terms he can understand. For a while when I referred to these people as 'progressives' he couldn't understand why this was bad because of the historical context. To him "Progressive' refers to the Progressive Era between the 1890s and 1914 when both the Democratic and Republican party had a progressive wing and where left-wing parties such as the Populist and TR's Progressive Party held sway with the electorate. In his mind the Progressives had been responsible for amendments leading to the direct election of Senators, the Income Tax and giving women the right to vote as well as the Presidencies of TR and Woodrow Wilson.

When I told him that, in fact, AOC and the Justice Democrats were more in line with the Socialist Party that Eugene Debs led during that period then Progressives as he knew it he instantly saw what I was driving at and agreed with me almost immediately that in fact Bernie has more in common with Norman Thomas than Bob LaFollette. We've been able to talk on that level ever since.

When I visited them last week and the discussion turned to the midterms as well as an update on my work for the Peltola campaign as always he had encouraging words. He told me he hadn't caught up with my blog in recent weeks and I assured him it was perfectly fine; at this point I'm so prolific in my writing if he ever tried to make hard copies of it (which he will occasionally make printouts of because like me he wants a physical record of things) he'd drown in paper. We both chuckled at that.

When we talked about whether I should share some of my writing with family friends, some of whom are more left-wing then them, he warned me that my criticisms of the left, despite being in good faith, might bother them. I joked that in many ways I'm more progressive then many actual progressives. I agree with 90 percent of what the left stands for and what they write about on this blog and because of that I want it to become a reality. Where I differ is how.

My father and I are in agreement that elections are referendums on how the country wants to go and both of us do agree with  Churchill's definition of democracy. I told him what I've send in this blog numerous times. If Americans truly wanted the agenda of the Justice Democrats or DSA in the aftermath of Trump's election, they have had five election cycles to vote for candidates to back it and a party that wants it. And given the results of those candidates in the last five cycles (which I've repeated before ad infinitum and won't do so here) it is very clear that the electorate doesn't want what the progressives are selling. And since the people have made their opinion clear I believe it is incumbent on the Democratic Party to go to the center rather then more to the left.

My father couldn't disagree with me on that. Because whenever I have presented him with the facts and figures and statistics, he accepts that as reality. To be clear he also follows every Supreme Court decision, every act of legislation that Congress does and watches the news. He is very informed. He doesn't like what the conservatives have done to America in the 21^st century but he can't argue that Americans  would prefer the progressive agenda because there's no evidence say they do besides the occasional poll. He reads the same magazines and papers I do and like me he has empathy and sympathy for what the left wants. But he knows the voters have a very specific way of telling you what they want and he's not going to disagree with them because AOC or Mamdani have millions of followers on TikTok.

As for my mother, well, she's always been more active in politics then me. In 2023 she wrote hundreds of postcards for elections in the Virginia Statehouse which ended up working out rather well for them. Now earlier this year, she agreed to write 100 postcards to voters in Michigan urging them to vote in the next election.

I've actually got one in front of me right now:

 

Thank you for being a voter! When will you vote in the Tuesday November 3^rd election? Please plan ahead! Thank you!

 

Again my mother's 83. Her hands are shaky. Her coordination's not great. In a few cases she made mistakes and she actually bought white out to erase some of her errors. And because my parents are going on a trip to Europe this week, she was going to miss the deadline to mail them out, which is tomorrow.

So when I saw my parents this Thursday she asked me and my father to apply stamps to the 89 postcards she'd written and asked me to mail them tomorrow. I agreed to both without a thought. So we spent twenty minutes doing just that.

To be clear my 83 year old mother handwrote 89 postcards urging people in Michigan to vote in the next election. And because she thought the speech was a little dry, she ended each postcard with 'Thank you!" because she knows courtesy matters.

Now she has no illusions this will make much of a difference in the Michigan's elections for Senate or Governor this cycle in the grand scheme of things. I don't know what she thinks of Abdul El-Sayid or some of the more far left Michigan candidates running for Congress. The point is she was concerned about America and she wanted to do something, however small, to help in a way that might be substantial. It does kind of raise the bar a bit for the rest of us.

Tomorrow morning I will do right by my parents and drop the postcards that my mother has painstakingly written and that we all stamped in the mail and send them on their way to Michigan. Then that evening I will do my most recent phone banking for Alaska – Peltola for Senate, JKT for Governor, Bill Hill for Congress. It will represent the peak level of the Morris household in the fight for democracy in America which will conclude on election day when we cast our votes for Tom Suozzi a Democrats in one of the swing districts in play.

Will this things lead to the Democrats taking back Congress? We'll see. Will it make America a better place? Hard to know. But that's not the point. The point is the work, the point is that we tried to do something of substance, even if we failed and even if we never know we made a difference.

My family knows that you don't solve the problems facing the country by getting followers or creating content. You do it by doing the long, messy, frequently unsatisfying work of trying in small and unnoticeable ways to make America better. You knock on doors and have them slammed in your face. You make phone calls and get cursed out. You write postcards until your hand hurts and then you write some more. And you do all of it knowing that are no guarantees, no certainties. But you keep doing it because that's the point of democracy.

 I'll actually add a challenge. Until someone on this site or a left-wing journal comes up with a better one, until they come up with a way to make the majority of Americans accept it, until they come up with a way to put in place on day one and not miss a beat when they dispose of this one, then I'm going to keep doing my part for American democracy. It is the worst form of government, except for all the others. So until you guys come up with that alternative, me and my family and millions of other Americans will keep doing our part for this one. If you call us suckers and sheep, well, we've been called worse by better.

Yankees vs. Red Sox Part 3: Hell Freezes Over

 

 

In 2004, as Yogi famously put it, it was déjà vu all over again.

The was between Boston and New York had begun even before spring training when Alex Rodriguez, already considered one of the greatest players in baseball, became a free agent. The Yankees and Red Sox opened their pocketbooks and the Bronx beat Beantown again, this time offering a ten-year $250 million contract. It was classic Steinbrenner and it pissed off everyone in baseball, not just Boston, but that was the game.

The AL East was a repeat of the war of the previous year, this time with even more bench clear brawls and all players openly seething. For the first time as a fan and a viewer I saw just how visceral that contempt was between the two franchises and particularly given how last year had turned out, it became real to me in a way it had only been figurative from all the books and TV clips I'd seen.

I was increasingly becoming immersed in my passion as a TV critic, though I was still more than five years before making my first semi-professional attempts. I remember I was distracting during the early days of the postseason with the new fall schedule, particularly ABC's Sunday night lineup of Desperate Housewives and Boston Legal. I'd also been watching the third season of The Wire which, in those pre-streaming days I tended to watch on Monday nights. I was following most of my regular shows such as Scrubs, half of what was on the WB and much of CBS's lineup of procedurals.  And at the time the postseason on baseball was divided between ESPN and Fox with the American League series on Fox during that period.

So during October I was basically watching TV with one hand on the clicker; checking the scores between commercials of one show or the other. That hasn't changed in twenty years until the World Series.  My mother was following this because once again the Yankees had the best record in the American league, going 101-61, once again the best record in baseball. This time the Red Sox were 98-64 which was the second best record in baseball and third only behind the St. Louis Cardinals who'd gone an impressive 105-57. For the third consecutive year the Yankees faced the Minnesota Twins and once again they went through them, albeit in 4 games instead of 3.

Boston was up against the Anaheim Angels, two years ago the World Champions and now back in the ALCS. In Anaheim the Red Sox trounced Boston both times with Curt Schilling winning Game 1, 9-3 and Pedro winning Game 2, 8-3. They went back to Fenway for Game 3.

I remember that game vividly. The Red Sox were ahead 6-1 going into the top of the 7^th. Then the Angels loaded the based with nobody out. Then Timlin walked in a run to make it 6-2. Then Vladimir Guerrero hit a grand slam to tie the game and Fenway went quiet.

At that moment I was truly a Red Sox fan in my soul. Because even though the game was tied I could see just how this would play out. The Angels would take the lead in the next inning, the Red Sox would lose the clincher, all the momentum would go out of them and Anaheim would make an incredible comeback. And considering that Boston had crushed Anaheim's hopes in a similar situation 18 years earlier there would have been a sad poetry to it.

That feeling was maintained even though the Angels didn't score and the game went into extra innings. I didn't know that there was one big difference between 2003 and 2004 and his name was David Ortiz.

In the tenth Johnny Damon single. Pokey Reese hit into a fielder's choice. Manny Ramirez struck out. Mike Scosisa then took Franciso Rodriguez out and brought Jarrod Washburn in to pitch to Ortiz. The man who was about to become known to the world as Big Papi hit a two run homer to win the ALDS for Boston.

So for the second straight year the Red Sox were facing the Yankees in the ALCS. Like I said, déjà vu all over again.

Whatever hopes I had for Boston beating New York went out the window in Game 1. Curt Schilling had gone 6-1 in the postseason and I remembered how much he'd owned the Yankees when he pitched for Arizona. He was up against Mike Mussina. The scene was set for a pitcher duel, so naturally it became a blowout.

Schilling sustained a torn tendon against the Angels and was ineffective. The Yankees took an 8-0 lead as Mussina pitched 6 perfect innings. Bellhorn' spoiled the party and the Red Sox managed to get 5 in the seventh. They closed it to 8-7 but then they brought it on Mariano and hope died. The Yankees finished 10-7.

Game 2 was a pitchers duel between Pedro and Jon Lieber with the Yankees finally winning 3-1.

Game 3 was scheduled for Friday but there was a rain out. The next day I was sleeping over at a friends house and only occasionally looked at the game. I spent most of it wishing for a flood in what could have been called the Boston Massacre had the term not been more famously used in 1978. The Yankees won 19-8.

I didn't read was sportswriter Bob Ryan wrote in the Boston Globe but I would have agreed with it a hundred percent:

They are down, 3-0, after last night's 19-8 rout and, in this sport, that is an official death sentence. Soon it will be over, and we will spend another dreary winter lamenting this and lamenting that."

Which was the logical reaction. The baseball postseason had existed for 100 years and in that century not a single team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven game series.  And this wasn't any team. This was the Red Sox, a team who had spent the twentieth century finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And against the Yankees? The winningest franchise in baseball history? Who'd won six pennant in eight years? The franchise that had provided Bucky F---Ing Dent and Aaron F---ing Boone?

No. Get the Fenway organist to prepare a bevy of funeral marches. This was done. Pay no attention to that long-haired idiot Johnny Damon, he doesn't know the first thing he's talking about.

I know that Game 4 was the following day. I was watching Sunday night broadcasting – Desperate Housewives, Boston Legal – and around 11 pm I finally tuned it. At which point it was over.  The Yankees were up 4-3 and Mariano was on the mound in the 9^th.  So what if he walked Kevin Millar?

I had no idea who Dave Roberts was before Game 4. Nor did I know he'd been trained in baserunning by Maury Wills, who'd once told him one day he'd have to steal a base with the entire world watching. Roberts met the challenge and stole second. Bill Mueller hit a single and Rivera for what was only the second time in my years of watching him blew a save. The first time had been Game 7 of the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series.

The game was tied 4-4. I watched the next three innings from my couch with my parents. Paul Quantrill had come into relief. Manny Ramirez singled. Ortiz hit the ball:

"Going back at the wall, we'll see you back her tomorrow night!" I remember the broadcaster saying. (I can't recall if it was Tim McCarver or Joe Buck.)

They'd staved off elimination in miraculous fashion. Still it was a deep hole.

Game 5 began at 5:11, less than sixteen hours after Game 4 ended. It was Mussina versus Martinez, a rematch of Game 2. The Red Sox took a 2-o lead early in the game but the Yankees would come back to take four runs in the sixth. Once again the bullpen couldn't hold it. Ortiz led off the eighth with a home run against Tom Gordon. Millar walked. Unbelievably Roberts came in again. He went to third on Trot Nixon's single and Varitek tied the game with a sacrifice.

The game went fourteen innings and I remember watching most of them the same way every single viewer did: with my heart perpetually in my throat. Every inning it seemed one team or the other had a chance to take the lead: every inning the other throttled it.

Finally after what I assume was the fourteenth inning stretch. Damon and Ramirez both walked. Ortiz came up with two outs. The at bat was epic: ten pitches and everyone of them you could feel the Red Sox catch their breath. Finally Ortiz singled the center:

Tim McCarver: "He didn't do it again, did he? Yes he did!"  Fenway fans started chanting "Who's your Papi?"  And from that day to this David Ortiz has never had to buy a drink in Boston.

Remarkable, astounding. But the Red Sox were still down 3 games to 2. And they had to clinch the last two games in Yankee Stadium. Where everything had melted down for them last year.

Now I have to say regardless of his political views, Curt Schilling should be in the Hall Of Fame. It's not just that he was a great pitcher; it's that even before 2004 he was one of the greatest big game pitchers in my lifetime.  Then he takes the mound in Game 6 with a torn tendon sheath in his right ankle. Which had been sutured in place by Red Sox doctors. In a procedure they'd only done once before. On a cadaver.

It's not like the bloody sock needs context but I really think it does. Because somehow Schilling pitched 7 innings and gave up just one run in the seventh. At which point the Red Sox were up 4-1.

Then in the eighth Bronson Arroyo took the point. One out. Miguel Cairo doubles. Jeter singles to close it to 4-2. Everyone watching in Boston is going: "Here it comes."

Then A-Rod grounds to Arroyo. Arroyo picks up the ball and runs to tag him but A-Rod slaps his arm knocking the ball loose while the ball rolled down to the baseline Jeter scores.

Now in 2004 there were no challenges, no replay the way there is now. So when Terry Francona challenged the call there were no guarantees the umpires would listen to him. And because this was the Red Sox and given everything that happened to them, history would indicate the challenge would fail, the call would stand, the Yankees would continue to rally, the comeback would end here.

And then the umpires  made the call. A-Rod was called out for interference and Jeter was sent back to first.

And as the Yankee fans reacted to this with the calm and composure they're known for (they started throwing garbage on the field) that, to coin the spiritual, was the hour I first believed. Eventually it got so bad that the Yankees were showering field with debris and Michael Bloomberg had to call the NYPD on to the field in riot gear. The Yankee fan base had never been in this position in eighty years and certainly not since 1996. This stuff happened to other teams, not the Bronx Bombers! They destroyed other teams. The most unprecedented comeback in baseball history, if not sports history, not against the Yankees!

When Game 6 ended I knew the Yankees were dead. The momentum was entirely on Boston's side and I knew there was no way the Yankees could overcome it. The fat lady had already sung even before the first pitch had been thrown even if the Yankees did get Bucky Dent to throw it out

And the Red Sox ended the suspense early. They scored 2 runs in the first on an Ortiz home run because of course. Damon hit a grand slam in the second and the rest of the game was the Red Sox making up for 86 years of pent-up aggression. It was 10-3 at the end of night.

I bought a copy of the New York Post that day for the sports section alone. The headline summed it up: "Hell Freezes Over."

There was still a World Series to go and in an alternate universe – really the one that Red Sox had lived in during the 20^th century – the Cardinals who had crushed their hopes in 1946 and 1967 and had won the most games in baseball in 2004 would have done so here. But the 2004 Red Sox were not just playing baseball; they were exorcising their demons. And once you've beaten your greatest nemesis for 86 years in the greatest comeback in baseball history, the Cardinals didn't have a prayer. And indeed Boston demolished St. Louis in a sweep never trailing in any of the games.

The entire world was different after that and I don't just mean sports. The ramifications filtered down to Hollywood at every level.  Just weeks after the sweep Boston Legal which was written by the native David E. Kelley had Denny Crane and Alan Shore basically use the Red Sox sweep as an excuse for Denny's latest shenanigans with William Shatner saying to the judge as he left "Who's your daddy?" Fever Pitch, the Jimmy Fallon-Drew Barrymore romcom that was being filmed with Fallon's character being a lifelong Red Sox fan getting in the way of a romance had to have its ending rewritten to dealing with the Red Sox's comeback.

 And as a fan of Lost, we would learn that not even on an island where miraculous things happened all the time could top the Red Sox sweep. When Ben Linus updates Jack on what's happened since the plane crash and tells him the Red Sox lost the World Series Jack actively doesn't believe him. He has to show a recording of the final out for Jack to buy it. And to be clear Jack still doesn't know whether to trust it. The following season when outsiders reach the island Jack actually asks Frank Lapidus if the Red Sox won the World Series.

"Don't make me talk about it," Frank says. "I'm from the Bronx. I bleed Yankee Blue."

To top it all off the previous October HBO had run a documentary about the Red Sox called: "The curse of the Babe" the previous year. One year they updated it with "Reverse of the Curse." All of the Boston fans who'd been full of gloom and dismay the previous year were now full of hope and cheer as if the weight of the world had been lifted from their shoulders.

And I'll be honest. I suspect that weight was lifted off the shoulders of every single Red Sox player still alive from that period just a bit if not the same way it had been the fans. For Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr, still around from the 1946 team, to Yaz and Lonborg and every from the 1967 team to that outstanding team from the entire 1970s, all the way up to Bill Buckner himself, they no longer had to carry the burden of having come close and failed. Reconciliation was possible, healing could finally begin.

As for the Yankees, I will confess it has been easier for me personally to root for them in the aftermath of being on the other side of a loss like this. It made them all human in a way that the four World Series in five years had made them seem like a machine. I can appreciate their dynasty in retrospect in a way I couldn't when I was watching it the first time. I can appreciate Jeter and Posada and Petite and Bernie in a way that was so much more difficult when I watched them win all the time. It was the first time the Yankee luster had been dimmed in not just my lifetime but the memory of baseball and while things have been as good for them in the last twenty years, I can root for them in a way that was more difficult as a teenager and young adult.

I will close this out with an epilogue for both Boston and New York and indeed  21^st century baseball so far.

 

Lost Character Study Part 1: Why Jack Shephard Never Fit The Narrative Of His Era

 

Author's Note: I felt to be fair in this series I'm going to go through the characters in the chronological order their final episode in Season 6 aired. That said because Jack was the first character we met in Lost I think I should start with him.

 

I'll be quoting some of my old reviews of Lost (never published on this site) a lot here. This is what I wrote about Jack when I was rewatching the final season:

(In retrospect )Jack Shephard was trapped by the rules of television at the time (2004-2010)

The series opened on Jack and we spent the first ten minutes essentially following him. According to the rules not only of network television but basically all television that has followed in cable and streaming dramas since, the first character you meet is going to be the lead for the entire series. There have been exceptions over the years  - we didn’t meet Scully until five minutes into The X-Files or Mulder until ten minutes in, and the first character we met in Damages was Ellen but the series made it very clear that the lead was Patty Hewes - but that is the rule and it's been basically a cliché as long as I’ve been watching TV from The Practice to The Crown. (There have clearly been exceptions over the years I’m not thinking of but that is the standard.) It was a different story because Lost was an ensemble show but Jack always appeared in more episodes than any other character in every season.

The bigger problem was that Jack was hard to like. Not an antihero the way that Tony Soprano or James McNulty had been before or Don Draper and Walter White were later on. The trouble was Jack Shephard wasn’t a ‘Difficult Man’ in the definition of the term. He was too good to be a villain but too self-righteous and prickly to meet the definition of a hero. No one had any trouble liking Sawyer even though he was a criminal and mean or Sayid because he was a torturer but for some reason we didn’t like Jack because…he tried too hard.

Now I'll elaborate on what was going on TV up until 2004 and until 2010.

If we accept the idea that most people considered Jack the lead, even though Lost was always an ensemble show, then there were only a few archetypes to that point.

1.He was basically a good person doing his best in a tough job (i.e. Mark Greene in ER) or something of a complicated action hero (Jack Bauer)

2.He was the antihero type who was basically a killer (in 2004 they would have been Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey or Al Swearengen)

3. He was a prickly professional who was awful personally but solid professionally (Dr. House or Alan Shore on Boston Legal.)

4. He was the romantic lead (McDreamy)

 

Matthew Fox didn't fit into any of the boxes at any point during Lost's run. He clearly never came close to number 2 on the list, Lost never really fit the metric where he could be number 3, and while he was involved in a love triangle, most fans never swooned after him the way they did Sawyer.

Jack does come the closest to being the first example and certainly Lost gave Matthew Fox more then enough occasions to show that. The problem was that Jack never wanted to be the leader on Lost (the first few episodes made that very clear) and once he got the job he demanded total loyalty but everybody constantly called his decisions into question for the first half of the series.

Jack was given the job of leader because of how he behaved in opening minutes of the series and also because he was the voice of reason in the midst of a disaster. That would have worked had they not crashed on this island and the fact that the longer the show went on the more he just ignored all of the weird stuff that was happening became frustrating to the viewers. He also never shared the information he had unless he was forced to, he didn't trust anyone else with the decision making process and every time someone held back personal information, he held it against them as if it were a personal affront.

Now this didn't make him different from any of his fellow survivors; as anyone who watched Lost knows full well everybody refused to share their personal secrets and many of them kept information that they learned about the island to themselves even if it jeopardized everybody lives. And it's not like the viewer wasn't fine with this whenever Don Draper hid his past or Walter White lied to his family that he was cooking meth and so on. Jack may have been self-righteous to a ridiculous fault but compared to the manipulations Dexter Morgan would do to everyone at Miami Metro it really does seem like it was small potatoes.

Perhaps it makes more sense if you compare Jack Shephard to some of the other leaders we were seeing on network television during this period, mostly those who were leading the various CSIs or Without A Trace or the police and district attorneys on the various Law & Order spinoffs that were starting to unfold. Gil Grissom and Jack McCoy might not have always been the most dazzling of characters but they were certainly competent professionals and superb examples of leadership in action. They were able to delegate when they had to, they respected the chain of command and they would admit when they made mistakes because they knew when they screwed up guilty people would go free and possibly people would die.

That actually leads to something I realized even in my first rewatch of Lost which I would restate in my original article (I'll try to edit it appropriately):

What was frustrating the longer the show went on is why everybody kept following Jack season after season because when push came to shove, Jack’s instincts were never right. And whenever Locke pointed that out, he dug in and argued that Locke was crazy and anyone who agreed with him was also crazy. Jack told both Desmond and Locke that pushing the button every 108 minutes was an act of lunacy because it was just an experiment. He was as wrong to think that as Locke was to not push it anymore. Jack thought he could trust Ben, a man who had lied to him for weeks about everything that if he performed life-saving surgery on him, he could leave the island. He was wrong about that. Jack believed the freighter folk were there to save them but when Ben and Locke said they were dangerous, he ignored what Hurley had told him and said they were crazy. Jack was wrong again. Finally when Locke told Jack that if he left the island, it was going to eat him up from the inside Jack told him he was crazy – and even after becoming a drunken, drugged out mess who was seeing the ghost of his dead father, when Locke told him he needed to come back, Jack told him he was crazy.

Then Locke ended up dying and Jack admitted he was wrong – but decided that Ben was now trustworthy. Even when he learned Ben had arranged to expose Aaron’s parentage  to bring  Kate on board, he went with Ben instead of her. By now Jack who had spent four seasons saying that there was no such thing as destiny believed it was now his destiny to take the five people he’d gotten off the island to get on an airplane that would lead them back there even though so many people had died already so they could get off it. He told everybody they had to go back to save the ones that were left behind. Then they blooped back to 1977 – and no one needed saving. In fact, their mere presence destroyed in a few days everything that they  had spent the last three years building.

Then Dan showed up and told them they were not destined to come back to the island and they never had been. This shook up Jack, who’d spent the last few days convinced the island was their destiny. So when Dan told them that they could make things so that none of the next three years ever happened, and all they had to do was drop a hydrogen bomb on an electromagnetic pocket at the time of an incident, he naturally signed on automatically. He was firm to that devotion even though no one else was and most of them thought he was crazy now. But he was sure that this was absolutely the right thing to do and dropping the bomb was the reason he’d come back….

And it didn’t work.

Perhaps that's also part of the problem with Jack. No matter what he did he was judged by both the survivors and the viewer for not doing the right thing. He couldn't delegate authority and he was always pissed when someone made a decision without him. And considering that his speech in White Rabbit is one of the most iconic in the series the fact that when someone else quoted they always seemed to do so mockingly made it clear they never really bought it – in large part because most of the time Jack did what he wanted and expected everybody to live with it.

During Season 5 Sawyer reminds Jack that he was a bad leader because he reacted rather then thought things through and as a result people died. When Jack counters that he got them off the island Sawyer points out that he ended up back here anyway. And for once Jack has nothing to say. In large part Jack's journey in the final half of the series is the realization that he's better as part of the group rather then the leader. While that's a reversal of so many stories on television before and during this era, it's counterintuitive to what the view thought it should be and its understandable that some would chafe at this particular lesson. We wanted our characters to be bold dynamic leaders or antiheroes who did their own thing and watching Jack bang his head against the wall season after season before he realized where his journey would take him isn't as fun as watching Jack Bauer save the world or Walter White go from Mr. Chips to Scarface.

Then there were Jack's 'daddy issues'. Now as any fan of Lost knows parent issues, particularly the father, are one of the main connecting forces behind practically every character we meet on Lost during its run and I'll deal with it in each of the articles. Jack's were among those that frustrated the most viewers because Christian, by the standards of Lost, wasn't even that bad a parent, just a dysfunctional one. He was an alcoholic who fathered another child with a woman halfway around the world and he always seemed to put so much pressure on his son. We saw in his very first appearance in his flashback when Christian told his twelve year old son after he'd been beaten up by a bully that he would fail as a hero because "you just don't have what it takes'.

Jack apparently lived in his entire life to prove his father wrong. He went to medical school and became a spinal surgeon just like his father was: he did his residency and became an attending in the same hospital as him and its clear in every flashback that he was trying to prove that he was everything his father wasn't: a better surgeon, a better husband, a better man. But Christian never seemed to give him any credit for it; every time he showed up it was as if he was there to seed doubt in his son's mind.

What the show revealed what that Christian was proud of his son but he could only tell strangers about it. He ended up befriending Ana Lucia (Two for the Road) and the two of them went to Sydney where he went on the mother of all benders and in the middle of the night went to a woman's house (we'd later learn it was Claire's) demanding to see his daughter. Christian then told Ana that he came to Sydney because he screwed up his life in LA and he was essentially running away.

Then he went into the same bar that Sawyer would end up in and told him that he knew that his son was a better doctor and a better man and that he could pick up the phone and call him and tell him that. Sawyer asked why he didn't. Christian told him: "Because I am weak." After that he went on the final bender that led to him drinking himself to death, which led to Jack going to Sydney – and putting him on Oceanic 815.

One of the major themes of Lost is the inability of share information, both practical and personally. In the final half of the series – as many of the children start to become parents – the viewer is given a different perspective on whether we've been misjudging what we saw in the flashbacks during the first half of the season. This is proven in Jack's case in his flashback in The Incident.

We flash back to Jack's first solo surgery which he described in the Pilot to Kate: he cut the dural sac, he was terrified, he said he was going to let the fear in for five seconds and then he closed her up and fixed her. We now learn he left out the most important part: he didn't make that decision at all, Christian did.

What's fascinating in the aftermath of the surgery Christian congratulates his son and Jack argues that his father doesn't have any faith in him. We actually hear Christian sigh audibly before he says: "Are you sure I'm not the one who doesn't have any faith in you?"  As Nikki Stafford points out:

"Christian could not have stepped back and done nothing, or the woman would have been paralyzed for life. He had to calm Jack down, and frankly, he probably treated him the way he would any student in that situation. In fact, there's a good chance he wouldn't have had a student as green as Jack performing that kind of surgery yet…It would seem Jack wasn't looking for his father to stop treating him differently; what he wanted was better treatment then any other student. Maybe Jack is seeing something in Christian's that's not really there. Is it possible Christian has always been proud of his son, but Jack was too angry to notice?"

Now if you've seen Lost and the final season you see how the show helps Jack come to this realization. But the writers have been telling us well before that Christian has always been proud of his son; he just was never able to tell it to him when he was alive. And as a result of Christian's emotional paralysis (a trait that's clearly handed down in the Shephard family) Jack came to the island carrying the ghost of his father with him. Literally. His father's coffin was on the plane; he followed his ghost around the island to it and when his father's body wasn't in it, he smashed the coffin to pieces.

When he got back to civilization the image that haunted him was the ghost of his father. It's never been explained if the island was talking to him or this was simply his own guilt, eventually fueled by drugs and alcohol. And as a result he ended up becoming Christian by the time we see him in the flashforward in 'Through the Looking Glaas, only while Christian could hold it together when he was drunk Jack couldn't hide it from the world. Watching those scenes during the flashforwards is brilliant acting because Matthew Fox plays every scene as if it’s a raw nerve, unable to hide just how thoroughly destroyed he is and how he just moves from scene to scene, dismissed by those who once cared for him as crazy himself.

Matthew Fox never gets enough credit compared to so many of his co-stars for his incredible performance on Lost. Stafford was always one of his biggest boosters and I'll let her describe  his work by Season 5

Over the past five years he has played the character of Jack as a combination of holier-than-thou, sympathetic, infuriating, confident, and completely lost. In Season1, he calmly walked from one catastrophe to the next, keeping things together and fixing things around him. In season 2, he refused to abandon his convictions, eventually causing Locke to mistrust his own. In season 3 he had his moments of doubt, and the stress of the island was getting to him. In season 4 he went off the island, fell apart completely and now we see a man who is a shell of his former self, desperate to hold on to any thread of hope that he can to keep going. His eyes are filled with pain, he looks like he's been through hell, and his face looks like its aged 15 years. But that's all Matthew Fox's acting, because when they flashback, he looks as fresh and healthy as he did in the first season.

That too was vastly different from what we were used to during this period. The viewer wanted either constancy from its leads, to see them become more of a monster, or reach a level of happiness by the time we get to the end of the series. It's not fun to watch the character you see as confident and assured when you first meet them become a complete and utter mess the closer we get to the end of the show.

But that's the point of Jack's journey during Lost. He has to reach a level of completely and utterly falling apart so by the time he reaches the final season he has absolutely no confidence left in himself to make decisions and realize he has failed. We have to see him confide in Hurley that he came back to the island: "Because I was broken, and I was dumb enough to think this place could fix me." We have to see him realize that he's lived his entire life blindly being a man of science so that he can find a way to be a man of faith. We have to see him reach a point where he has to make the kinds of bizarre decisions that he wouldn't have made at the start of the season. And most importantly we have to hear him give this speech close to the end explaining why he makes the decision he does then – and foreshadows what happens to him at the end of the series:

"You have no idea how hard it is to sit back and listen to other people tell me what I should do. But maybe that's the point. Maybe I'm supposed to let go."

Jack's journey on the show is learning not to be a leader but to be follower, that he has to be passive in his approach rather than active. That's not always the most entertaining thing for a viewer to watch or experience but in its way it's just as radical as anything we were seeing anyone else on TV doing during that era and for a long time to come.

And let's not forget something else: at the end of the series Jack is a very different person than he was at the start. That's hardly unique for Lost, as we'll see in the articles that will follow, but for those of us who watched Tony Soprano and Dexter Morgan were the same people they were at the end of the series that they were the start – and in many cases, worse – that's another reason Lost was such an outlier and a different kind of classic.