Homicide Episode Guide: Autofocus

The season of change continues in this episode when Lewis, who has been flying solo  since the beginning of Season 3, finally gets a permanent partner--- new Homicide Detective Mike Kellerman. Meldrick is understandably jumpy--- as Munch cheerfully reminds him in the teaser, he has partnered with every detective in the squad (save Howard) and none of the partnerships have been successful. As it turns out this partnership will work better even though it gets off to a rocky start in this episode. Of course, everyone is even more unsettled when the entire squad is forced to move to a nearby bank due to a gas leak.

     In this sea of confusion, Meldrick and Mike get their first case together--- the murder of an old lady at a bus stop. Despite the fact that there were people waiting with her, in typical fashion, no one seems to have seen anything. Indeed, the main witnesses are so focused on a terrible blind date they don’t notice anything. The detectives are left swinging until they get help from an unlikely source-- cameraman J.H. Brodie. As it turns out Brodie gets the killer on tape entirely by accident and then spends a good deal of the episode trying to convince the detectives that he has something worth watching. Naturally, he has a price—he wants an exclusive on the arrest of the killers.  Eventually he does get this but it is not enough to save his job. The higher-ups at his TV station are far more focused on getting an exclusive then they are on solving a crime. When Brodie gives this up he is promptly fired---  again, this is closer to real life, when getting your job done is more important then doing the right thing.

     Brodie will eventually become a regular on the show--- one of only two that will not play murder police. Unfortunately, Fontana and company never find a way to work him seamlessly into the show. His role is unclear, none of the detectives become friendly with him and he never gets the same attention made to his life as the regular detectives. I was never entirely sure what to make of Brodie, he never really gelled for me (or for most viewers of the show) Its pretty clear that he was meant to be a version of David Simon, the man who spent a year on the killing streets. But Simon stayed outside of the story in his book, Brodie keeps stepping into it on TV. It is impossible to pretend (like the detectives do) that he isn’t there but we’re never sure what to make of him.

     Another major change that never completely gelled occurs in ‘Autofocus’--- Howard is promoted to Sergeant. Unfortunately, in the book, it was made very clear that a sergeant’s role was mostly office work, although they are allowed to go out on cases. This is the reason that the sergeants were written out of the series when the show premiered. And since there is already one office bound leader (Giardello) there would seem to be less for Howard to do. Howard gets squeezed between these two extremes and as a result would have almost no presence on the show for the next two years--- not being called out on cases, or allowed to supervise. It’s a great pity, because as this episode illustrates there was a lot that could have been done exploring Howard’s character as she dealt with the challenges of her new job--- how she deals with it and how others deal working with a former friend. Instead, Howard was all but eliminated, a sad fate for Melissa Leo who was such a vital part of the show for its first three years on the air.

     Despite all of these problems, there are some interesting elements in this episode. We see how Meldrick and Mike reluctantly dance around each other as they both try to settle into a new situation. They don’t start out very well but by the end of the episode they are slowly beginning to function as a team. They will be a somewhat lighter version of the ‘A-team’ for the show--- Bayliss and Pembleton. Generally speaking the stories surrounding them will be somewhat lighter in tone—which doesn’t necessarily make them less interesting as we shall see.

     Also somewhat interesting are the killers themselves--- James and Trevor Douglas, two seventeen-year old boys who went from armed robbery to videotaping random killings. In typical ‘Homicide’ fashion, they refuse to confess—even though the police have the videotape of the shooting the victim. Even more bizarre is that they arrest the shooter at his own wedding, suggesting that the previous night’s murder was his bachelor party. When the breadth of their criminal activities are explained to Gee, he is remiss of how young people have gone from playing cowboys and spacemen t0 these kinds of felonies. That is all the philosophy that we get for this particular episode.

     ‘Autofocus’ isn’t a great episode. There are a lot of elements of the new ‘Homicide’ rather than the old. But the acting and writing are good if not spectacular. If the episode seems a little more traditional cop show that old style ‘Homicide, well that is just how the show has begun to evolve. Poorer examples, unfortunately, lay ahead.

My score: 4 stars.