Homicide Episode Guide: All Is Bright

Written by Rafael Alvarez; story by James Yoshimura and Julie Martin

Directed by Matt Reeves

Well, for the first time in three years, its Christmas for the Homicide  squad. And while there may be putting up a tree in the Waterfront, and hanging tinsel on the board, neither murder nor morality take a holiday. The detectives learn this in spades in ‘All is Bright’.

For the first time Ballard and Gharty get handed a murder of their own to investigate. The deceased is Philip Longley, who gets assaulted with a bottle of detergent at his local Laundromat and has bleach poured down his throat in the bargain. We don’t get the motive, however, until the autopsy is finished and it is revealed that Longley was HIV positive--- a big deal, when you are as sexually active as Longley was.  What strikes us as galling is that Longley (who showed no outward sign of his illness) had the disease for six years and told no one about it, save his mother--- and he had no problem spreading his love all over Baltimore.  The ironic twist is that got him killed by a woman he had already done the same to--- the woman who killed him was infected.

Continuing in the tradition of the ‘walking dead’ that perforate this season is Rita Hale, a woman in the final stages of AIDS. Openly covered with sores, Hale has less than five months to live. It’s obvious she had motive and she makes it pretty clear she would have done it. The detectives, however, are split on how to handle it. Ballard (perhaps not surprisingly) is prepared to overlook Hale’s crime as she has been the victim of a greater evil. Gharty remains cool and detached but you can’t escape the feeling that he is prejudiced against her because of her disease. The episode comes down to an extended sequence in the box between the two detectives and Hale.  Hale is openly scornful, sarcastic, and eventually sorrowful and you get the feeling that neither Ballard or Gharty is wild about what they’re doing. Ballard is so upset by it that she butts head with Gee over charging her. While the lieutenant isn’t unsympathetic, he  is blunt--- Hale is a killer first and a person afterwards.

Callie Thorne gives her first solid performance as Ballard. We learn a bit about her in the interrogation--- she had a fiancé in Seattle, and is currently dating someone in Baltimore--- but her attitude towards Hale, and the other women Longley slept with indicates her real opinion about the deceased. It is also clear that she has her own worries (she gets tested for HIV at the end of the episode) Equally memorable is Kathyrn Erbe as Rita.  Erbe is a fine actress (after this episode, Fontana would cast her in Oz as another doomed woman, murderer Shirley Bellinger) and in her few scenes she creates a memorable woman, bitter, sad and ultimately haunting.

Ballard and Gharty aren’t the only detectives faced with hard choices.  Falsone continues to dog Kellerman over the Luther Mahoney shooting and Kellerman reluctantly tells Lewis that Georgia Rae might have a tape of the murder. Meldrick is understandably pissed by this and this will cause the estrangement between the two partners to get even worse. Kellerman is rapidly becoming isolated from the unit.

Even the comic subplot is pretty grim. We meet Munch’s  first ex-wife Gwen as she calls on him to help her plan his former mother-in-law’s funeral. Gwen’s mother was a major literary critic, and had a huge number of colleagues in the literary world. With the help of Munch’s brother Bernard, they plan for large reception--- only to have no one there, save for true-crime novelist Peter Maas (playing himself). As Maas says, Munch’s mother-in-law was a bitter, hackneyed, unpleasant woman and he came just to make sure she was dead. Its pretty clear that this woman despised Munch and did everything in her power to break the two of them up.  Yet despite all this, after seeing his wife’s downfall, he delivers a rather nice eulogy for the woman at the Waterfront Christmas party.  For all his cynicism John can be really sweet sometimes.

Almost in passing, we see Bayliss, who has had a crush on Dr. Cox since he first met her, finally reveals his feelings for her by kissing her. The two of them will hook up for a while, but this relationship doesn’t last either. For Bayliss, however, it’s the start of a lot of action for him.

Not exactly a warm and fuzzy show, is it? Topping it off, we have one of the best music montages in a long time, as Suzanne Vega’s angry, metallic song ‘Blood Makes Noise’ plays as Rita gets booked. That image and sound will remain in your head long after the credits have rolled.

‘All is Bright’ is anything but. It is dark with difficult issues, deals with old wounds that don’t scab over and very problematic relationships—in short, its everything that we’ve come to expect from Homicide. This is great television

My score: 4.5 stars.