Homicide Episode Guide: Birthday

Written by Julie Martin

Directed by Alison MacLean

In the early stages of Season 6, Homicide was still struggling to find the right balance between the old and the new. With Andre Braugher officially announcing this was his final season, it might have made more sense to give more storylines to the rest of the cast. But when you've got one of the greatest characters in the history of the medium on your payroll, you use him as much as you can. Simultaneously, the writers were still struggling to figure out how to use the newer actors who had joined this season.

'Birthday' is a prime example of how they were moving. For the fourth time in six episodes,  Falsone is given the center of a major storyline. Keeping with the what would quickly become a major theme of Season 6, the victim in the case is a member of the 'living dead'. Grace Rivera is found in a Fells Point alley beaten, raped and near the point of death. Called on to the scene along with Sex Crimes, Falsone, Lewis and Stivers (now having rotated to sex crimes), find themselves fighting for coverage. Falsone, still cocky, guarantees Gee that he will clear this case, something Meldrick tells him in an idiotic thing to do. Falsone manages to strike a rapport with Rivera, who has no memory of the attack or anything that led up her ending up near death. Rivera is the exact obverse of almost every major assault victim you see on TV, particularly the ones that you would see on Law & Order: SVU. She is not shattered or hysterical, but rather grateful to be alive, angry about the investigative process, and when the attacker is caught, reflective on how her lifestyle has basically led to this event.

Rivera is promiscuous (as her roommate, the closest thing to family she has says, "she says you gotta kiss a lot of frogs") and she seems to think that she has made a lot of bad choices in her life. But she doesn't seem like a 'victim' in the same sense that so many rape victims are, or would later be portrayed. She's a good person, and Allison Foland makes her seem real without being tough. Which is why the denouement to the episode comes as such as a shock. Falsone comes to the hospital to tell her that they are about to charge her attacker with attempted murder, and learns from the doctor that she started to have a brain hemorrhage and died on the table. For awhile they made this character come to life, and it hurts to see someone so vital die so inauspiciously. In  other words, it's classic Homicide.

The investigation is more or less Homicide, too. The attacker is not some abusive sex offender, but rather the friendly bartender who let Rivera run a tab. He is caught on the re-canvas, when it turns out the bartender who Lewis talked to the first time lied so she wouldn't get in trouble with her boss. And the bartender never gives any real explanation as to why he attacked Rivera.

For reasons that never made any sense to me, either at the time or now, Jon Seda was considered one of the worst things to happened to Homicide in the final two seasons.  Admittedly, he comes across as overly aggressive at times and often very awkward, but I honestly thought that was part of his charm, at least in Season 6. His dogged personality, and his lack of confidence coming from auto seems natural and very well done, and I thought that much of his work was among the high points of the season.

Frank, in the meantime, is dealing with drama of his own. Mary is way overdue with her second child, and its starting to irk him, to the point where he's confiding in Bayliss.. Tim suggests that they go to a restaurant and get a special kind of salad, which he claims will help induce labor,. Frank thinks this is ridiculous, but takes Mary to a restaurant anyway to get this salad. She ends up going into labor, but there are complications, and she has to have an emergency C-Section. Frank feels a degree of helplessness in the waiting room, and finds himself confiding in Tim to a level he rarely does, claiming that maybe he should've stayed in Robbery, because at least that way he'd have been there for Mary and his daughter. The doctor tells him that he has a healthy son, and he's happy. Had they used this for a reason why Frank would leave the job later on, I would have been content, as it would've been keeping with his character.

But the main reason he will leave the series is the third story, and it involves Kellerman and Georgia Rae Mahoney. Georgia is out on bail (we won't learn how this is possible until the middle of the season) and she starts her season long torment of Kellerman. Luther, for all his sins, was subtle in his machinations; his sister is far more direct. She tells Kellerman that her brother had surveillance cameras in his entire apartment, and she has a videotape of him. Kellerman spends the remainder of the episode finding out there was surveillance, and it would've picked up everything in the apartment where he shot Luther. Georgia continues to taunt him, saying she won't give any information, and this pressure will lead Mike back to drinking. Reed Diamond gives the first of many good performances he will give in his last season, as he begins to drown. Equally good is Hazelle Goodman as Georgia Rae, which makes you really wish the writers had made more use of her.

'Birthday'  is a return to the dark level of Homicide that we have seen,  but there's still a fair lack of balance for the series. The season is now almost a third over, and we've seen precious little of Callie Thorne or Peter Gerety. (The writers will correct this in the next few episodes). It's a good balance of a traditional cop show (there's a hell of an 'A' story, a solid 'B', and a decent 'C'), but considering that Homicide was anything but the traditional cop show, it's something of a letdown. Still Seda, Braugher and Diamond are all excellent, and we seem to be definitely going in the right direction.

My score: 4 stars.