Homicide Episode Guide: Finnegan's Wake

Teleplay by David Mills; Story by James Yoshimura

Directed by Steve Buscemi

The teaser for ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ does not take place on the streets of Baltimore or  in a crime scene--- at least, not a real one. Though we don’t realize it until its almost over we are inside the mind of Tim Bayliss, confirming something that we might have expected---- he  has nightmares about the Adena Watson case. The involves the Watson crime scene spiraling out of control, while Pembleton looks on mockingly. But in the middle, Bayliss realizes that this a dream. When he tells Frank about it later in the episode, he says that this must be a sign that in his head, he has gotten to a place where he’s all right  with it. But obsession over some cases never goes away.

The Watson case  come back into play when Bayliss is given a lead on another old case---  the oldest unsolved murder in Baltimore history: Clara Slone, a ten-year girl shot and sexually molested in 1932. When an old man comes in claiming that his father committed the murder, Bayliss turns him away, thinking it’s a joke. Part of this because it seems unlikely, but most of it is due to the fact that he’s never heard of the Slone case at all. Eventually, the reason for this comes out--- because Tim caught Adena Watson his first week on the job, no one wanted to disturb him more by bringing up a decades old case.  It is probably for that  reason that when Gee hears about it, he takes the case from Bayliss and hands it to Falsone. Falsone has his own problem right off the bat when he learns that all of the evidence in the Slone murder was removed from the evidence locker in 1974. It was taken by the last man to work murder--- Detective Tom Finnegan.

When Falsone goes to Finnegan’s house, the old, cantankerous detective only is willing to hand over the information if he is allowed to pursue the new investigation. Finnegan is an old school, second generation detective--- from an era when Baltimore was primarily policed by the Irish, when beating a suspect with a phone book was the order of the day, where shooting a felon and planting a weapon on the corpse was common practice. He thinks very little of the fact that the ‘Italians’ are running the department, that women are allowed to work murders (one wonders what he would have thought of Kay Howard) and he flips when he learns the shift commander is  a black man.  Yet despite all of his prejudices and the fact that his investigative methods are thirty years out of date,  Giardello has no problem allowing him to work on the murder and is insulted when Falsone suggests Finnegan be removed. For the lieutenant, blue is a more important color than anything else.

As the episode progresses we learn that the Slone case was like the Watson case---- it was mishandled from day one.  Onlookers trampled all over the crime scene, the body went to the morgue before it could be photographed, the bosses sent dozens of men to canvass the neighborhood--- and the lead detective, a man named O’Malley--- was never the same after he failed to close it. This time, however, there is evidence. Devlin suspected that his father had committed the murder and that he gave the gun away to his brother. His brother pitched  it into the harbor, but miraculously it is still there forty years later. So despite the fact that the elder Devlin is dead, the case goes down as closed.

But this episode, as you might have guessed, is not about down a 66 year old murder. It is about two detectives obsessions  with a long-closed case. Thomas Finnegan has been involved with the case since O’Malley died in 1954, but his obsession with it dates back to his first days with the department. For more than half a century he has been consumed by the need to know who killed Clara Slone. It’s clear in the way that he has preserved the evidence, and the way that he interrogates people even remotely involved with the shooting that he wants justice done. But when it finally does happen, he doesn’t think its remarkable or feel anything but anger that the case is closed. The killer “never answered for his crime. He never answered to me.” That is  a feeling that Tim Bayliss knows all to well.

Bayliss doesn’t interact much with Finnegan but the viewer  can tell that there even though they were at Homicide fifty years apart, they have some common traits at least. No doubt Finnegan has had his share of bad dreams regarding Clara Slone and, as we see in a sequence wear Bayliss boxes up the Watson file, he’s not going to be able to let this case go when he quits. Yet unlike Falsone who can barely stand him and the rest of the detectives who he goes out of his way to alienate, Bayliss feels empathy with the old detective. Which is probably why after the case is down, he goes to Finnegan and asks him to go with him to see Slone sole living relative--- a child the Slone’s had after Clara was murdered.  In that Bayliss expresses the anger that he has always felt that the he had the Araber in the box, and he lost him.  “I looked evil in the face” he tells him “and I let him go.” From any one else this would seem clichéd; from Kyle Secor, it comes out as a cry of pain.

Attention should also be paid to Charles Durning exceptional work as Finnegan. Durning is a character actor par excellence who has played old cops since The Sting. He manages to make Finnegan seem not only an out-of-touch relic, but also a very pain-ridden old man who nevertheless feels  connection with his city. (In a brief acknowledgement of the present, he  becomes the only man who praises Kellerman for taking out Luther Mahoney. Maybe it’s the Irish in them.)

‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is a painful episode for the characters  but it is a return to some of the old standards that Homicide established six seasons ago.  Eugene O’Neill (another old Irishman) once wrote “There is no present or future; only the past happening over and over again, now.” Murder police know this better than anyone. And the characters in Homicide  know it better than most.

My score: 4.5 stars