Homicide Episode Guide: Brotherly Love

Written by Julie Martin

Directed by Peter Medak

Ever since Homicide began running full seasons, it has traditionally started with multi-part episodes, either red ball cases or investigations that required more than one episode to resolve. 'Brotherly Love' is the first - and, unfortunately, the last - episode of the series that would serve as a standalone. Maybe that's the reason its so popular with the rank-and-file, though there's very little in it that would work for the series.

Lewis and Sheppard are called in on what seems to be a simple murder, that quickly spirals into bizarre. The victim, David Ralston, is found dead of a gunshot in his home. Before the teaser is over, we learn that he lived with his identical twin brother, Adam. It doesn't take more than a few minutes for the episode to get even creepier as we learn how obsessed the two brothers were with each other - the identical layout of their living room, complete with two TVs side by side leads one of the few good lines from Meldrick: "Maybe he couldn't decide between Hercules and Xena'.  There is clearly some kind of obsessive love going on between the two, and it just gets creepier when we learn that each brother had their own gun.

All of this is unsettling, but it honestly feels like its something that you would have expected from the minds of X-Files rather than the writers of Homicide. What gives this story any oomph at all is the work of Clark Johnson, doing his best actually policework in nearly two years.  The scene at the funeral home where he goes after Adam Ralston is some his best work in years, as is the scene where he manages to elicit a confession out of him. There's a certain amount of ambiguity here when we learn why the murder took place - Adam slept with his brother's girlfriend while masquerading as David, and when he told David about it, the two of them got into a huge fight, and he killed him. We never know whether he meant it for certain, but that maybe the point.

Unfortunately, one has to take this with the baggage that is being attached to Sheppard. Meldrick spends most of the episode treating Renee like a cop, and at the Waterfront, he actually unburdens himself of a secret we learned back in season 4, about his older brother having to be institutionalized for schizophrenia. This kind of unburdening would seem to be a nice character moment, were it not surrounded by the fact that Lewis still seems determined to try and get his partner into bed. And it doesn't help matters that for much of the episode, it now seems like Bayliss is determined to get in the line of suitors for Renee's hand as well, which is just starting to border on the ridiculous side.

What makes this episode work a little better is that we have a secondary investigation that is a bit more interesting. Ballard and Gharty go out to Johns Hopkins, and find themselves involves with a gunshot victim who bled to death. The kid who drove him to the ER is brain-dead in the sense that so many Homicide characters are, and finally tells them that they drove to DC to score meth, and a dealer shot his friend. (He didn't take his dying friend to a DC hospital, because if their parents found out they were getting meth, they would kill them.) Giardello does what so many squad commanders does, and tries to dump a stone-cold murder on DC. DC sends a detective down to Baltimore in a repossessed Mustang to tell them they don't want it. The brass finally tell the two of them to work together, using their brain-dead suspect.

This is actually mostly from Simon's book, although the end result is not nearly as pretty as it is here. (Indeed, an entire three pages in Simon's book was devoted to just how grateful the Baltimore PD is not to be working in Washington, where they averaged three hundred murders a year with a thirty percent clearance rate.) In typical Homicide fashion, there's a nifty bit of casting here with the Aerosmith drummer Joe Perry playing the DC detective who never quite warms up to Baltimore. There's a little bit of goofiness when Ballard starts flirting with him, but that's countered very quickly when Gharty tells her that he's left his wife. After spending the previous episode complaining on how getting shot changed Bayliss for the worse, Stu now admits that his brush with death has forced him to face certain truths about his own life. Unfortunately, his path will be a lot darker than Tim's.

By far the most significant change to the series takes place almost in passing. Mike has applied for a transfer to Baltimore and has agreed to work as FBI liaison for CIB, which would work in conjunction with Homicide, and naturally his father. Gaffney approves the transfer with relative subtlety, and then when he comes down to tell Al about the DC shooting, casually mentions it to him, because, well, he's Gaffney. This leads to a heated conversation between the two on the roof, and some actual awkwardness when he starts his official job. Things are not going to get any easier from here.

When all is said and done, 'Brotherly Love' is not a particularly good episode of Homicide, yet paradoxically, it was considered one of the favorite episodes of the series in a Court TV poll. This makes less sense, since its not even among the best episodes of the seventh season. Maybe there were some Aerosmith fans juking the stats, maybe there were some people figured Sheppard should have her own episode. However you view it, its barely worth a single look.

My score: 2.75 stars.

Fan Ranking: 8th.