Homicide Rewatch: Ghost of A Chance

 

Written by Noel Behn ; story by Tom Fontana

Directed by Martin Campbell

 

It took a long time – well after Homicide left the airwaves – for even its most devoted fans to fully appreciate the work of Kyle Secor as Tim Bayliss. It’s understandable; Andre Braugher very quickly became the breakout sensation; Ned Beatty and Daniel Baldwin were more famous at the time it debuted and Richard Belzer’s John Munch would have a place in television decades after Homicide left the air.

But I honestly don’t think Homicide would have worked long-term without the work of Secor. It’s not just that Bayliss is the window in To the unit; the inexperienced rookie thrown into a veteran squad. It’s because from the start and for the show’s entire run Bayliss is always the easiest character to read. Over time he becomes more hardened and cynical and eventually he will be the one that new detectives to the unit lean on over time. But the compassion that we see in him from the pilot never truly goes away. And while that it is a great strength for a human being, it frequently gets Bayliss into trouble as a detective.

This is never more clear in Ghost of a Chance. The opening of the episode where Bayliss stands over the body of Adena Watson, practically begging the body to tell him its secrets while Crosetti, Munch and Lewis stand a few feet away, impatient and making idle conversation (Lewis is obsessed with turning Memorial Stadium just vacated by the Orioles for Camden Yards into an aquatic theme park) tells you who the veterans are and who the rookie is.

In this episode Yaphet Kotto begins to fill out Giardello in a way he couldn’t quite in the Pilot.  Gee, as we quickly know, spends much of the episode trying to gently guide Bayliss through the process of the investigation, trying to be patient with him, seeing Bayliss is in over his head. Everyone tries to be patient – except Pembleton whose opinion of Bayliss hasn’t changed and who has the arrogance to go to Gee and insist the case be handed over to him. Bayliss is the primary on this case, which means the name is under his on the board but as we will quickly learn Homicide doesn’t play by the rules.

The Adena Watson investigation, like almost every plot during Homicide’s first season, is lifted directly from an investigation in David Simon’s book. And in keeping with faithfulness to the source material, we follow the investigation pretty much as the Baltimore PD did. The case is what is referred to in Baltimore as a ‘red ball’, meaning that it is the top priority of not only the unit but basically the entire Baltimore police department. In theory this should be a good thing as the unit has resources and authority it normally wouldn’t. In practice, it very quickly becomes a shitshow as the bosses go out of their way to make it seem like they have things under control when in fact, all they’re doing is undermining the investigation. Pembleton knows this better than anyone; at one point he makes it very clear that the bosses and the media will pay attention to it for a few days and then move on to other things. Like most things, sadly, Pembleton is dead on.

Giardello’s major role in the unit is essentially to be a shield for the squad from the powers-that-be. His job is to keep the pressure from the bosses off his detectives while applying it in a subtler fashion on them. It’s a delicate dance, to be sure but it can be illustrated in two scenes that come in rapid succession in this episode.

In the first Bayliss has just assembled the squad to pool information after the last several hours. To this point he has been struggling immensely. He had immense difficulty notifying the Watson family of their daughter’s death (I’ve described this scene in some detail in some of my previous articles). When he was at the morgue, the first thing the M.E. tells him is that he botched part of the investigation and pinning down the time of death will now be impossible. (This is taken de facto from Simon’s book.) He is unable to ask any questions of substance to the ME, and instead expresses his thoughts: “She’s got the face of an angel.” Gee has to push him to schedule the meeting with his detectives and all he can contribute is the kind of girl Adena was in life which is not helpful to solving her murder. Pembleton then openly demands Gee hand the case over to him.

Gee then goes to Bayliss and asks him outright if he can handle it. When Tim says he can: Giardello says: “Then show some cojones. When you move I want to see lightning come out of your butt.” Gee’s tone has grown harsher and it’s a measure of how lost Bayliss is that he starts shouting at him: “I’m trying to solve the murder of Adena Watson and I don’t even have a desk!” Gee goes dead quiet. He walks over to the nearest desk and in one swift motion, knocks all the papers and paraphernalia off it, loudly. Everyone freezes but Gee doesn’t notice. He walks over to Bayliss and  says: “There’s your desk. Now show me lightning.”

In the next scene the bosses essentially demand Bayliss be removed from the case and Gee stands by him, saying that if he does so he would be cutting off his detective at the knees. (In a good joke according to a news report saying that the detective assigned to the Watson case doesn’t even have a desk, Gee says with a straight face: “He has a desk.)  When the bosses demand they take this rookie of the case Giardello says: “That rookie is going to surprise us all.”

Fontana, who co-wrote this episode, begins to do something that most series didn’t do at the time and wouldn’t become standard practice until HBO started breaking down every rule a few years later. (It’s worth remembering that Fontana and Simon were the minds behind two of those iconic shows: Oz and The Wire.) Having established the main cast in the pilot, Fontana begins to fill out the four major types of characters that will, in some form or another, be a part of Homicide from now until the end of the series. I’ve discussed a few of them in my previous articles on the show but it’s worth going into detail now.

The first are the brass. We meet the two who will be essential to the show for the first three seasons, one who will be here until the series end: Colonel Granger (Gerald F. Gough) and Captain George Bonfather (Clayton LeBoeuf). The two men are politicians not cops and they will always go out of their way to stand behind the unit in public and do everything to undercut it behind closed doors. They only tend to surface in the time of a red ball and its never to be helpful.

The second group is the States Attorneys, usually in the form of Ed Danvers (Zeljko Ivanek looks so young). As we will learn once the case has been closed, it still counts in the win column for the detectives. If the case goes to trial and the defendant is acquitted (which will happen more than a few times during the series run) the case still counts as solved. Danvers, however, has other concerns and he makes it very clear that his job is to maintain ‘a better than average conviction rate so he can land a job at a better than average law firm.” (Typically Danvers never leaves public service.) His relationship as well as that of his colleagues is adversarial and its clear in the conversation Howard has with him when he tells her he plans to plead the defendant in the Agnes Saunders case to five years suspended. He is unmoved by her certainty and tells her to come up with evidence. At the end of the episode he buys Howard a pitcher of beer and typically Munch says: “Maybe we should check it for cyanide.”

The third group who we briefly met in the pilot and get a closer look at now is the ME’s office (You don’t say coroner, we’re told in the Pilot) Carol Blythe, played by veteran character actress Wendy Hughes, is the new chief medical examiner and as we see in this episode, she’s here as much as an ME as she is a potential love interest to the newly divorced and lovelorn Stan Bolander. Famously they met with him saying: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Her answer: “Looking for Mr. Right.” ME’s and detectives having relationships will become a recurring theme on Homicide (and indeed other police procedurals that followed)

But there’s a more serious point to Blythe’s being here: more than any procedural to this point in TV history (with the exception of Law & Order) Homicide will spend a fair amount of time in the morgue to get the evidence they need to find the killer. Considering there isn’t much of a budget for forensics in Baltimore the ME is essentially the stand-in for so much of what will become lore on CSI in the next decade, and I have to say the portrayal we see here is more accurate by far.

And the last is the media. Perhaps more than any other procedural in history the reporters and the press are always there even when they’re not. Griselda is an archetype of three or four reporters that we will see on local television over the series run. They are there to harass the detectives – and more importantly they are who the bosses play too, not the detectives.

It’s typical of how Homicide was in its early episodes that even though the world is focused on the Adena Watson murder, the unit has other cases. Indeed, there’s an entire humorous plotline going on in the second one. Bolander and Munch are sent to the Doohan household where they are met by Officer Thormann where a man has died of an apparent heart attack. Except when Munch checks his pulse, Thomas Doohan is still alive. The couple, both of whom are octogenarians at least, resume their argument back where they left off. Later that day Bolander and Munch return to meet Thormann. “It’s rare we meet the same officer at the same address twice in one day,” Bolander says cheerfully. “It’s probably rarer to respond to the same murder.” Doohan is now in the cellar, really dead.

Jessie Doohan - “Widow Doohan’ as she keeps telling us – is still complaining about how miserable their marriage has been for the past sixty years. When Thormann asks if they were so unhappy why didn’t they divorce the Widow Doohan replies: “We decided to wait until all our children were dead.” As in the best episodes of Homicide no one acknowledges the joke and everybody leaves.

Blythe and Bolander disagree about whether Thomas Doohan’s death is a murder and get very loud about it –  Bolander seems to be using his marriage as a partial excuse. Danvers hears this conversation and decides not to pursue the case: “Death by cellar stairs isn’t going to be a good cause. Not to the married juries anyway.” Blythe, however, declares Doohan’s death a homicide – as is the ME’s right – and tells Bolander feel free not to pursue, but Doohan’s name will be in red for a long time – something that cuts close to a man with a clearance rate as low as Bolander. He still decides to try and ask her out.

The title of the episode, theoretically, refers to the ghost of Agnes Saunders who Howard tells Felton appeared to her in a dream and told her where to find the murder weapon. Howard goes to the trailer and doesn’t find it. Her reaction: “Agnes lied to me.” Now Felton is rarely a sympathetic character but its hard to blame him when he says: “It’s bad enough when live witnesses lie to you, but when dead witnesses do…” This superstitious part of Howard doesn’t seem keeping with the detective we’ve met to this point but it’s worth noting she does contain multitudes. When Felton lets this slip and Howard is, understandably, mocked by Lewis and Crosetti to the tune of ‘Casper, the Friendly Ghost’ she takes it personally. In a rare display of work ethic Felton follows the suspect until he leads them to the murder weapon – although he claims he used tarot cards.

But the real ghost is Adena Watson and Bayliss is carrying it from the start of this episode – until the end of the series. At the end he goes to Adena’s funeral to ask the undertaker for the list of mourners – following the standard of looking for someone who shouldn’t be there. But Bayliss has been assigning people to run errands throughout the day. He came to the church for a reason.

And that’s to go in during the service. Not to look for someone who doesn’t belong or to give condolence to the grieving family but to see Adena’s body before it goes into the ground. Her ghost will never leave him, even after the investigation ends and he knows it. What makes Homicide a brilliant show is because the viewer doesn’t know it yet – and the series will keep reminded us of at unexpected times and places forever.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

In a poll by fans of Homicide on Court TV, this episode ranked 10^th all-time.

 

Hey, Isn’t That…Lee Tergesen plays Office Chris Thormann, the patrolman who meets Bolander and Howard at the Doohan murder. The legendary Gwen Verdon plays the Widow Doohan. Martin Campbell, who directed the episode, became a legendary film director best known for directing Goldeneye and Casino Royale.

Detective Munch: Spends much of the episode listening to Stanley’s recounting of his most recent trip to Detroit with wide-eyes as Bolander tells him about his seat-mate who says that she likes to make love ‘iguana-style’. (No I don’t know what that means either and I don’t particularly care too.)

Gwen Verdon received an Emmy nomination for  Best Guest Actress in a Drama for her work in this episode. In keeping with quite a few of the nominations Homicide got, it’s a great choice but its far from the best guest work this season.

 

 

 

Williams Vs. DiMaggio: When They Were Playing in The American League, Who Was Better?

 

 

Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were two of the greatest baseball players of all time. No one will refute that. The two men have been linked together since the magical Summer of 1941 when both men officially put the mark on their respective Hall of Fame careers: DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Williams became the last man to hit .400, marks that have stood for more than eight decades and that no one in the sport has come close to matching ever since.

Both men are icons for their respective teams, though in the case of DiMaggio he was ‘only’ the third in the list of Yankee legends to play in the teams remarkable four decade dominance of baseball, starting with the arrival of Babe Ruth and ending – temporarily  - in 1964 when the Yankee dynasty collapsed. The two are inexorably linked because they represent ‘the greatest rivalry in the history of baseball’, although during the 20^th century there was no contest as to who the better franchise was. (Things have shifted in the Red Sox direction during this one.) But because DiMaggio and Williams’s career intersected during the brief period in the 1940s when the Red Sox looked like they were going to be a dynasty, the two outfielders are linked in the way that few Red Sox players during this period were. Indeed for much of that period the biggest link the two teams had were the players who got traded between the franchises with the Yankees inevitably getting the better of the deal.

And because both men were at their peak during this period, the debate has lingered: just who was better, Williams or DiMaggio. It’s worth noting that at the time Boston sportswriters built the idea that DiMaggio was the better player because according to them DiMaggio was a clutch hitter and Williams had gaudy statistics but never came through when the Red Sox needed him too. That is unfair to Williams and it’s not particularly fair to DiMaggio: the Yankees did just fine after he retired in 1951 and most of the time they won the pennant by such huge margins that even when DiMaggio wasn’t doing well, the Yankees did pretty well.

So with the distance of time, perhaps we can actually ask a different question: when both men were playing at the same time in the American League, who was the better player: Jolting Joe or the Splendid Splinter?

This is actually fairer than it might sound. Williams was a rookie in 1939 and DiMaggio at the time was starting his fourth season in the majors. Both men missed the same three year period due to their service in World War II: 1943-1945. And both men did suffer major injuries during the end of the decade that hurt their productivity. DiMaggio missed the first six weeks of the 1949 season due to bone spurs and only played half of the season and Williams suffered a broken wrist halfway through the 1950 season which ended a brilliant season for him.

So in this article I will look at Williams’s and DiMaggio’s performance during the period where the two men were directly competing against each other (and making pitchers in the American League miserable): 1939-1942 and 1946-1951.

For the record I will not use sabermetrics but only their basic statistics as well as where they ranked in the standings in the American League in the seasons they played. I think that’s a fair comparison as we’re also comparing them to the rest of the league.

 

1939

Williams broke in with the Red Sox and had arguably the greatest rookie season of all time: he hit .327 with 31 home runs and drove in 145 runs, which more than led the American League. (In fact he led both leagues in that category. He also led the lead in total bases with 344, was second in Doubles and runs scored and fourth in slugging percentage. Had there been a Rookie of the Year award, he would have been the unanimous winner.

Nevertheless DiMaggio outperformed him by a considerable amount that year. He batted .381, drove in 126 runs, hit 30 home runs, and was second in the American League in slugging percentage. He did all this even though he missed six weeks of the season with an injury which does boggle the mind. He won his first Most Valuable Player award and he thoroughly deserved it.

 

1940

Williams received such booing during this season that he vowed never to tip his cap after a home run because of it. And if Boston fans considered his second year performance disappointing, I actually side with Williams. He hit .344, second in the league to DiMaggio, hit 23 home runs and drove in 113 runs. He was third in total bases, led the league in runs scored and was among the top five in doubles and triples. Apparently Boston fans are harsher even when they have a legend.

The Yankees did not win the American League Pennant that year (the only time between 1936 and 1943 that didn’t happen) but DiMaggio had another great season. He batted .354 for his second batting title, hit 31 home runs and drove in 133 runs. He was just behind Williams in total bases and second in the league slugging percentage. DiMaggio was slightly better than Williams that year. However Hank Greenberg had a monster season and when the Tigers won the American League pennant, Greenberg won his second MVP. Apparently DiMaggio was booed at Yankee Stadium too that year.

 

1941

Trying to decide who had the better year in 1941 is trickier than it sounds and DiMaggio did end up beating Williams for the MVP that year. Williams’s 1941 season has been racked by many statisticians as arguably the best single season a hitter had whose name was not Babe Ruth. In addition to his .406 average, Williams led the league in home runs, slugging percentage, bases on balls and runs scored.

But DiMaggio’s season was, obviously, not that bad. He batted .357, drove in 125 runs to lead the American League (Williams finished fourth that year with ‘only’ 120) was second in runs scored and slugging to Williams, finished ahead of him in doubles and was the league leader in total bases with 348. You throw in that the Yankees won the pennant by 17 games after finishing third the previous year as well as the 56 game hitting streak, I can’t understand why the sportswriters named DiMaggio MVP in 1941.

Williams obviously had the better season but all things considered, I’m still inclined to put them at dead even for this year.

 

1942

There’s no question who the better player in 1942 was by any metric. Ted Williams won his first triple crown: he hit .356 with 31 home runs and 137 runs driven in. He also led the league in total bases, runs scored and slugging percentage. DiMaggio, by contrast, had was to that point his first ‘off-season’ in his seven years in baseball: he ‘only’ hit .305 with 21 home runs and 114 runs batted in. He was better in other categories, among the league leaders in total bases, runs scored and triples – and he and Williams tied with 186 hits apiece.

The problem was not that DiMaggio was named MVP and Williams wasn’t it was that the American League MVP that year went to Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon in one of the strangest choices the sportswriters had made to that point in the  awards history. It would have made more sense to name DiMaggio or Charlie Keller, another Yankee outfielder Most Valuable Player. By naming Gordon it really did seem like the sportswriters were demonstrating an pro-Yankee bias or more likely an anti Ted Williams one. Sadly it was far from the last time it would happen, even in this brief period.

 

We start up again in 1946 after both men, like the rest of America, returned home at the end of World War II.

 

1946

DiMaggio was not himself when he returned from his hiatus. He hit .290 with 25 home runs and 95 RBIs, career lows for him and the first time he’d never hit .300.

Williams by contrast came back swinging – literally. He batted .342, hit 38 home runs and drove in 123 runs. He finished second in all three categories – batting average to Washington’s Mickey Vernon, the latter two categories to Hank Greenberg – so some argued that he only received his first MVP because the Red Sox won the American League Pennant. What that fails to account is that he led the league in slugging percentage, runs scored and total bases, just as he had done in 1941 and 1942.  He also was among the league leaders in hits and doubles and walked 156 times, positively Ruthian numbers. There’s no question he earned this one.

DiMaggio by contrast only managed to finish in the top five in home runs and slugging percentage. The talk around the league was that he might be washed up.

 

1947

This one’s a dilly. Williams won his second triple crown, batting .343, with 32 home runs and 114 RBIs. He also led the league in total bases, runs scored and slugging percentage and was walked 163 times.

DiMaggio’s season was a slight improvement from 1946 – he hit .315 with 20 home runs and drove in 97 runs and was second in total bases and slugging percentage to Williams. Still there was no question who the best hitter in the American League was that year. What’s more DiMaggio’s numbers were not the most impressive among his own teammates. In the clearest example his fellow outfielder Tommy Henrich drove in 98 runs, scored 109 runs and hit 35 more doubles, easily surpassing DiMaggio’s figures in all three categories.

Yet DiMaggio was named the American League MVP – by one vote over Williams. Williams would point out justifiably one of the critical factors that a notable Boston sportswriter named Mel Webb left Williams off his ballot completely. Had he received even a tenth-place vote Williams would have been the MVP. There’s more to the story than that, obviously, but it does how Williams’s reputation with the Boston media – which was one of mutual loathing – affected his reputation at the time, particularly in comparison with DiMaggio.

 

1948

The American League enjoyed one of the great pennant races in baseball history in this year with Boston, Cleveland and New York fighting all season for the pennant. The Yankees would be eliminated on the next-to-last day of the season and the Red Sox would famously lose a one-game playoff to Cleveland.

Williams and DiMaggio each had one of their greatest seasons, though they would lose the MVP to Cleveland’s player-manager Lou Boudreau who also had one of the great seasons in major league history. Keeping that in mind, let’s focus on DiMaggio and Williams.

Williams batting .369, winning his fourth batting title and also led the league in slugging percentage and doubles. He hit 25 home runs, drove in 127 runs and scored 124 runs.

DiMaggio hit .320 but hit 39 home runs and drove in 155, both of which were enough to lead the American League. He also led the league in total bases with 355 forty more than Williams. He was second in slugging percentage to Williams but was also  among the league leaders in hits and triples.

Now there’s no question Boudreau deserved the MVP that year: in addition to posting offensive numbers that were among the highest for a shortstop to that point history, he was also the team manager had more pressure on him than Williams or DiMaggio did. But among the two men in question, I think I have to give the edge to the Yankee Clipper in this one. Even in the last game, after the Yankees had been eliminated, he played all nine innings and hit two singles and two doubles. He never gave up.

 

1949

This one is an easy one because DiMaggio missed the first six weeks of the season and only came to bat 272 times that year. His .346 average, fourteen home runs and sixty seven RBIs are impressive but despite the stories you hear (and I may tell some of them later) DiMaggio was not the best player in the American League.

Williams clearly was. He batted .343, with 43 home runs and 159 runs driven in. He missed his third triple crown by an eyelash. He led the American League in total bases, runs scored, doubles and slugging percentage and was second only to Dale Mitchell in hits. He walked a ridiculous amount – 162 times, second only to Babe Ruth for a single season, He won his second American League MVP deservedly.

But whatever possibility the Red Sox had for a dynasty dissolved on the final day of the 1949 season. The Red Sox had come close to winning two consecutive American League pennants only to lose them both on the final day of the season. Williams would never get this close to one for the rest of his career and I have little doubt his reputation began to dissolve still further for that period in Boston.

 

1950

At the All-Star break of the 1950 season Williams was hitting .321 with 25 home runs and 83 RBIS. While catching a liner of the bat of Ralph Kiner, he fractured his elbow, missed a third of the season. He finished hitting. 317 with 28 home runs and 97 RBIs. It took him out of contention for most of the league leaders – and was no doubt  a big part of how the Red Sox who had one of the best offensive seasons in history, lost the American League pennant by four games to the Yankees.

DiMaggio was a shell of his former self in 1950 but that shell was still very capable of doing amazing things. He hit .301, with 32 home runs and drove in 122 runs. He led the league in slugging percentage and managed 307 total bases.

DiMaggio might get this by default but it was an impressive season anyway. He was among the league leaders in home runs and RBIs and would have been a better choice for MVP then Phil Rizutto, in my opinion. (So would Yogi Berra for that matter but that’s neither here nor there.)

 

1951

This was DiMaggio’s last season for a reason. He batted .263 with 12 home runs and 71 runs driven in. He knew he no longer had it and rather than hang around any longer he chose to leave the stage after the Yankees won the World Series.

Williams was the better player that year by far, hitting .318 with 31 home runs and driving in 126 runs. He led the league in slugging percentage and total bases, scored 109 runs and was walked a ridiculous number of times. So naturally the writers gave the MVP to Yogi Berra.

No I won’t trash Yogi. During the 1950s he was deservedly one of the most respected players in the game. He deservedly won the MVP in 1954 and 1955, finished second in 1950, 1953 and 1956 and fourth in 1952. I could argue he deserved to win in 1950 as much in any of those years and let’s not pretend he wasn’t revolutionizing the position of catching in more ways then one. And for the record Williams thought he was one of the greatest hitters he’d ever seen.

 

Conclusion

The two men actually matched up better than I expected when I began writing this article. Williams was clearly the better player in both his MVP season as well as the two in which he won the Triple Crown. Comparing the two men in DiMaggio’s season isn’t strictly fair, but let’s count it for the record.

But DiMaggio was  clearly better than Williams at the start of his career and compares very well with him in several critical marks. The two men were better matched in 1941 than it would seem at first glance and DiMaggio was clearly statistically superior in 1948 to Williams. It might not be fair to compare DiMaggio to Williams in 1950 but the fact that DiMaggio was not only lagging quite a bit but had to take more rests than usual does lead me to think the two men might have finished favorably had Williams had been hurt.

DiMaggio hit 260 home runs and drove in 1105 runs during this period. Williams hit 273 home runs and drove in 1208. Williams scored 1295 runs. DiMaggio scored 978.

That last statistic speaks to one way Williams is clearly superior to DiMaggio. DiMaggio spent his entire career as a player surrounding by superb hitters around him, Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller at the start of his career, Berra at the end of it. DiMaggio had all sorts of protection.

Williams by contrast never had anyone close to as good as him in the lineup. There would be some Hall of Famers – Bobby Doerr and Jimmy Foxx – as well as some very good hitters – Vern Stephens and Johnny Pesky but Williams was walked an absurd amount of the time because it was safer to do that and pitch to the next man down. That’s part of the reasons his numbers took such a nosedive in the latter stages of his career; he was still hitting as well as ever but there was no one base to drive ahead of him.

And it’s also the reason why his peak ended not long after DiMaggio’s career ended. Don’t get me wrong he was still as he himself put it ‘the greatest old hitter alive’, capable of batting .388 at 39 and winning a battle title when he was 40. And it’s not like his power disappeared: he hit 29 home runs at the age of 42. But the rest of the offensive lineup was, frankly, inoffensive. After he came back from Korea he never drove in more than 89 runs the rest of his career. There were some solid hitters in the lineup during the 1950s – Jackie Jensen and Frank Malzone – but they did not strike fear into the hearts of pitchers the way Williams still could at 40.

DiMaggio drove in 100 runs or more six times during this period. Williams drove in 100 runs every year but 1950 and that was due to extenuating circumstances. To be a little fairer DiMaggio drove in 120 runs four of those times and Williams did seven times.

Williams hit 30 home runs or more seven times during this period. DiMaggio did so 5 times. Williams hit 40 or more four times and DiMaggio never came close. To be fair DiMaggio only hit 40 home runs once in his entire career, when he hit 46 home runs in 1937; it was not easy to hit that many in the House that Ruth Built.

 Williams won four of his six batting titles during this period; DiMaggio won two. DiMaggio did manage to hit .350 three times during this period, the exact number as Williams did. DiMaggio, it’s worth noting, did flirt with .400 in 1939 before settling down at .381. Williams next highest total was .369, while DiMaggio hit .357 in 1942.

It was famously said DiMaggio only had one weakness: doubles. He hit 288 of his 390 during this period as well as 88 of his 131 triples. Williams hit 396 doubles during this period but only hit 61 triples. And it must be added how much he was walked: Williams led the league in walks almost every year during this period, getting more than 140 seven times. DiMaggio by contrast never was walked as many as 100 times during his entire career: his highest total was 80 and that was in his next to last season. That’s the thing about the Yankees; there was no such thing as an easy out.

And it is worth noting DiMaggio was, if anything, harder to strike out than Williams was; he only struck out 361 times in his entire career. His highest total was 39 in his rookie year, which means his batting eye only got better from that point on. And for all of Williams’s incredible eyesight, pitchers did have a better chance of striking him out than DiMaggio. He struck out 45 times or more five times during this same period. Bob Feller might have thought he had a better chance to strike out Williams than DiMaggio.

 At the end of the day I think Williams was a better hitter than DiMaggio during the period they were in direct competition but the margins are far closer than I expected them to be. Of course when it comes to who the better human being was that’s no contest – but I’ll save that for another article.

 

Season 41 Of Jeopardy So Far - And A Revised List of The Tournament of Champions Qualifiers

 

 

Depending on the math we are a little more than a quarter of the way through Season 41 of Jeopardy. And I think I will get little debate from recent and long-term fans of Jeopardy that in many ways this is already a far better season than Season 40 was at this time last year.

First, and to many most importantly,  no endless postseason. This might seem obvious but for those of us who were exhausted by the time we had to go through the third round of Champions Wild Card and not even close to the end of the run, it’s not a minor detail.

Second and more seriously, it’s clear that the writers for Jeopardy have upped their game considerably this season. Perhaps it was out of revenge for the producers being vocal about using ‘recycled clues’ while the strike was still going on or perhaps they felt they had something to prove for those who might have angry at them for going on strike during the first place. Whatever the reason they have demonstrated, particularly when it comes to Final Jeopardy, that they are running on all cylinders perhaps in a way that wasn’t obvious during the reign of the super-champions that made Season 38 so much of a joy.

And third the show has overcome my doubts that by the time the next Tournament of Champions took place they would have a roster sizable enough for it. I made it clear multiple times before we were subjected to the long, flat, seemingly endless death march through the Jeopardy postseason of Season 40 that the expansion of the Tournament to 27 players was a flawed idea for countless reasons. I’m not saying that the 2024 field was padded, per se, so much as the fact that it led to my belief it offered very little when it came to rewards. The idea of the show having even half as many necessary qualified players by the time the next Tournament took place  - I assumed it would be this coming February at the earliest.

As is so often the case, Jeopardy has proven me wrong. Since the first Jeopardy Invitational ended exactly 138 ‘normal’ Jeopardy games have been played. And in that period 19 players have qualified for the upcoming Tournament of Champions. That compares favorably to the first 135 regular season games of Season 39 when only fifteen players managed to qualify – and several of them only qualified retroactively when the show decided to admit players who won three games during Season 39.

As someone who made very clear in previous articles that not only should three-game winners be allowed to compete in the field normally but argued that both Wild Card tournaments had taken an endless amount of time just to let several qualified three game winners in anyway, I take a certain satisfaction in the fact that the new producers of the show have realized that there is little to be gained from reinventing the wheel. The Wild Card Tournament when it takes place next year is only going to feature 1 and 2 game winners as well as the two winners in the Second Chance Tournament. And considering my general level of being impressed with those who will compete in that same tournament I think we must give credit to the producers for having learned from their mistakes.

To be sure we will have ‘just’ one super-champion competing in this years TOC but as I’ve written before I think new fans have been spoiled by the array of winners who came along in the immediate aftermath of Alex Trebek’s passing. While we must give credit to Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach for doing much to ‘save Jeopardy’ when it was struggling the fact remains the super-champion while become more frequent in the last decade, has always been something of a rarity. That is as it should be: if every Jeopardy champion was a Cris Panullo or Ryan Long, it might become boring and we would appreciate them less.

So with that in mind here is the official roster for the 2025 Tournament of Champions. For purposes of this column Lisa Ann Walter had been excluded as she won a ‘special tournament’. As someone who saw how good Ike Barnholtz was last year, I will be taking her seriously going forward.

I’ll go chronologically:

Lucas Partridge: 3 Games, $66,200

Lucas won the final game of Season 39 and then had to wait nearly a year before he played his next game this April. He was actually ahead going into Final Jeopardy on his first day back. But a very tough Final Jeopardy that no one could get right, did him in. Lee Wilkins, who won with $2200 was defeated the next day by:

 

Alison Betts, 5 Wins $121,500

The first ‘official’ player to qualify for the Tournament of Champions since Ben Chan during his impressive nine game winning streak in May of 2023. She was engaged in a back and forth battle with Marko Saric throughout the game but ended up losing to him in another tough Final Jeopardy that no one got right. Marko won one more game.

 

Amy Hummel, 5 wins, $100,994

I’ve written about Amy extensively before so now I’ll just tell you that she lost her fifth match to:

Weckiai Rannila,  3 wins, $35,200

Weckiai had one very big payday and two small ones. She was defeated by Matthew Smith, who the very next day was beaten by:

 

Allison Gross, 3 wins, $44,598

I will just mention that this period of four female qualifiers for the Tournament of Champions was last seen in Season 38 when Christine Whelchel, Margaret Shelton, Maureen O’Neill and Jackie Kelly, all managed to win 4 games in the course of less than a month. This group had their streak in a similar span. Allison would give way to:

 

Will Stewart, 3 wins, $70,501

Will had three big paydays and won his two of his three games in decisive runaways. He seemed unbeatable until:

 

Grant DeYoung, 4 Wins, $81,203

Grant won all four of his games playing in a tall swiveling chair, not unlike the one Troy Meyer did throughout his original six game winning streak all the way to the Finals of the 2024 Tournament of Champions. Chris D’Amico moved ahead of him on the very last clue of Double Jeopardy in his fifth appearance which allowed Chris to prevail in Final Jeopardy. (All three players knew the correct response that day.) But the next day Chris fell to:

Amar Kakirde, 4 wins, $55,899

Amar’s paydays were small because three of his matches were runaways and not ones that left him with much margin for error to bet. He lost to Abby Mann in another tough Final Jeopardy that no one got right and Abby’s run was cut short by a little-known player named

 

Adriana Harmeyer, 15 wins $349,600

Drew Basile, 6 wins $129,601

Isaac Hirsch, 9 wins, $215,390

 

Well you know about those three already so I won’t waste time. However there was one last qualifier before Season 40 ended.

 

Neilesh Vinjamuri, 3 wins, $53,099

Neilesh was defeated by Davey Morrison just two days before Season 40 ended. Morrison lost on the last day of the season to Rachel Bradley.

 

Now a brief recap of Season 41 and there will be some new names.

David Erb, 3 wins, $90,754

Described as a Clint Eastwood look-alike by some on Jeopardy sites David locked up his first two games with $30,000 at the end of Double Jeopardy and wagered everything on a Daily Double late in the Double Jeopardy round of Game 3 to come from behind. Then the next day he was outplayed by Maddie Carvel and Alex Michev and Maddie ended up winning.

 

Ryan Manton, 4 wins, $83,179

Mark Fitzpatrick, 5 wins, $107,201

Risabh Wuppalapatti, 3 wins, $52,802

He managed three impressive wins involving some very tough Final Jeopardys. However he went into Final Jeopardy trailing Kelly Gates and that was enough to make the difference as everyone knew the correct response for Final Jeopardy that day.

Will Wallace, 4 wins, $79,998

Greg Jolin, 5 wins, $135,002

 

And last but not least:

Kevin Laskowski, 3 wins, $52,999

Kevin is an Episcopal priest with an interesting array of knowledge. He didn’t know as many Bible quotes as you’d think but somehow knew more about cocktails and rap music than I do. And while I’m loathe to use terms like a higher power in this context, given that in his second win he only took the lead on the last clue of Double Jeopardy and in his third win he was trailing going into Final Jeopardy and the leader got it wrong…well, all I’m saying.

His luck didn’t hold last night but it was a near thing. The game was so close that it was a three way tie until Laurel Day responded correctly on the last clue of Double Jeopardy broke it to put her in the lead. All three players knew the correct response for Final Jeopardy so Laurel won. (She lost today, so that’s as far as her luck ran.)

 

Does this roster have the luster of the three Tournaments of Champions in the post Alex-Trebek era? Perhaps not. But this is, honestly, what a long term fan like myself is used to from a Tournament of Champions ever since the five day rule at the start of Season 20. And as anyone who has watched the last three Tournament of Champions know all too well, past performance is no indication that you will even end up in the semi-finals of the TOC when game play starts. Cris Panullo and Ryan Long are painfully aware of that fact.

I imagine my next official report on Jeopardy will come close to the end of the year, barring another entrant in the TOC. As always I’m looking forward to it and this time there are no overwhelming favorites to cloud the picture. Stay tuned.

 

Constant Reader November 2024: Keep Your Friends Close by Lucinda Berry

 

 

 Perhaps the biggest irony in Keep Your Friends Close Lucinda Berry’s psychologically terrifying and bleakly funny novel is that it begins at a meeting of the West Hollywood Moms’ Club where a group of rich and powerful wives and mothers get together to drink, indulge in edibles and bitch about how difficult it is to have their lives. By the time the reader is nearly halfway through the novel you do understand that these women’s lives are stressful for many reason but motherhood had nothing to do with it. In a way the death of Kiersten, the President of the club, may be the least stressful thing at least three of the women in this club have had to deal with in a long time: given how sociopathic and self-centered they are this clearly gives them a break from the tales that they’ve been spinning – most of all for their own benefit.

I suspect the setup will remind some readers, as one is so often during the past decade, of Big Little Lies but there’s a major difference: for all the flaws of the Monterey Five you never doubted for a moment they loved their children with all their hearts. By contrast the three women who serve as narrators – Brooke, Whitney and Jade –  spend the novels essentially viewing their children as appendages more than anything else. They don’t particularly like each other or even their spouses that much and they really do seem to see the investigation into their friends death as an inconvenience more than something horrible. All of them – or at least the three women we meet – have the emotional depth and empathy of the Roy family and don’t even have the excuse of being heirs to a media conglomerate to blame.

Now to be fair Whitney does care – she and Kiersten have been best friends since kindergarten and have done everything together since – gone to college, got married, had children together. Whitney finds it impossible to believe that Kiersten’s death is either an accident or a suicide  but she can’t for the life of her think anyone would want to kill her. Throughout the novel Whitney cares about the death of Kiersten because she knew her better than anyone to the point that she shafts aside anyone else who tries to help her.

Jade spends most of the book in a detached fashion from the other moms: she makes it clear she never felt like she truly belonged and resents having to go to Whitney when she seems catatonic after learning of her friend’s death. When she finds herself staging a get-together after Kiersten dies, she’s more upset about people seeing her house and her family then the fact of her friends death.

Brooke is the most troubled of the three women we meet in the novel, mainly because she seems so closed off: she’s the only one who doesn’t cry after Kiersten is found dead and has been acting increasingly bizarre for a while. We learn very quickly she is the odd one out of the Mom’s Club. Her spouse Abby was the one who was friends with the group and she’s been reluctantly included ever since. The two of them met when they were both in rehab for alcohol abuse and they bonded and eventually got married. This should have been a warning sign for both of them that this relationship was not going to be a healthy one and indeed by the start of the novel Abby and Brooke are in the process of divorcing – something Brooke seems unwilling to accept.

When the moms gather in the aftermath of Kiersten’s death, its quickly become clear that the police – led by Detective Perez – are viewing this as suspicious. Whitney insists that they tell them the truth. This changes when Perez makes clear that the death is suspicious.

Part of what makes this novel funny at times – and it can be darkly so – are the scenes between Whitney and Detective Perez. Whitney spends most of the novel, like the other two narrators, certain that she’s a good person as well as the fact that she’s superior to everyone who isn’t part of her circle. When she’s called back in Perez, she wants to make it clear she’s certain her friend didn’t kill herself but was murdered and Perez tells her she thinks the same thing. Perez is the hero of this novel so naturally we never see the story from her perspective but whenever she’s around Whitney it’s clear that she judges not only her but all of the women in this circle. Whitney keeps thinking that this detective is unworthy of respect when she starts questioning Whitney about where she was at the time of her friend’s death. Whitney thinks she can manipulate Perez the way because she is rich. This is the first of many stupid things she does during the novel.

Brooke has been struggling her whole  time in Beverly Hills for acceptance. The Mom’s at the club were all Abby’s friends, not hers, and its clear none of them ever had any respect for her. We never see the novel from Abby’s perspective but its clear that she’s the dominant one in this relationship – she couldn’t carry a child so Brooke agreed to even though she never wanted a domestic life. Then Abby tells Brooke she wants a divorce and we later learn she’s been having an affair with a younger woman before this something she is unapologetic about. Brooke ends up relapsing not long after and ends up assaulting someone at a party. Because the group has always preferred Abby to Brooke they never care about her side of the story.

Brooke would be the sympathetic character in this book – she very quickly becomes the focus of the investigation because of the other mom’s  - but she is just as deluded and narcissistic as the others. She refuses to accept the marriage is over, tries to use Kiersten’s memorial as a way to get back together with Abby and when the memorial ends is so upset at Brooke’s attitude that she shoves her. When Abby takes her son over to Whitney’s in order to protect her child Brooke’s becomes truly unhinged, ranting on social media in what amounts to a three-hour monologue and in a custody hearing refuses to take the fact that there has to be a psychological hearing before things can proceed as a justifiable reason for her to not see her baby.

Jade is the harshest of the group, mainly because she doesn’t come from money and they live in a house that is owned by her husband’s parents. In her mind, her husband is lazy because he can’t hold a job for long – and its worth noting she seems unable to process how jobs work – when he tells her that half the company was laid off, she uses it to say that he wasn’t working hard enough. She’s upset because she has to quit therapy because she doesn’t like her husband. What she really doesn’t like is living in a mansion and not being able to invite guests over because it has Ikea furniture instead of the latest from Rodeo Drive. The fact that Jade cares about status then love really should be a big giveaway.

Throughout the book whenever we feel the slightest bit of sympathy for any of the characters Berry – sometimes through their own thoughts, sometimes through Perez – immediately yanks it away. We learn that Whitney’s husband Colin has a gambling addiction and she makes it clear that she doesn’t considering gambling a real disease the way drug and alcohol addiction are. (It’s not clear she thinks those are real problems either.) When Perez asks Whitney why she doesn’t just divorce Colin she says she loves her husband but its clear that’s barely true.  We learn that the talent agency she runs is a front for an escort agency – one that often involves using minors. She doesn’t have a license because that would mean having to pay taxes on her income and the whole reason she’s doing that is to hide money from Colin. When Perez discovers this – with barely any work – and reminds her its illegal, Whitney jokes that “she was hoping we could avoid that small detail.” Something that doesn’t amuse Perez at all.

It doesn’t take much work for Perez to learn something that we learn late in the novel: Whitney’s marriage has been a sham from the start but for her Colin has been the one who caused the problems. When he says outright late in the novel that she loves Kiersten more than him, she just states it as a fact. (That’s far from the most shocking thing we learn about their marriage but that you should find out for yourself.) We actually learn that Whitney and Kiersten have been swapping husbands for awhile and that Whitney has been having members of her escort agency service Colin in an effort to keep him happy – something she has no intention of apologizing for. When she learns that Colin has been having an affair with someone else among the mom’s, she takes this as the final straw, even though it plays into the narrative that Whitney has been controlling this marriage from the beginning.

There are more secrets to be revealed, including who the murderer of Kiersten and why. What is shocking is not just who did it and why but because none of the characters feel any remorse about what happened and even the murderess still thinks she can save her marriage and her family after all of this. When all the crimes are revealed Whitney realizes that Perez is brilliant because ‘none of us have spent a single second on her husbands in this scenario. But she had.” Indeed it speaks to the narcissism of all involved that this could have been solved if they’d had conversations with their spouses instead of this – and they were so focused on themselves that it never occurred to them.

Yet even this revelation doesn’t lead to falling action: there are far darker moments at the end and a deeper and more unsettling twist when we learn one last unsettling truth about the deceased. What it is I will not even hint at here but it argues that at the end of the day Kiersten has been a very real sense controlling all of the actions that started this and while she didn’t deserve to die, she is guilty of a betrayal far worse than that and it remains unclear if that truth will ever come out.

Keep Your Friends Close is a short read; 270 pages in paperback. According to her profile she’s a former psychologist, ‘who uses her clinical experience to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche.” And boy does she in this one. But at least she has a better perspective of the characters she writes about; in her acknowledgements she thanks her readers: “I’m glad you like my books and enjoy being traumatized. Thanks for going with me on this wild ride.” No, no, Dr. Berry, thank you.

 

Get Millie Black is The Procedural We Didn't Know We Needed

 

 

I suspect it is purely a quirk of the calendar that HBO’s last original series of 2024 is a bookend of its first original series. Get Millie Black is a story about a former Jamaica resident who returns to her home country after years in self-imposed exile and finds herself following a missing persons case into a seedy underbelly that is far more complicated and bloodier than she expected.

But it says something (perhaps more about me than the show) that I was drawn in from the first ten minutes of Millie Black than I was during all of the first two episodes of Night Country (all I could stomach before I abandoned it). There are many reasons for this, some of which are about the similarities, far more about the distinct differences.

A large part of it may very well be the fact that Millie Black doesn’t have the baggage that Night Country did going into its premiere last January. For all of the impressive efforts of Issa Lopez and her cast to try and make Night Country a jump off point from all of the sexist and racist baggage of True Detective, the fact remains it had all of the things that I came to loathe about the series by the time of its second installment and were clearly present in even the first. The pace was glacial, the atmosphere oppressive, the characters apart from the two leads little more than stick figures. And for all the incredible work of Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, they were little more than the gender reversal of the kind of toxic masculinity we’ve been seeing on the show since Season 1. They were both abusive to everyone around them, they hated each other from day one, they slept with anyone they chose and formed no attachments and one was vaguely spiritual and one matter-of-fact. Throw in the fact that the series still couldn’t decide whether it was a mystery series or one with a kind of supernatural kink and Night Country remained as much a mess as every True Detective installment.

Get Millie Black has many of those same aspects but it doesn’t have any of the pretension. And it also moves at a much faster pace than any installment of True Detective ever did; we basically know everything we need to know about the title character in the first ten minutes of the show – something that it generally takes almost all of any installment of True Detective to tell us anything about the major characters. There is a note of the supernatural in Tamara Lawrence’s narration about what is happening but it doesn’t have the same baggage as the stories we would hear from Rust  Cohle or Detective Navarro because this story is taking place in Jamaica and by definition a former colony is going to have ghosts beyond the idea of the culture.

Millie-Jean Black tells her past in a brilliant seven minute opening monologue. She and her brother Orville grew up in a house of abuse under their mother, who regularly beat her son because of his tendencies towards cross-dressing at an early age. One night she actively fought back and her mother sent her to relatives in London and did everything in her power to cut off communication between the two siblings. She called to Millie her brother had gone ‘to the Gully’ and was killed a riot. When she made it clear her brother was burning in hell, Millie never spoke to her.

Millie has been haunted by that all her life and she makes it clear she worked in London in the missing persons unit ‘to work off a debt she could never repay.’ Then last year when her mother died, she learned that her brother was still alive and flew back to Kingston to atone for her sins. She didn’t expect that her brother had now renamed himself Hibiscus and has no desire to renew relations with her or even acknowledge what her sister is trying to do. In the opening minutes Millie goes to lock-up to bail Hibiscus out of jail for a prostitution charge (the guard clearly knows this and mocks Millie’s return: “Same time next week?”) Hibiscus walks away from Millie without so much as a goodbye and has no desire to have dinner with her that night, something that Millie has been making an effort at for the past year and that Hibiscus clearly resents. (We will get Hibiscus’s side of the story in the next episode.)

Millie must have been considered an outsider all her life in London but when she returns to Jamaica she is considered just as much of one. She is angry and arrogant as she must have been in London because she is good at her job and she will not bend to authority. Her boss, Baccarat, is also a Jamaican woman but she has no patience for the gamesmanship Millie tries in the episode about working a case and clearly resents her. The other detectives do not tolerate her except for her partner Curtis and Curtis, who is gay and married, barely has the patience for her transvestite brother. This may very well be the price of the baggage she’s carried her entire life and the fact that now she has no way to take it off. So we see her throw herself into her work, which involves a missing sixteen year old named Janet Fenton.

Janet is reported missing after two weeks by one of her teachers. Indeed when Millie and Curtis go to see her mother, she doesn’t seem remotely interested in her daughter’s fate. We learn Janet has been working at a strip club and there is an excellent possibility her mother has been whoring her out. It turns out Janet is connected to Freddie Somerville the son of a wealthy Jamaican white family.

In some places racism can be subtle: when it comes to the Somerville family they don’t even hide it to the people they work for or the police. Millie manages to bond with one of the domestics by spitting in the lemonade for a function which shocks to domestic – and then she spits in it herself. This is just the start of the problem: they head to the side of a robbery-homicide where Freddy is supposedly dead – but it’s not Freddy. A white Scotland Yard inspector shows up (Joe Dempsie) claiming Freddie’s involved in an investigation. Naturally he refused to comment to it, naturally Millie mocks him for his racism, and naturally her boss tells to stop being so arrogant. Freddie is involved with Janet, and there’s clearly something go on that involves children – but more than that remains to be seen.

The series comes from a short story by Marlon James, who created the series for Channel 4 in Britain. If ever you needed further evidence that the British do everything better than America when it comes to movies and TV, Get Millie Black tells you as much. Shot on location in Jamaica, it looks at the world that tourists never see. It shows us the seedy nightclubs, how slavery still has its mark here far deeper than the US and that the horrors of transphobia are as bad here as in America. In an early scene Millie tries to warn Hibiscus of the attacks on the people in her community in recent days. Hibiscus ignores her and goes back to the Gully – and that night a mob attacks and beats her friends, including one just inches away from where a terrified Hibiscus is hiding in terror.

As of this writing Get Millie Black is just a limited series but the British have even more of a tendency to tell multiple stories than we Americans have. I don’t know if there will be a second season or even if I’ll be as fascinated by the end of the first as I am after just one episode. But I do know that this is the kind of story, as with The Woman in the Wall  at the start of the year, that will draw me in quickly.

And unlike with True Detective James makes it clear what kind of story we’ll be getting. “It will end wrong. It won’t make sense. But like every story about Jamaica, it is a ghost story.” And no one needs to be told that ghost stories never have happy endings.

Note: Out of respect for the native accents of Jamaica, Get Millie Black is presented entirely with subtitles. I doubt most viewers will need them but I do appreciate them. To understand the rage, you must not miss a word.

My score: 3.75 stars.

2012 Movies Tribute: Looper - Rian Johnson Shows Us Time Is A Flat Circle (2200nd Post)

 

As someone who has always been detached from the idea that the Star Wars franchise is the be-all and end-all of pop culture and who has proudly spent much of the last quarter of a century avoiding, whenever possible, seeing any film or TV series related to this universe I have no real stake in the argument about Episode 8 being the worst film in the most recent trilogy. However from the perspective of the film critic as well as an admirer of talent I’m not entirely surprised that Rian Johnson’s vision was, shall we say, disparate from the one that J.J. Abrams had introduced in The Force Awakens.

Anyone who has read my column on other subjects over the years knows that I am a huge admirer of both Abrams and Johnson, both in terms of their work for movies and television. And while I think both men are geniuses I’ve seen enough of their work to know that they each have a different niche where they are masters.

From the moment he broke on to the scene with Felicity in 1998 J.J. Abrams has been a master of both wonder as well as the idea of community in all of the television series he has created. We see at the heart of the relationships Sydney Bristow forms in Alias, the basic ideas at the center of Lost (even though his involvement stopped after the Pilot) and the unlikely bond that forms between the Bishop family and their team in Fringe. One clearly gets a sense of it in his reboot of Star Trek as well as a very clear vision in Super 8. One even gets a sense of it in his entry in Mission Impossible. Abrams has always been more comfortable in the world of sci-fi and fantasy.

By contrast Johnson’s sweet spot throughout his somewhat shorter career (he’s only 50) has always been far more in the noir genre. When he has ventured into television as a director and writer he has always been in the seedy underbelly of crime. His work on Breaking Bad – including Ozymandias, considering arguably the greatest episode of television ever made – as well as the brilliant Poker Face makes this very clear. It’s always been clear in the handful of movies he made before and after as well, though considering he is now the force behind the knew Knives Out mystery satire probably told you that in advance.

I first came into contact with him back in 2005 with his very first movie Brick. This is the story of a contemporary high school students search for his former girlfriend written entirely in the style of a 1930s film noir. Joseph Gordon-Levitt played the lead in what could well be considered the first adult role he plays. This film absolutely should not have worked by any nature but somehow it flows perfectly. When Gordon-Levitt says: “Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you” it sounds just as normal as any of the dialogue we were hearing on Deadwood at the time. The film made $2 million dollars on a budget of less that half a million and it put Johnson on the map. However his next film The Brothers Bloom which featured Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo as two con men who swindle millionaires was a box office bomb, even though it was relatively cheap to make.

Johnson had to go back to TV for a while before he managed to get Looper greenlit. It was well received critically and more than managed to make its money back at the box office (it grossed over $175 million worldwide). Still the decision that Johnson should have been allowed to handle a Star Wars film was clearly a poor one because while Looper is at least on the surface a sci-fi film, it is as much in the noir genre as everything else Johnson did before or since. There’s none of the wonder that we see in Abrams’s movie or show and that’s clear from the opening shot and the narration of it. This is a movie that takes one of the most wondrous ideas in science fiction – time travel – and basically says upfront that the only purpose it has is for crime syndicates to dispose of dead bodies in the past.

The film is set in 2044 – thirty two years from the date the movie was originally released – but if anything the future looks bleaker than we get from the world of Blade Runner or Steven Spielberg’s various inputs. We see speeders that are close to hoverbikes and they are mocked by Joe the second he sees them. Occasionally we see signs of hovering cars or jet packs but they’re basically being used as tools. Even the idea of telekinesis is outright mocked by Joe in the narration. “We thought we’d all be getting superpowers. Turns out all we got was a bunch of guys who could float quarters.”

The film takes place almost entirely in Kansas and I’m pretty sure Johnson is making this a deliberate choice: you can see this is not a place that Dorothy would ever want to go back to. The city is unnamed but we basically see a world that looks worse than the one we live in today: the streets are filthy, people live in poverty and shoot each other at random, almost everybody is some kind of drugs (Joe is a junkie when we meet him). Halfway through the movie we get a look at China and the only thing that looks different is the streets are slightly cleaner. Abe (Jeff Daniels) is the crime boss from Kansas who has been sent from 30 years in the future as a representative of one of the syndicates and if anything he sounds more depressed about it than anything. Perhaps it’s the nature of his job. Joe tells us he runs the state and “that would be impressive if it were any other state.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe. In Johnson’s version of the world no one seems to have a last name. We’ll learn that Joe was sold by his mother to a crime syndicate, spent his teenage years in robberies and when he broke into the wrong storefront Abe saw something in him and made him a looper. That he thought this was a noble path shows the narrowness of his vision but it’s clear from Joe’s description that ‘loopers don’t attract a lot of forward thinkers’.

Joe’s job is to dispose of bodies and when he does so he collects a reward in silver. Eventually he knows he will be hired to ‘close his loop’. In order to tie up lose ends 30 years from when a looper starts his job he will be captured, tied up and sent back in time to kill himself. This naturally causes all loopers and we see Joe with his gang to spend their lives drowning in cheap pleasures and frequently becoming addicts. At a critical point in the film we are shown what Joe’s life will be like when he closes his loop and we see how miserable it is: he will get deeper into drugs, spend all the money he has, go back to becoming  a hit man and eventually become a bigger monster. One gets the feeling this is the traditional trajectory for any looper as well as this being the best case scenario. We get a clear sense of the worst case through Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) who is sent to close his loop and can’t follow through with it. He comes to Joe and begs to hide and while Joe does so temporarily after a meeting with Abe he gives him up when his fortune is threatened. We never learn what happens to Seth in the present  - Abe has no intention of messing the timeline – but we know its not going to be great.

We get a sense of Joe’s existence in the first half-hour of the film and it is truly miserable. He goes to his site in the wheat fields; he kills his target, he collects his silver, he gets high, he sleeps with Suzie (Piper Perabo). The clearest idea he has of the future is learning French and going to France, maybe with Suzie. Suzie has a clearer perspective of reality than Joe does and just wants ‘services rendered’ . Joe was a dead man walking long before his loop was closed.

And at the half-hour point, he has to close his own loop. Except his older self is clearer on what’s going to come and is prepared. Joe is more determined to make things right with his gang then the life of himself: he doesn’t even care why he’s determined to escape.

I should mention that watching Gordon-Levitt throughout the movie he does take on the behavior or a young Bruce Willis in so much of his mannerisms.  His haircut and tone sound very much like Willis in Die Hard  and Moonlighting but he also has the someone deader tones that we saw him use in the works of M. Night Shyamalan. I remember reading an end-of-year Best-Of-List in Entertainment Weekly saying that Gordon-Levitt’s performance in Looper was ‘the best Bruce Willis performance in 2012’. That’s not entirely a joke. Gordon-Levitt does embody much of Willis in his work.

And it’s worth noting that his work here gives Willis a chance to flex his acting muscles in a way that he hadn’t to in a very long time, say, since Lucky Number Slevin. When Willis and Gordon-Levitt confront each other in the diner both men are angry but Willis’s is far more deserving. He looks down at himself – literally – and sees the kind of horrible person he already is. He’s a killer and a junkie with a child mentality and he knows that he is dealing with a monster. Willis is filled with self-loathing in this scene and its clear why. As we’ve seen in the montage he found a woman who loved him, saw through his massive flaws and the two of them got married. They’d built a future together. He might have been fine dying for his sins but when his wife becomes an inadvertent victim, it sends him on a mission.

It’s here we learn the story of ‘The Rainmaker’ who in six months took control of the five major syndicates – alone. No one knows how he did it, no one knows what he looks like and we certainly don’t know the kind of person he is to the rest of humanity. What we do know is that he has begun to close all the loops and Willis was his target. The day before Willis got a lead on who he was. He’s alive in this time period and Willis intends to kill him.

There’s a flaw in Willis’s thinking, of course: the one in common with all time travel movies. If Willis succeeds in his mission and kills the Rainmaker as a child, then how will the timeline align itself so that he can be sent back to kill him in the first place. The movie makes a point by having Gordon-Levitt say that this flaw isn’t relevant scientifically but because Willis believes it will happen that’s what matters.

The emotional center of the film takes place in the second half when Gordon-Levitt rides through the wheatfields he’s been using to dispose of bodies and reaches one of the addresses Willis thinks ‘The Rainmaker’ is. It’s there he meets Sarah (Emily Blunt) the only character in the entire movie with a moral compass and a soul. Sarah was both a junkie and a prostitute at one point and she abandoned her son as a child for his own good. I will not reveal the circumstances as to why and how she came back: all that matters is that she has love and her heart and compassion in a way no one else in the movie does. Everything she does is to protect her son and she makes it very clear that it is her only priority.

This is, to be very clear, a bleak vision of the world one that is more at home with Ridley Scott’s visions of the future. It has the kind of intellectual puzzles that are at the center of so many Christopher Nolan films but unlike Nolan (who didn’t seem willing to confront them until Interstellar) Scott looks at the harsh consequences. This is clearest in the fact that The Rainmaker in 2044 is five years old. The information Willis has received tells him that there are three possibilities as to who he might be. Sarah asks the inevitable question: is he going to kill them all? And unlike most filmmakers Johnson actually answers it by having Willis go to one of his possibilities first. He doesn’t show the actual moment of the murder – I don’t think he could have gotten the film made if he included it – but he shows every moment leading up to it and most critically Willis’s reaction after it. We see a man in utter grief at what he has done, perhaps because it hasn’t work but just as likely because he has killed a complete innocent for nothing.

Perhaps the real reason that Johnson was not suited for Star Wars is seen in the final confrontation. Johnson has never believed in easy answers in any of his work and that is very clear in Looper’s final minutes. Gordon-Levitt finally gets a clear version of how the Rainmaker will come to be and not only all of the horrible consequences but that it is an unending cycle. That may very well be why this movie is called Looper because what is a loop but a circle that never ends? Joe doesn’t know that anything will change in his final action but he knows enough to know if things do proceed they never will.

I will close this review with a reminder that Gordon-Levitt was very active in 2012. Just a couple of months previous he had played Jon Blake in The Dark Knight Rises the movies that brought an end to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  At Bruce Wayne’s memorial Commissioner Gordon reads the final passage from A Tale of Two Cities which ends with: “It is a far, far better thing I do then I have ever done, it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.” Blake hears these same lines and while I seriously doubt Joe has ever read Dickens, I can’t help but think that when he does his final act in the film, something like that very thought is playing through his head.