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.