Homicide Rewatch: Son of A Gun

 

Written by James Yoshimura

Directed by Nick Gomez

 

It’s something that we’re all used to in the police procedural: an officer is shot in the line of duty. The procedural follows certain patterns: all of the cops first go to the hospital to learn what happens to the man down. Then regardless of whether he is alive or dead, the bosses go before the cameras and tell the media that they will bring the shooter to justice. All the action stops until the shooter is brought to justice. The bosses call for a show of force, and every officer and detective – certainly every regular on the series – go through every inch of the city in question, breaking windows, yelling at suspects, beating down anyone who defies them. And eventually the shooter is hauled in if he is not killed outright and faces the mercy of the law.

Anyone who’s watched procedurals over the last quarter of a century – from any of Dick Wolf’s dramas or Blue Bloods, from The Shield to Dexter – even Simon’s follow-up series The Wire – would follow some version of this events. And indeed in future storylines in Homicide this pattern would play out. But in the first season, in regard to the shooting of Chris Thormann that does not happen. This is telling even though one of the detectives in the unit Steve Crosetti considers Thormann close to a son.

In keeping with how low-key Homicide is the detectives are basically BS-ing in the coffee room, with Crosetti holding forth on his new theories in the Lincoln assassination. (This time he’s trying to blame Edwin Stanton for the role.) Then Gee walks in tells them that theirs an officer down, tells Munch he’s the primary and only then tells Steve that the man down is Thormann.

We then cut to what will be a familiar place – a Baltimore hospital. Here we meet another semi-recurring character Dr. Eli Devilbiss who is trying his best to bring Thormann back to life when Crosetti and Lewis arrive at the hospital. Devilbiss, in keeping with so many of the other characters in all walks of life we meet on this show, is realistic to a fault: when Crosetti asks about Thormann’s chances, he tells him if he has any  family he’ll die on the table. One gets the feeling that Devilbiss sees this far more often then he’d like and as Thormann’s condition improves, however minor, he modifies his opinion. However he tells Crosetti that there’s only so much medical science can do. (One can see him as a kind of ancestor character to the doctors we’ll meet at Cook County in a few years’ time.)

The press is, in fact, in greater presence at the hospital then the officers. There is a boss there – Granger – and he goes out of his way to sing Thormann’s praises alongside his wife, but at the end of the day he’s doing so for the cameras and probably has no idea who Thormann was. And while eventually Lewis and Crosetti are assigned to the shooting, by and large its business as usual for everyone else.

The next stage of the Adena Watson investigation is underway: Bayliss is following up on the theory that he suggested at the end of the last episode and is leading an investigation into a new address. The case is eight days old by now and it’s clearly on the backburner for the squad. There are far fewer officers involved in this raid then the one we saw back in the second episode and at this point Bayliss and Pembleton are the only two detectives on the squad still pursuing the investigation full-bore.

It is, as is increasingly become the case, yet another dead end as Bayliss himself acknowledged after spending half a day there. I should mention at this point Fontana and his colleagues have no idea yet how critical the interactions between the two men will be to the long-term success of Homicide so I find it impossible to believe that when the two men have their conversation in the squad car driving back to the unit that they have any idea that the dynamic between the two men will be central to the series greatness.

Bayliss asks Pembleton a question he heard in the last episode (but viewers at the time might not have for reasons I lifted above) that he won’t last in Homicide because he doesn’t have a killer’s mind. Pembleton asks Bayliss to look out the window and what he sees and after Bayliss gives a literal description Pembleton tells him he sees the same things “ but with his name on them.” Windows to break into, cars he can jimmy open. Bayliss says that robbery and what does that have to do with murder? Pembleton just chuckles and tells him that’s the problem. Eventually the writers will explain what Frank means by that, but right now the implication is Tim is too innocent for the job.

Later that episode Gee hauls Pembleton aside and tries to get him to modify his opinion. By this point Frank has elevated to considering Tim ‘an okay detective’ but now he considers him a snail. Giardello fires back that he would give a case like this to a snail because he would drag himself all over the city looking for the killer. Typically Pembleton refuses to acknowledge the point even with his boss.

At the end of the episode Gee tells Bayliss he wants to take him off the Watson case for a while and come back to it later with fresh eyes. Bayliss doesn’t directly answer but mentions something that will never be forgotten, either to him or the viewer, how he can’t get over Adena’s body in the rain and how small and helpless it looked. In the Pilot he talked about how important homicide was to him and it was made light of. This time he makes it very clear that if he can’t cut it in the unit, he’s not going to transfer he’s going to quit being a cop. When Howard said “we work for God” she was clearly joking. Bayliss means it. This comes to the core of what will be his great strength and great weakness as murder police: he cares too much.

It's telling that the episode spend the majority of its time balancing the darkness of these two cases with low comedy, in what is already becoming Homicide sweet’s spot. Felton and Howard have arrested Melia Zorn who had her neighbor Lawrence Hepner killed because of an ongoing dispute as to whether Spiro Agnew’s head should be enshrined in the capital in his role as vice president. (Agnew, as the casual viewer is probably unaware of, was governor of Maryland before he was Vice President.) Naturally this leads to a similar debate between Howard and Felton about this fact in which they relate the sordid history of Spiro Agnew and by the end of the discussion Felton understand why Zorn wanted her neighbor killed. (As we shall see Munch has the greatest clarity on the situation.)

The investigation leads them to a hit man who is clearly a sociopath and remarkably cheerful. In keeping with the series, this leads us to a link back to an earlier episode – the shooting of Dollie Withers by her aunt Calpurnia. It is here the case becomes a model of both farce and stupidity. We meet Calpurnia’s latest husband (“I was her nephew first” he tells Howard and Felton straight-faced) who tells them how terrified he is of his aunt because ‘she is untouchable’. And naturally the old woman has an album in her houses with the death certificates and insurance policies of all her victims proudly displayed.

When Howard and Felton bring the old woman in and invite Meldrick to close his case it becomes utterly hysterical as Aunt Calpurnia tries to be a helpless old woman, flirt with Lewis, and is so utterly clueless in her behavior that you wonder of the intelligence of everyone else around here that let this happen. Meanwhile the detectives methodically close unsolved cases with the turn of pages in their albums. We hear no more of Calpurnia after this episode ends but you almost wish there was a trial just to see more of her. Particularly after she asks for a fried chicken sandwich before she goes to lockup.

There’s another mix of comedy, romance and tragedy in a subplot as Bolander goes to his apartment to prepare for his long-awaited date with Carolyn Blythe. In hindsight while the series was clearly trying to be an ensemble for its first two seasons at least, the writers were clearly trying to use Beatty’s stature as much as possible and gave him more screen time then other detective. I honestly have no problem with this: Bolander was one of my favorite characters and I wished the show had used him more. And the storyline that he is involved is one of the purest the show would do.

We see Bolander in the third-rate apartment he moved to after his divorce and the racket of his next door neighbor Lorenzo. Lorenzo steals his beer and Bolander walks in after it to find a cheerful man who can’t stop talking about how much he loves wood. The major discussion is about the coffin he built but the seller backed out and the two men discuss the failures of their past relationships and the coffin’s proximity. In hindsight it’s inevitable how Lorenzo’s story will end but it doesn’t make any less sad.

Bolander goes on his long awaited date with Blythe and they connect But Stan admits his cynicism at how he looks around and sees murder suspects everywhere. Frank essentially told us the same thing earlier this episode but where Frank seems to be bragging to Tim, Stan feels in a state of despair. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be happy again and he clearly wants to connect with Blythe. Then his beeper goes off and because the squad is short-handed, he has to go a crime scene.

No one – not even Munch – knows that this is where Stan lives and oddly enough he doesn’t seem shocked to see Lorenzo in the coffin he built. Compared to Munch who mocks it Stan is philosophical about it saying: “he died of a broken heart.” Before he goes home he tells Munch that he has written in his will that his cremated remains are to be put in a shotgun and fired into the air. He has no intention of ending up in a box. And while he tries to shrug it off that night he ends up at Blythe’s doorstep.

Lorenzo, I should mention, is played by that extraordinary character actor Luis Guzman, an actor who worked constantly for much of his life because he had this gift of looking like he could be playing anyone from thirty to fifty and you’d believe it. (His contemporaries Titus Welliver and until recently the late Lance Reddick had that same gift.) Guzman is so cheerful as Lorenzo and so soulful in his remarks that his death takes on the note of tragedy when it happens, even though it’s the rare peaceful death that we almost never see on the show.

Guzman is one of two extraordinary actors who we see relatively early in their careers during this episode. The other is Edie Falco, who plays Eva Thormann, Chris’s wife. At this point Falco was, if anything even earlier in her career than Guzman was: in 1993 she was very gradually breaking into television and in fact her work in Homicide this season was one of her biggest roles to date. There is not much sign in this appearance of the woman who has been one of the most awarded actresses in television during my lifetime and it’s not like Eva is there for much. But every so often you do get a hint of the kind of steely resolve that she will become famous for in The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie.

That moment comes near the end of the episode when she and Steve are by her husband’s bedside and she is a mess. “I could have been a scientist or a world traveler,” she says bitterly. “I don’t deserve to be here right now.” She is coming from a more sympathetic place than either Carmela Soprano or Jackie Peyton ever will, but the same dissatisfaction with one’s lot in life is there.

And in what is becoming even now a pattern the investigation spends as much time spinning its wheels as it does towards moving forward. When Lewis and Crosetti receive an anonymous call, it seems to be a sign from God that they will find the man who shot Thormann, left him bedridden and permanently blind. Instead it will turn out that the man they find is Charlie Flavin, who says he knows who shot Thormann but seems more interested in telling Steve about the headaches he suffers from. It turns out to be another blind alley.

But Yoshimura, who will eventually become one of the great writers in the show’s history, is not interested in that. He leaves us with Steve sitting over the bed of his amigo, listening to jazz hoping that his friend isn’t going to have to hear this music in heaven.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD:

Future Inmates: I think now is as good a time as any to start mentioning the number of series regulars for Fontana’s next show OZ, which as I’ve written in other articles, is where the revolution really began.

No less than five future cast members appear here: Falco, of course, will later be cast as Diane Wittelsey and Lee Tergesen will end up becoming Tobias Beecher. Sean Whitesell will appear in the first season as the unassuming cannibal Donald Groves and Luis Guzman will show up in Season 2 as ‘El Cid’ Hernandez, the head of the Latinos in Em City. Paul Schulze has a role as a hit man and will later play one of the CO’s.

I should mention Schulze has, to this point, starred in every series Falco has had a lead role in and in all of them ends up abetting her worst impulses. In the case of OZ, he is the member of a sort team who ends up raiding the prison after a riot and he loses his gun – which Wittelsey will later use to kill an inmate in cold blood.

Detective Munch: When Felton and Howard are arguing about Agnew, he mentions that Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton “and attempted to build his own country’. Felton says Burr is in the capital. When Howard says they should take Burr’s out, Munch puts the nails in the coffin: “Nixon has his own library.” (Munch leaves Quayle out of the discussion, which is interesting, given what we will learn of his own politics.)