Homicide Rewatch: Three Men & Adena

 

Written by Tom Fontana

Directed by Martin Campbell

 

I think one of the  key reasons that television officially entered its Golden Age not long after Homicide debuted is, paradoxically, one of the reasons that some of the most devoted admirers had such frustration with the series they committed years too. No one denies that shows like The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Mad Men are among the greatest series of all time but they will end up on lists of the most polarizing series as well online.

And that’s not merely because of the final episode but because throughout their runs the writers refused, over and over, to bring resolution to so many of the stories that took place during their runs. This frustrated even the people who worked on these shows; David Chase’s colleagues on The Sopranos hated how he left storylines dangling with no resolution well before the ending and people are still pissed as to what happened to Kara Thrace even before the series finale.

I won’t pretend to be any different in nearly thirty years of watching TV: I was never happy with how Chris Carter never chose to give a real answer as to what happened to Samantha Mulder, I ran out of patience with David Chase well before ‘Made in America’ and I’m still pissed at Robert and Michelle King with how they ended The Good Wife nearly a decade later. But I’ve always had more patience with how shows over the last quarter of a century tend to leave stories open ended and that endings are frequently ambiguous. And I have to say watching Homicide has to have prepared me for that quite a bit.

Consider the rules of the police procedural. Whenever a heinous crime is committed, the killer is identified, charged and arrested by the end of the episode. Law and Order never deviated from that formula, nor did any of its counterparts nor did such shows as the CSI franchise. There would be villains who would repeatedly get away with murder over and over but they would be brought to justice by the end of the season in many cases (as with the Miniature Killer on CSI) or perhaps the closer one got to the end of the run of the show (3TK on Castle is the most obvious recent example). Other shows like Bones or NCIS have basically stuck to this formula during their long runs.

Nor should I add has this fundamentally changed even among the best series of Peak TV, even among the creators of this series. When David Simon moved onto The Wire a decade later he changed many things about how we viewed the mystery but the one thing he didn’t make ambiguous was who the killers were. The viewer could grief over the death of Wallace or Stringer Bell but because of their deaths not because there was any ambiguity about who killed them. They might never be brought to justice but there was no mystery as to the killer.

Nor does any other show deal with this kind of ambiguity: it didn’t matter if the protagonist was Dexter Morgan or Raylan Givens who killed people without due process; the viewer knew they were guilty and that brought us closure. Those of us who are disappointed by each season of True Detective are disappointed because we seemed to be promised a supernatural solution and the killer turned out to be all too human. Television has evolved brilliantly in many ways and it can be ambiguous as to how justice is carried out but we never doubt that the killer deserves what they get.

It is for that reason that Homicide may be the most radical procedural in the history of television and may also explain why it was never a ratings grabber during its original run. At least once, usually multiple times over the course of a season, Homicide would have cases with no closure. Sometimes the viewer would know for certain who didn’t but the killer would never be arrested or see the inside of the courtroom. Sometimes we never learned who the killer was at all. And perhaps most maddening of all there would be times when it seemed like we knew who the guilty party was but the writers never tipped their hand to imply one way or the other that our suspicions were correct.

Never was this illustrated more brilliantly in an episode that is considered by many  the quintessential Homicide Three Men & Adena. In it the Adena Watson investigation ends but unlike any I’ve ever seen any TV show do before and I don’t think I’ve seen since. (If a reader can tell me of one such occasion, I welcome enlightenment.)

Ever since the investigation began we’ve been hearing the word ‘Araber’ over and over. The viewer of contemporary or even 1990s TV would no doubt have no idea what it is and it’s defined during this episode. It’s a man who goes with a horse with produce going from street to street in Baltimore, plying his wares. They’re considered little more than vagrants but they are also a proud Baltimore tradition. It’s clear given what we’ve heard that they are also viewed as trouble.

Bayliss has kept coming back to the idea that the Araber is responsible for Adena’s murder and Pembleton has been no less adamant that this has been a dead end. Even as the two of them ready themselves to go into the interrogation room Pembleton is still not fully convinced of his guilt. Bayliss is absolutely certain that he raped and butchered Adena. It is only at the end of the teaser that we finally see this man and learn his name: Risley Tucker. We also understand why Pembleton has held that he is harmless: Tucker is wearing a ragged coat, is clearly in his sixties and unkempt and seems to be being dragged by Felton to the box.

The late Moses Gunn takes an interesting approach to the Araber that anyone who watches crime dramas would be unnerved by. For the majority of his time onscreen Tucker has a dead look in his eyes. Not like a sociopath or a monster but very close to an old man who is tired of being harassed. By the time of this episode, this would be a believable perception. As Giardello tells us this is the third time he’s been brought in for questioning and he’s been interviewed on ten occasions altogether. The department is getting worried about the possibility of a civil suit. This is going to be the last bite Bayliss gets at the man he clearly believes killed Adena Watson.

Pembleton makes it clear what the rules of engagement are, and for an audience who wasn’t aware of them he is very clear. They have twelve hours to get a confession. If they stray one moment over that the court will throw it out. Advocates for the justice system can argue how this has played out in reality and there is evidence that the Baltimore PD would be less than loyal to it in real life. But for television in the 1990s this was revelatory. It was one thing not to obtain a confession just by this kind of verbal attack, but to be told there was so far you could go and no further was something that was unheard of (and I’m pretty sure later shows like The Shield and Law  & Order: SVU basically threw out the window in the following decade)

Almost the entire episode, saving for the teaser, a few minutes at the end and the rare scene of the remaining detectives seeing how well its not going, is set in ‘the box’. For all intents and purposes this episode could be staged as a play and very little of its drama would be lost. The title accurately sums the episode up: we spend it with Bayliss, Pembleton and Tucker – and Adena is clearly hanging over the episode to the point you could swear she was.

In a contrast to many of the interrogations that would follow Pembleton spends the majority of it as ‘the good cop’. He is polite to Tucker, asking about his background, the history of the Araber, initially maneuvering the questions away with the murder back towards Tucker. It’s clear that is a tactical maneuver in the second half of the episode but fans who are used to the aggressive questioning of ‘the almighty Pembleton’  might look at this episode and be surprised at how studious - to the point of unctuousness Frank is for most of the episode, even going so far as to bring all of them their food.

It's not shocking, given how he’s talked about him to this point that Bayliss is the aggressor, interrupting for information, insisting that Tucker is lying, pointing out the contradictions in his story, demanding he answer for his actions. Neither detective crosses any lines in this interrogation though it is worth noting that Bayliss comes very close more than once to crossing the boundaries of violence. It’s clear that Bayliss is letting out weeks of frustration against the Araber – really everything that has gone wrong with the investigation since it started – out on the suspect and there are times that he sounds very close to desperate in the early stages, far more than Pembleton who maintains his calm throughout.

At the halfway point of the episode with time running out Pembleton tries to use all of the goodwill he thinks he’s amassed with Tucker. Bayliss is out of the room and he tries to be polite to him. He tries to show that he is Tucker’s friend, that he will hear him out. Here Pembleton tries to be father confessor, trying to get Tucker to repent of his sins. (We don’t know anything about Pembleton’s religious beliefs yet but there’s a possibility Fontana may be laying the seeds of the idea here.) He mirrors Bayliss’s approach by sitting near Tucker, but where Bayliss clearly did it as aggression Pembleton tries to be an ally. It almost like it will work: for the briefest of moments Tucker seems about to reveal something.

And then the mask goes back up. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about the episode is that during its entirety Tucker’s actions can be read with total ambiguity. Tucker keeps saying two lines over and over: “I didn’t kill her” and more often “I don’t remember.”  No matter how many times Bayliss or Pembleton point out the contradictions in his story he will invariably go back to one line or the other. There’s no sense of guile in his answers, much of the time it is in monotone and though he does express his emotions near the end of the interrogation he never says anything that could be construed one way or the other as an admission about anything. The viewer could just as easily read it as a man tired of being harassed by the police or that of a pure sociopath who will not reveal his crimes to these detectives.

In the final act of the episode Tucker does lash out but it’s very clear it is out of pure frustration rather than anything like taunting. Regardless of how you view Tucker’s guilt he’s clearly just as infuriated by the questioning of the detectives and he takes his venom out on both of them. And he’s clearly got a good read on both Pembleton and Bayliss based on what we know of them so far. He has picked up Pembleton’s arrogance and how he looks down on people like him, maybe not so much of his education but how he looks down criminals in a majority African-American city. And he can tell by now how desperate Bayliss is to prove himself based on how many times he’s been brought in. He has heard almost all of this before multiple times and when he calls Bayliss an ‘amateur’  it may not be so much bait as how Bayliss himself feels about handling the case.

The interrogation ends with neither a bang or a whimper but a simple clock running out. Regardless of how he, or indeed the viewer feels, the Watson investigation is over. Bayliss has to go back into the rotation after this and he has to move on from his first case. He does the former – he has to – but when he is packing up the evidence to be sent into storage, he takes out a picture of Adena Watson and puts it on his desk. This is symbolic in more ways than one. Every time the show will cut to Bayliss’s desk from now until the end of the series, Adena’s picture is there even if the camera doesn’t dwell on it. There will be multiple occasions during the series run where Bayliss will try to rid himself of the ghost of Adena, some times more bluntly then others, but neither he nor the show will ever let him forget it.

And the show never gives us a hint one way or another whether Tucker actually did kill Adena. The exchange between Pembleton and Bayliss at the end of the episode when the case is done is very critical in that sense. Pembleton has come in to offer words of encouragement and he tells Bayliss that he was right all along. Pembleton comes away from the interrogation certain that Tucker killed Adena. Bayliss, however, tells Frank he’s not sure anymore. And throughout the series Homicide shows Bayliss on either side of it. He will never be able to get right with what happened: it will haunt his dreams.

And critically Fontana gives us no picture one way or another at the end of the interrogation. You come away from it convinced of many things about the Araber – that he is a drunk, a pedophile and that he harbored horrible thoughts about Adena Watson that he himself may never come to terms with. But he himself never gives anything way about killing her. The evidence that Bayliss has painstakingly spent weeks gathering is all circumstantial and there is nothing can tie Tucker to Watson’s death definitively. They needed him to confess and he gave nothing away.

This is why Homicide was groundbreaking. No one was going to throw a man in jail for murder based on a gut feeling or the ‘enhanced interrogations’ that we would later see take place on NYPD Blue and other crime dramas. As we are told early on  the holy trinity is ‘witness, evidence and a confession’. There are no witnesses in the Watson killing, the evidence is entirely circumstantial and the suspect never comes close to breaking. So whether Bayliss likes it or not, Risley Tucker gets to walk out of the squad a free man.

Even the final shot of Tucker changing channels on the squad TV is subject to interpretation. Those who believe in Tucker’s guilt might think he is a cold-blooded sociopath who was left unaffected by the episode and wants to use the unit’s TV to entertain himself before he walks away from murder scot-free. Or you could argue that Tucker has just been through a horrible stressful experience and wants to show some free will by changing the channel on the TV for a few minutes before he goes home and can put this horrible nightmare behind him once and for all. The detectives have one point of view; the viewer has their own and the writer has no intention of telling us which is more valid. Perhaps that more than any other reason is why this is the ‘quintessential Homicide’.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

In a fan survey by Court TV, this episode was ranked Number 2 all time.

Tom Fontana won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama in 1993 for this episode. Though the show would receive three more nominations in this category, Three Men and Adena was the only time it won.

Imdb.com ranks this episode as the second highest ranked in Homicide’s entire history.

Ned Beatty does not appear in this episode.

 

Moses Gunn was a character actor who had been working in film and television since 1964, starring in such iconic movies as The Great White Hope and Shaft. He appeared in such iconic series as Roots and The Jeffersons and played the role of Moses Gage on Father Murphy for two seasons. He was in poor health at the time of the filming of this episode and it would mark his final role as an actor. He died on December 16, 1993, little more than ten months after this episode aired.