Homicide Rewatch: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

 

Written by James Yoshimura & Tom Fontana

Directed by Wayne Ewing

 

Perhaps one of the most striking things not only about this episode but about Homicide as a whole is how the majority of the regulars all smoked. In what is the final episode of Season 1, the only regular we haven’t seen drag on a cigarette is Lewis (and later on in the series we do see him smoke a couple of times) and Bolander has been seen smoking a cigar more than once. (Of course we never see Munch smoke at all, but given his views on controlled substances, that may not be the least of his vices.)

In this sense Homicide has a different kind of being a product of how the times were changing: this may very well be the last network series where so many of the regulars smoked and no one batted at an eye. Smoking, of course, can be seen on almost every cable and streaming drama during the 21^st century and that may be one of the subtler ways it broke the rules. By the end of the 1990s as perhaps the clearest sign of the times, smoking of any kind was unofficially kiboshed from network television, at least when it came to contemporary dramas. Smoking was allowed for non-regulars but as was almost always the case (The X-Files is the most obvious example) it was a sign of evil or at the very least, untrustworthiness. And this was particularly clear with all of the procedurals on network TV I’ve seen; no one in any CSI unit ever lit up at a crime scene the way we see Pembleton do so casually over and over and I can’t picture contemporary detectives on shows like Will Trent doing so, at least on camera. This may have been one of the least realistic things about so much network TV; it essentially was saying that no one in any show on the air was lighting up. Characters could and would have battles with the bottle and drug addiction in the future on network television and yet somehow they never had a pack of Marlboros anywhere on their person.

One of the funniest things about Smoke Gets in Your Eyes – arguably one of the most laugh out loud episodes in Homicide’s entire run -  is that as we watch Howard and Bayliss trying to quit smoking, they are viewed in the squad as the villains. Felton’s rant in the teaser is one of Daniel Baldwin’s greatest moments, starting with his stunned realization of it, comparing Howard to one of those ‘born-again vegetarians’, and making it very clear that he views her quitting smoking as a threat to his effectiveness on the job. Pembleton, in a rare reversal, is trying to accommodate Bayliss and perhaps the funniest scene comes when Bayliss basically forces his partner to light a cigarette so ‘he can live vicariously through it”.

The comic highlight of this particular storyline comes when Pembleton asks Howard why she quit. He tells her that sex or money are the only forces stronger than cigarettes. He gently asks her about her relationship with Danvers and thinks he forced her hand.

And then Howard goes into graphic details about her sex life with Danvers in terms that I’m kind of astonished NBC standards and practices let them get away with. When she refers to the frail Ed Danvers as “a stallion among ponies” Pembleton is baffled. Then Howard tells him in every apparent detail of just how active her and Danvers’s sex life is – “he’s constant…I’m walking around in all kinds of sweet pain…I’ve had to set ground rules. He can’t touch me in a restaurant or in a church.” The only funnier thing is seeing the brash Pembleton practically scamper away upon hearing this. Howard then tells him she didn’t quit smoking because of Danvers. Pembleton, relieved, asks if her everything she said about Danvers was a lie. “Yes.” Howard says. “Pause. “No.”  It’s rare to see Pembleton so incredibly out of sorts and when Howard tells him “I guess you’ll never know,” he’s actually speechless.

The murder that Felton and Howard are investigating is less prominent but eventually they end up staking out the suspect who Pembleton is looking for in another murder on the board. (He referred to ‘the Lilly murder’ in the last episode.) Felton more or less insists on not riding with Kay and Pembleton, who as we know doesn’t like Felton, is actually relieved. In one of their few moments of solidarity Pembleton and Felton bitch about their partners attitude about quitting smoking as particularly self-righteous. Both know that their partners have the right idea; Pembleton once quit for three months and Felton has been repeatedly trying to quit the habit with no success. But they also know the ugliness of the job keeps bringing them back to smoking over and over. Meanwhile Howard and Bayliss are in the next car, basically talking themselves back into smoking again. Bayliss gives in at the last moment. For the record both Howard and Bayliss will be able to quit their habits permanently, though Bayliss will admit later on that it took far more work than Howard. Felton smokes until his character leaves the series and Pembleton – well, I don’t want to give spoilers here.

But the very real humor in this episode is, in typical fashion, met with melancholy and darkness. We see it in the first half of the episode with Giardello who is  subdued and pensive. Later in the episode we learn that he’s hungover and in his monologue with Lewis on the roof, it’s clear he’s dealing with the repercussions of Scinta retiring. He remembers Scinta’s words two episodes ago; he knows of Bonfather’s discussion with Frank the previous episode, and he clearly got drunk the previous night in order to escape. When Bayliss offers to buy him a coke and he decides to go upstairs Bayliss jokes that he sounds like he’s playing chess with death. Giardello answers: “Who says I’m not?”

The scene that follows where Gee sees men in hazmat suits tearing apart the third floor of the building that was just qualified as being safe by an air reader is one of the more unsettling ones we’ve seen in the series so far. Giardello takes the opportunity to use his advantage over the bosses, which he will rarely gets demanding full concessions and protection for his detectives for their poisoning from asbestos. No one denies the health hazards his detectives face but its worth noting that the storyline is not referred to in this episode and there’s no indication he even tells his squad about it.

We will see Giardello go to the mat for his detectives over and over on Homicide and he will always do everything he can to protect them from the bosses when it comes to their investigation. However, in hindsight, I think Giardello is picking this particular fight for himself out of the malaise he’s been feeling about Scinta’s retirement. Usually he doesn’t directly pick fights with the bosses and while he uses the press over and over he rarely threatens to do so in their faces (Bonfather is correct on this assumption) This is a fight he knows he can win and he stages for that reason.

This is proven when Howard and Bayliss come to the squad and more or less demand that they put off a section of the squad for non-smokers. He listens to them openly and more or less tells them where they can put their request. (Bayliss, it’s worth noting, can read the writing on the wall well before Howard does.)  Apparently if the bosses are threatening the detectives health with inaction, it’s a call to arms. To stop his detectives from poisoning themselves even though it is a federal guideline, well, that’s not his job. I suspect this is part of him asserting his authority with those below him as well as above.

This is all very funny. The case that is the center of the episode really isn’t. Bolander and Munch are called in to look at the case of Percy Howell, a fourteen year old who died of a cerebral hemorrhage. As the doctor tells them he was attacked days earlier and apparently refused treatment. This case strikes the usually humorous Munch harder than normal; while there’s a lot of humor from Richard Belzer’s character (see Detective Munch below) he spends the investigation either subdued or in many cases angry.

And there’s a lot to be upset about. When Bolander and Munch inform the father, who is clearly a born-again Christian and almost certainly an anti-Semite, they are both struck by how little this man cares for his own son. Bolander is incredibly shocked at how cold the man is and Munch, for a change, doesn’t press him about his dating life or the end of his marriage. The case has him in a mood too.

This episode once again represents a showcase for Ned Beatty. A book I read on Homicide would argue that of all the detectives on Homicide Bolander was the only one you’d confide in. This is very true when a teenage girl clearly shy wants to talk about Percy and Munch decides to leave the room. With a gentleness we have not yet seen any other detective demonstrate he guides the girl to telling him what she knows about what happens to Percy. He is kind, almost fatherly in how he gets the information he needs. It’s not the same thing as the interrogation of a suspect but it is key to how Stanley works.

The interrogation of Evan Hess is one of the highlights of the entire first season. (See Detective Munch for my favorite bit.) It’s not just than Hess is clearly clueless during the process; it’s the use of the electrolyte-neutron-magnetic test scanner. (Or as its better known, the copy machine.) The scene that follows would be slapstick as Munch and Bolander announce just how dangerous this thing is and Felton makes it clear he doesn’t want to be in the building when that things on. They don’t push the envelope the way other detectives have been accused of; Hess doesn’t confess to anything but he makes it clear he knows who the killer is. Naturally when Munch says he can’t stay in the room because he doesn’t want to lower his sperm count, finally gets Hess to break.

But there’s a clear anger to Munch throughout the process that we rarely see. After giving his one real joke in the box, he gets really pissed at Hess for his denials and prevarications. It’s clear that the death of a fourteen year old has angered him as it would anyone else and that rage is justified. At least two or three times a season going forward (with the exception of the second) Homicide would probe the most heartbreaking deaths of all: those of children. But they go out of their way to make sure that while the loss of an innocent is very horrible, each life has its own impact.

Percy Howell is a different kind of death. This is a clearly a teenage boy who had no love in his home. He wanted acceptance and ended up wanting to be part of a gang that is clearly modeled on the gangstas’ lifestyle. But even though the Zeffs are white, the loneliness and pain is no less real among them than the African-American children we will frequently see as the victims. For all his bravado, Colin clearly means what he says that everybody has pain in common and that the beating he required was a sign of love. Bolander tells him that he killed him and then says to Munch: ‘Murder ain’t what it used to be.”

The thing is in a wry and painful scene that was originally meant to serve as the season finale, Bolander does get it. In what is essentially a monologue with a bartender he talks about the story of Elvis Presley and how our society fascination and devotion to celebrity does much to destroy them. He says our love does much to isolate them and points out to how Elvis’s fame led to him getting fat. He makes convincing arguments for Orson Welles, Brando and Elizabeth Taylor (the latter two were still alive in 1993) and you could make a similar argument for so many celebrities in the decade since. (Kirstie Alley might be the most obvious example when it comes to weight but I’m sure there are many others.) He doesn’t have to add the part about being a junkie, because as we all know, that seems to be part of it too.

But he ties it to the murder we’ve just seen. Percy Howell had no love in his life and in a weird way, the blow that ended up killing him may have been the greatest sign of affection he ever experienced. We’ll later hear on this show the idea that murders never make sense but Bolander comes as close to arguing that in the case of Percy, he can understand the need for so much of what happens. Many of the murders we will see on Homicide are because of the drug war and addiction is in many ways a reaction to a void that some of us can’t fill by any other means. (Munch basically said as much in the last episode and despite his attitude about the consequences of the drug war, he clearly was sincere.) And it’s something that Bolander himself gets more than any other character on the show: his marriage of twenty-three years has just collapsed and more than any other character on this show he is constantly trying to find love.

The final scene where Bolander sings Love Me Tender to himself, half drunk at a bar, is one of the more depressing season enders the show will do. NBC basically shifted the order of the episodes run so that the ending of Night of the Dead Living which has a more cheerful ending would be the last image of Season 1. We’ll see many endings with cliffhangers but there are few sadder ones then this one. Maybe that’s the real reason so much of this episode has to do with smoking. We all need something to fill an emptiness inside, and all things considered, a cigarette’s among the less dangerous ones.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

The scene with the copy machine would play out again as the opening teaser for the final season of The Wire, this time with Bunk Moreland being the one leading a suspect to confess to a murder. This is, for the record, one of the times I think Homicide did it better. On The Wire, it was meant as a motif for the entire season to follow. On Homicide, it was just a joke.

Detective Munch: The whole episode is full of them, starting with Munch’s joke about how country music led to a suicide and his wonderful theory about how William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont’s are responsible for marijuana being illegal, not just in America but around the world. (I wonder what he’d think about the movement to legalize it now.) But my favorite unquestioned moment comes in the interrogation room when Evan says he doesn’t know Percy:

“When you say you don’t know him, do you mean in the philosophical sense as in ‘no man can truly no each other’ or in the Biblical sense as in “Lot knew his wife?”

Hey, Isn’t That… The bartender, as you can probably tell without even having to see the credits, is John Waters, Baltimore’s other most famous directing alumnus next to Barry Levenson. At the time of the episode he was best known as the ‘infamous’ John Waters having directed Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester and Mondo Trasho. By contrast the films that his most recent three movies to that point – Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Serial Mom – were practically the kind of things that were designed for mass acceptance.

Dan Moran, who played Mr. Howell is a memorable looking character actor known for playing heavies. Oddly enough his most famous work was for Woody Allen in Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, and Sweet & Lowdown. He also had roles in the Todd Solondz classic Happiness and played the gravedigger in Campbell Scott’s version of Hamlet for television. He died in June of 2024.