Homicide Rewatch: Black and Blue

 

Written by James Yoshimura; story by Tom Fontana

Directed by Chris Menaul

 

This is a star-making episode. And I’m not just talking about the fact that two iconic television stars are present in what rank among the earliest screen appearances in their long careers. No this is the episode that officially catapults Andre Braugher into not only the standout performer in Homicide’s incredible ensemble but in the echelon of great actors in all of television that he would hold until his untimely death nearly thirty years later. And he does so in an episode that is just as searing today and must have had an impact that I can’t comprehend in 1994. (It also has a problematic aspect, which I will deal with.)

So much of what we see unfold in the shooting of C.C. Cox has repeatedly so frequently in the thirty years that have followed this episode. Indeed one of the great strengths of Black and Blue is that it never shies from showing just how the media firestorms that have played out are present in every single moment: news reports relating the details of police involved shootings, reporters hovering around the station and in full force when the killer is finally brought in. There is also the blue wall of silence being put up, the justifiable outrage when white cops try to in trying to find potential eyewitnesses in one of the run-down tenements of Baltimore, along with the certainty the police are negligent and a memorial being built the 22 year old man who was gunned down with candles around it. It doesn’t even shock us to learn that C.C  was a teenage father almost in passing.

No one is pretending that Cox is a model citizen; even an old woman who knew him won’t go that far. She knows that there are no saints in this city. But they are in agreement that he didn’t deserve to die like a dog in the street. You get the feeling that the brass are only making this much of an effort to find the killer because of activists who want justice and the only reason they’re going to this must trouble is because of the circumstances: with no cop willing to stand by the shooting, the coverup is far more obvious.

The striking thing in this episode is the war that is going on between Giardello and Pembleton. The title of this episode no doubt refers to Gee’s description of what happened when he came up as an officer, during the riots in Baltimore after King was killed in April of 1968. He makes it clear he had to choose what side he was on: was he a black man or a cop (blue). Giardello has very clear chosen the latter and he has done so ever since. But the fact remains he is a black man choosing to protect white cops for killing another black man. There’s no way not to feel uncomfortable at this.

Pembleton chose blue a long time ago as well but as we see for the first time in this episode when it comes to bringing killers to justice he is truly color blind. We see this in the opening moments where he treats his fellow police officers with the same contempt we will see him show so many other suspects. If anything he takes it more personally when they choose to lie to him. In the aftermath he says he was expecting “if nothing else, that cops would be better liars.” This is the first time we will see how relentlessly Pembleton will storm the battlements when it comes to getting justice for the victim and its one of the few times we see that the bosses are on his side but Gee is clearly adversarial.

This is Yaphet Kotto’s best performance to date on Homicide and there are so many rich moments to choose from. One highpoint comes when Pembleton demands cops come in for lie detectors and Al hits the roof. “These are fellow police officers!” he shouts, hitting his desk when Frank pushes for it. He has to accommodate when Granger agrees to go along with it but the moment Granger leaves he orders both Tim and Frank to get out of his office. And then he demands that Frank show the same respect to him “that you show the white bosses”. This is an incredibly low blow for Giardello and its not even close to his low point in the episode.

Pembleton is not made of stone, it’s worth noting. At the end of the first act Howard – the only other cop to this point he’d treat as an equal -  asks him if he really  thinks a cop killed Cox. He says that at this point his own grandmother’s a suspect and she’s been dead twelve years. His gut tells him a cop killed Cox, but he has no idea how to prove it.

And its because of this honesty that Howard returns it. We already know Tyron was her old mentor when she was a beat cop; she confides to Frank that they had a brief affair, even though Tyron is married with kids. Melissa Leo has relatively few scenes in this episode but in them we get to see a deeper side of her; something close to shame. She might have loved Tyron once but she also knows what a good liar he is; at the end of the second act she confronts him saying that when they were going on rendezvous he would have her wait in the car while he called his wife and told her how much he loved her. We’re already used to seeing Howard as the independent figure, so is unsettling for the viewer – and in hindsight, her -  that she was overcome by an authority figure and still can be carried by her feelings.

It's while this is going on that the scene that is one of the most wrenching – and in retrospect, problematic – in Homicide’s entire run airs. During the canvas of the neighborhood Bayliss manages to find someone who believes she knows what happened or at least someone who would. That someone is Lane Staley, a running buddy of C.C. Cox who has a pretty solid rap sheet. Pembleton and Howard think he might have seen what happened. That’s not what Gee thinks. For the first time in the show’s history we see Gee put his thumb very firmly on the scales of justice. He calls Frank in and tells him the story I mentioned above and that he chose his side. Now it is Frank’s turn to choose his. Frank knows exactly what Gee means and it’s clear it turns his stomach. In a sense that makes the following scene – nearly six minutes in length – nauseating and impossible to look away from.

Frank has started to form a camaraderie with Staley, trying to make it clear that they are bonded through race. He mentions whether C.C. and Lane were friends and Lane denies it. Tim then points out the fact of the two men’s connection beyond mere running buddies – Lane pulled him into the business, was godfather to his son. Lane acknowledges they were friends. Frank gets mad – to him this is Staley choosing a white cop over him. Pembleton then gets loud, demands Tim leave, actually unsettling Bayliss. Not long after he does he overturns a chair. Bayliss wants to go back in. Giardello holds him off.

Pembleton then relays what is no doubt an accurate version of his duties when he was coming up “I was a glorified meter maid!” and he’s clearly talking from a not-too distant past when white cops took them into a paddy wagon to get a confession ‘by any means necessary.”  He looks at Gee through the one-way mirror as he says that last one.

What follows is a tour-de-force not just for Braugher but for the then almost unknown Isaiah Washington, who plays Staley. Lane has been cocky and arrogant through most of this, now he starts to get upset as Frank berates him. At no time does Frank come close to hitting or even touching Lane, but that doesn’t make the scene that follows any less excruciating. Pembleton instead shames a confession out of Stailey. He says the moment he lured his friend into one of these deals “You put the bullet out there.” He shows him pictures of the dead Cox. “What was he looking at as the blood poured out of him?”  he essentially implies that Staley is responsible for Cox’s death because he put him into this life of crime and therefore he might as well have killed him.

The longer Frank goes the more guilty Staley feels until he says how sorry he is. Then Frank writes down a bogus confession and Staley signs it. “Put pen to paper,” he says. “You’ll feel better.”

This is a scene that has been repeating itself for decades in interrogation rooms across the country and may very well forever do so. I remember watching it for the first time when I was eighteen and being incredibly uncomfortable with it and I can’t imagine what viewers would think of it today. But putting that aside, this was an incredibly brave thing that Fontana and Yoshimura did in this episode. I’ve been watching cop shows for decades and while I’ve seen so many horrible scenes of police brutality and lieutenants looking the other way before and since, I still don’t think I’ve seen a scene where a man we’ve come to think as the hero elicits what both he and the audience knows is a false confession from an innocent man. Even when they beat confessions out of people on NYPD Blue or tortured suspects on 24 the ones being interrogated were guilty of something and the viewer could wash it off by saying that the greater good is being served.

In Black and Blue the viewer doesn’t get that relief. Yoshimura hedges his bets – just a little – by having Pembleton confront Giardello afterwards. But this doesn’t seem heavy-handed because of the intensity of Braugher’s work. He’s sweat-soaked coming out of the box and there’s not the least bit of arrogance when he talks to Gee.

“I did this for you. He didn’t shoot the Cox kid. But look at him. He’s proud he signed. I’m so damn proud of myself. That kid would have had a better chance in the back of the paddy wagon. With jackboots and clubs, he’d have gotten a fairer shake.”

Then he goes and erases Cox’s name and writes it in black with a completely blank expression. This was very far for the parameters of a cop show in 1994 and Fontana wasn’t willing to go that far. (I doubt any show would today.) Gee finally acknowledges what he knows to be true and confronts Staley in his cell. We learn what we thought was true; Staley gave in because he was a witness and a cop did shoot Cox. Stailey does nothing to let the cop – it was Tyron – off the hook. Cox knocked the gun out of Tyron’s hand to be sure but then Tyron pulled another gun and shot him in the back. “He didn’t say freeze, he didn’t say stop!”  Tyron was clearly high on adrenaline when he didn’t but he couldn’t find a gun on Cox to justify the shooting. So he used his authority to concoct the story. Tyron is hauled in to face a grand jury though whether he goes to jail or is back on the street after the fact is not Homicide’s concern.  The case is closed when they have a suspect in custody; justice is for another day.

If the episode had focused entirely on the Cox shooting it would have been too grim but fortunately Fontana and Yoshimura are smart enough to give us a lighter storyline. As you’d expect by this point in this series, it centers on Bolander and Munch. Munch is deliriously happy at the start of the episode: he and Felicia seem to be in their blissful moments. Bolander is grumpier than usual; by this point you get the feeling he’s heard this story before so many times. During the episode the two detectives find a fish in a bag in a stiff’s care. Munch wants to turn it in for evidence and seems annoyed when they won’t accept it: “It’s a witness,” he actually says.

He decides to take the fish home to put in Felicia’s tank of tropical fish as a surprise. Bolander, however, wants to have dinner and he basically goes to everyone in the squad before going to the diner alone. There he finally meets Linda and its clear he immediately falls in love with her.

Not that I can blame him, for the next thirty years everyone from George Clooney to Josh Charles to Jeffrey Dean Morgan would fall in love with Juliana Margulies. And in what is the first real role she ever had (Margulies was in fact offered a larger role on Homicide for reason I’ll explain in the notes) you basically see everything in Linda that we’ve been seeing in every character she plays. She’s charming, she’s charismatic, she’s funny. But what’s different about Linda is that she’s also carefree in a way that very few characters Margulies will play later on will be.

Linda is a waitress who works the kind of long shifts that every character she plays ever will and she’s been doing it for a while – she’s been a waitress for ten years and started when she was sixteen. Bolander is drawn to her because he’s a professional himself who has long shifts and grinding work, much like Linda does. And yet she seems so happy. It’s then Linda reveals that she’s an aspiring musician and violinist.

And that inspires the very reserved Stan to share something we’re pretty sure no one on the job knows – he played the cello. Linda tells him that he should probably consider it again.

In the final act Bolander goes to talk to Munch and their moods have completely reversed. Bolander is being warm and open and Munch is completely miserable. He actually thinks Stan is mocking him when he asks how he’s doing . Apparently the fish that Munch put into the tank  was a Jack Dempsey the kind of fish that kills every other fish without thinking. Felicia would have known this if she’d seen it but the impulsive Munch put it in to surprise her and it devoured four thousand dollars’ worth of fish. In keeping with the kind of man Munch is he calls Felicia a lunatic and himself the aggrieved party. This would be an unattractive quality in most characters; the fact that John is a hopeless  romantic despite this is actually one of his more endearing qualities.

He wants to hang out with Stan but it turns out Bolander has plans. Then we see something we haven’t seen before on the show: a guileless warm smile crossing Stan’s face. In the final scene he goes to the Peabody where he knows Linda is rehearsing with his cello, listens to her place and then the two of them engage in a duet.

The episode ends with a moment that will someday become quintessentially Homicide: a musical montage. It should be offsetting because it’s a duet for violin and cello but its actually perfectly fitting. Tyron is hauled into the squad by Pembleton and Bayliss with police surrounding the squad. He passes Howard and she looks melancholy. Munch goes by a pet store and looks at a fish tank. We see and hear Linda and Bolander playing – complete with the part of the cello that Stan can’t get. Then we cut back to the busy squad Pembleton erasing Cox’s name for good and all, while Gee looks on, detectives answering phones, Lewis throwing the football around to the other detectives as the cameras pulls back. The music stops just as someone answers the phone and says Homicide. And despite everything, you want to clap and say bravo. After all, that’s what you do when you witness a work of art.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

As May-December as the Bolander/Linda romance may appear, it’s actually based in reality. The detective Bolander is based on, Donald Worden, was in his late forties and would eventually woo and marry a much younger waitress. In fact Simon puts their wedding in the final chapter of his book.

Hey Isn’t That… At this point Juliana Margulies must rank as one of the greatest television actresses of all time, with ten Emmy nominations and three Emmys one of the few actresses in the history of the medium to win acting awards for two different dramas (ER & The Good Wife) She has received ten Emmy nominations and three Emmys and as of this writing has also been nominated twice more for the SAG Award for her work in The Morning Show. She’s also had roles on The Sopranos and was a lead on two separate cancelled too-soon series Canterbury’s Law in 2008 and Dietland in 2018.

Her appearance on Homicide was only her third acting role on television to that point in her career but considering the connection to one of the characters Fontana offered her a role on Homicide the following season. She’d already been cast in the pilot of ER and in the original version of that she was supposed to die. But the writers had a second thought and the rest is history.

Isaiah Washington wasn’t much older than Margulies when he was cast as Lane Staley and he didn’t have much more experience. He would quickly become a worker in Spike Lee’s films such as Clockers and Girl 6. He didn’t start to breakthrough in movies until 1998 when he starred in two critically acclaimed films Bulworth and Out of Sight. Even then he was still mostly starring in B-movies for the next few years, many of which went straight to video.

It would not be until he was cast as Preston Burke in Grey’s Anatomy that he achieved the stardom he deserved but a falling out with Shonda Rhimes over homophobic remarks got him fired in 2007. He spent a lot of time in the woods after that and it wasn’t until he was cast as Thelonious in The 100 that his career revived again. His last major role was Tyrell in the Starz series P-Valley.

“Detective Munch” Hard to pick a high point, among his highs and lows but my favorite moment comes when he sees Stan smile at the end of the episode. “You’re smiling like the Cheshire Cat. You’re smiling like that Jack Dempsey fish.” And in what his trademark attitude: “You don’t deserve to be this happy when I’m this miserable!” This will carry over into the next episode.