Homicide Rewatch: A Many Splendored Thing

 

Written by Noel Behn; story by Tom Fontana

Directed by John McNaughton

 

No one needs to be told what the title of the episode is referring to; the episode refers to love in almost every conceivable version the viewer could imagine. In a twisted way you could this is Homicide’s version of Love, Actually only Fontana and Behn go out of their way to show just how horribly this love can put you in. I suspect that’s why the opening of the episode shows Bolander and Munch investigating a double suicide in which an old married couple, rather than live without each other, kill themselves as the sun goes up. Bolander, in one of the great jokes of the episode, is almost bouncing in a way we’ve never seen him before, and Munch is grieving over his breakup with Felicia.

This of course hysterical because it’s a reversal of everything the viewer has come to expect of Beatty and Munch’s wonderful act over the past twelve episodes: Munch is obnoxiously cheerful; Bolander always dour. And now here’s Stanley talking about the beauties of nature, offering consolation to ‘John’ (“since when did you know I even have a first name?” Munch says) and speaking in sympathy and warmth of the old couple with almost awe.  The punch line is hysterical.

That day Bolander tells Howard about his relationship with Linda and that he wants to double date with her and Danvers to take the pressure off. He seems ridiculously happy and Munch just can’t live with it. “The only thing that gets me through each day is knowing Stan’s more miserable then I am” he grouses to Giardello at one point before telling his boss to ‘order’ Stan to be unhappy again. No doubt to get his detective off his back, Gee goes to have a conversation with Stan.

The conversation between Bolander and Giardello is wonderful: we’re so used to seeing Giardello as superior to all around him that this is the first time he’s talked to Stan as an equal. And because they are almost exactly the same age Stan feels free to confide in him in a way he wouldn’t with anyone else – and similarly call Al out on his own issues.

This is the first time we’ve heard any real discussion of Al’s family life – and the fact he’s a widower.  Perhaps with the knowledge of his broken marriage Stan calls Al out on his own attitude. He points out that his wife has been dead for seven years and Gee is still in mourning. For the last five years he ‘goes out’ with the same two women on dates that are basically routines and there’s no sign there’s any real drive for romance in it.  And Bolander says something very telling: “At my age, what else am I gonna be but a long shot?” When he tells Al that he’s happier then he ever remembers being it clearly hits Gee between the eyes. The two of them go back to an earlier age and there’s none of the machismo or sexism: you’re almost reminded of two much younger who have fallen in love for the first time.

Munch, of course, can’t take this: somehow he finds out where the double date is happening and he shows up. Ostensibly it’s because he needs Stan to sign off on the report, but we all know why he’s really there: Munch is the Misanthropic, spreading dismay and unhappiness wherever he goes. When the episode cuts back to him he’s closed the restaurant down and for all intents and purposes destroyed Danvers and Howard’s budding relationship. (Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, of course but when Season 3 begins the relationship is in the past tense for both of them.) Howard wanders off more depressed than we’ve ever seen him, Danvers’ is clearly hostile and Stan intends to take it out on him the next day. Only Linda seems cheerful after all of this.

In one of the more enjoyable scenes in the entire series the three of them go to Fort McHenry Munch tries to apologize and Linda is as cheerful as ever. She clearly has John’s number; she knows sympathy is wasted on him so leaving him speechless is the worst form of punishment. Munch respects this even though he remains cynical when Linda tells him the story of how her great-grandparents met during World War I and Munch tries to say nothing surprises him.

And then fireworks erupt and Bolander emerges. For the first time in the series (and one of the few times in its entire run) Munch is genuinely surprised by something in a good way. And in his twisted way, he gives Stan and Linda his blessing. “What she sees in you I’ll never know, but you’re happiness is one of those great mysteries. Next to the location of the Lost Tribes of Israel and the true meaning of the lyrics of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’. The fact that Bolander and Linda are never seen together again (due to outside circumstances involving Juliana Margulies which I discussed in the previous entry) can’t rob us of the joy of the moment.

Of course we saw in the opening where even the best love stories end up and the two killing at the center show how much in can hurt you. The central story puts Bayliss and Pembleton at the center with Tim being the lead investigator for the first time since the Adina Watson arc ended. The murder of Angela Frandina is just as critical to Bayliss, not just as a detective but for understanding so much of his character in the years to come.

The victim has been strangled and her body was discovered by her neighbor. We learn that she was somewhat promiscuous but that’s just the start of the journey Bayliss and Pembleton make. We start at the store she works at: the Leather Chain and Tanya the manager. Tanya tells the detectives that she wouldn’t say they were friends: “We shared similar fantasies.” That may be an implication that the two went on similar sexual pilgrimages but the writers leave that as a possibility.

The store is a 1990s version of the kind of sex shops that are practically mainstream today. Back in the 1990s they were still very much on the fringe and its clear Bayliss views them with something close to contempt. Pembleton keeps an open mind and almost seems to enjoy the possibility of Mary wearing some of the clothes. Then we learn that Angela had another job (“the economy” Tanya explains) and that she worked doing 900 numbers.

The phone sex office is one of the quietly hysterical bits of the episode: for all intents and purposes this is much a cubicle job as the kind of things Dunder Mifflin does except everybody reading sex scripts and looks utterly bored doing so. Ed the owner speaks of it as if this is thriving diverse business and feels no shame about what he’s doing. (Hey maybe he was sex positive!) He tells them that you need a script for this or you get lost and then he shows them the script which is so vague that you could be hearing an NBA game.

Bayliss, however, continues to get on his high horse talking about ‘the sleaze business’ and how he wishes he could close it down. This is not the talk of someone who is interrogating a potential suspect. The victim had a note in her hand that said, “Ed Did It” and everyone knows in a red herring but they have to play it out. (“Don’t you just love it when the victim tells you who killed them?” Pembleton says to one of the uniforms when they find the note.) Ed is shook up by Angela’s murder, not just from a business standpoint but also because he clearly liked her. Bayliss is clearly starting to spiral.

And this comes to a head at Eve of Destruction, what is clearly an underground sex club that one of Angela’s boyfriends was hanging out at. Here Bayliss loses whatever self-control he had at the boyfriend and when he jokingly hits on him he practically slams against the wall. I remember watching this episode back in a rerun in the spring of 1997 and thinking to myself that Bayliss was either seriously repressed or was going through some kind of memories beyond what was going on. It’s unlikely the writers had a game plan for their characters this early but in later seasons my inklings would be proven correct.

In the car Bayliss is trying to find a way to understand how this kind of behavior is allowed and Pembleton is more blasé about it. He tells a story about how at the ruins of Pompeii they found a Latin term for fellatio (thus giving us a key to his character later on) and points out that perversion has all sorts of connotations, including interracial. But when Bayliss tries to tell him that he believes that sex and love should be interchangeable Frank has no use for it and argues about sexual fantasies when Bayliss denies it he says: “Well, you’re either a liar or a moron. If you’re a liar, there’s still hope for you but if you’re a moron I might as well take you out back and shoot you.”

Bayliss ties this in to Frank’s lack of respect for him, going back to the idea that because he doesn’t have a killer’s mind he won’t be a good detective. This time Frank elaborates in one of the more memorable speeches he gives:

We’re all guilty of something, whether its greed or cruelty or going sixty-five in a forty-five mile per hour zone. But you know what if you want to be the fair-haired choirboy you go ahead…I’m saying you Tim Bayliss have a darker side and you have to know. You gotta recognize it so it doesn’t sneak up on you. You’ve got to love them because your vices along with your virtues make you who are. Virtue isn’t virtue unless its paired with vice, so consequently your virtues mean nothing unless they’ve been tested. Tempted.”

It's one of the better philosophical speeches Pembleton gives on Homicide (and he gives a lot of them, believe me) and there’s an argument Bayliss’ arc on the show is about him trying to realize it. He doesn’t quite get there during the murder.

It’s revealed that Angela’s killer is Jeremy, the boyfriend of the neighbor. He describes how everything happened. By this point we know how aggressive sexually Angela is so it doesn’t come as a shock to learn that she died as a result of a sexual encounter. Jeremy came home, Angela was right there, and she clearly had an itch that needed scratching. She decided to have sex with her friend’s boyfriend (they’d been together since high school but that wasn’t an obstacle for her) she started flirting with him, getting aggressively sexually and essentially demanded he wrap the belt around her neck. (This is more likely involuntary manslaughter then anything else.) However Jeremy tries to put the blame on Angela for his killing her, saying she forced him “We never even really liked each other,” he says almost wondrously as the cuffs are put on him.

The b-plot of the story deals with another kind of love, albeit psychotic kind. In one of the weirder murders in the shows history Lewis and Crosetti investigating the killing of Max Zintak. A librarian clearly stunned tells them that a man took a pen, offered to buy and then when he was refused shot him. Meldrick thinks there has to be something more to this but Crosetti says “this is a murder that is exactly what it seems.”

The murderer is Mitchell Forman, who spent time in Spring Grove “a mentally unstable diagnostic health center,” Crosetti tells us. “A nutjob spent time in a loony bin,” Lewis says. “You got it,” Crosetti agrees. And when they enter his home they find it filled with pens in every possible arrangement practically filled floor to ceiling. Just another average Baltimore citizen. Forman shows up at the squad, first to turn himself in then to kill himself. Meldrick manages to talk him down promising to write his story – and showing him another pen.

It's the nature of how both Lewis and Bayliss operate that the denouement of the episode shows them handling it differently. Lewis can’t understand why a man would be obsessed enough to kill over a pen. We see a pen that he was given by his grandmother and that he says he loves. At the end of the episode when Felton needs a pen he gives him his and says: “Keep it.” Lewis can just move on.

Bayliss, as we know by now, can’t as easily. Tanya shows up to thank him and Bayliss asks an honest question: “How can you do this kind of thing if you know it might kill you?” And Tanya gives an honest answer: “When I give total control of myself to someone else, I’m free.” She gives him a leather jacket from her store as a gift and the episode ends with Bayliss walking down the darker streets of Baltimore, awkwardly trying to blend in. It may be a little on the nose that one of the last songs we hear is Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’ but its fitting. Of course Bayliss isn’t looking for love, he’s trying to understand his darker side of himself. That journey will take almost the entire series to figure out and it will lead to some of the best work of Kyle Secor.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

Hey, Isn’t That… This is a relatively early role for the late Adrienne Shelly, she was only twenty-seven and had barely begun her film career. Fontana would later use her in OZ in Season 2 when she played one of Leo Glynn’s Secretaries. Most of Shelly’s work was in the Independent film industry and she had written and directed such films as Sudden Manhattan, I’ll Take You There and other short films. She had just completed writing and directing Waitress in November of 2006 when she was murdered in what first seemed to be a staged suicide. Tragically her death came before what would be the film that would have put her on the map as a talent came out as the movie was both a critical and box-office success that later become a Tony Winning musical.

First appearance of: Herb Levenson’s Dr. Lausanne one of the ME’s who has a recurring role throughout the series. And yes he is Barry Levinson’s cousin.

Last appearance: Juliana Margulies as Linda who was never heard from again after this show ended. (Kidding)

The Max Zintak murder is, like many on the show, based on a real crime. In August of 1993 a twenty-three year shot and killed a man when he refused to sell him his pen in Baltimore’s Anne Arundel County.

Noel Behn was a novelist and writer who every year wrote a single episode for Homicide. His last script aired in Season seven a full six months after he died at the age of 70.

‘Detective Munch’  There are many to choose from among the ones I’ve already mention. A personal favorite comes after Felton tells Munch Kay is ‘no Judas’. “Say what you want about Judas but he had his good points. Without him, the whole show never would have started.” Which is…pretty much accurate from a religious standpoint.