Homicide Rewatch: Nothing Personal

 

Written by Bonnie Mark ; story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura

Directed by Tim Van Patten

 

To make an appropriate play on words NBC demonstrated that they had something personal against Homicide when they aired this episode. This episode was the eighteenth episode aired of Season 3 but it was the ninth episode filmed. I won’t risk spoiling the rest of Season 3 but by the time this episode was broadcast, there were a lot of continuity problems. To use the one that will be the least consequential by this time The Waterfront had already opened and the new owners were having issues with the bartender.

I should mention by that point NBC was officially number one in the ratings and would remain their until the end of the decade. It’s hard to imagine that they would be this callous in the order of broadcast for, say, ER or Friends during this period, but they never missed a chance to throw continuity out the window when it came to Homicide. Other series, it should be mentioned, would have similar issues over this period: The X-Files and Chicago Hope were by far the biggest ones to suffer during this era. You wouldn’t be able to get away with it today.

Ironically the first time this happened in Season 3, it was also related to the late Steve Crosetti. And while this episode isn’t nearly as dark or depressing, there is a similar mood of melancholy surrounding every detective.

After weeks of delay Giardello has finally decided that the time has come to take Crosetti’s name down off the board and reassign his open cases. In doing so the series takes on a pattern that it will follow almost every season afterwards as members of the cast either quit or are forced to leave, though because the changes that place over the summer hiatus there’s less ceremony and less mourning.

In a way much of this episode deals with the occupational fallout of Crosetti’s death. We’ve seen all of the detectives, especially Meldrick, wrestling with it emotionally over the past few episodes and it will never entirely go away. Lewis tries to take up the burden of his partner one last time asking Gee to give him all of Crosetti’s open cases. Instead he hands them out based on everybody’s workload. The toughest, the murder of Erica Chilton, is handed to Kay Howard. For the first time since we’ve met her Howard chafes at the idea of being handed an assignment. “I don’t want this case. It’s a dog,” she tells Giardello. And she resents the idea that she’s been giving this case because she’s the only one with a hundred percent clearance rate. But Gee brooks no dissent and hands it to her.

And with that Crosetti’s cases – and then his name itself – is erased from the board. There’s something truly unsettling about that; a man devotes his life to the job and one day all of his accomplishments are gone, along with any evidence he was even there. It’s a sad necessity that Homicide knows it has to go through. Furthermore by delaying a new detective being assigned to the squad as a matter of bureaucracy (Russert delightfully refers to Granger and Bonfather as ‘the Doublemint Twins’) the bosses show that they are completely indifferent to the squad even now. We already know Bonfather thought Crosetti’s death reflected badly on the department; he doesn’t think his absence and the decline in the clearance rate as a result is enough to replace him, arguing his work didn’t matter much either.

The main casework of the episode shows Howard becoming obsessed with closing the Erica Chilton case. During this episode Howard looks and acts unpleasant for the first time on the series. She’ll argue that part of this is about being the only female detective on the squad at one point but Pembleton – again the only person who he considers an equal – knows that this is about ego. He tries to get her to admit as much on more than one occasion but Kay is too bull-headed to see it.

There’s an argument much of Lewis’s attitude towards Howard in later seasons may be due to Kay’s behavior here. This case is obviously more personal to Lewis than it is to Howard and her brush-off towards him at the start is very cold. He tries his best to tell her it’s not an easy case and when she says: “Yeah, and its six months cold,” is incredibly tone-deaf, especially considering what Meldrick has been wrestling with. He actually welcomes going to the bank to expect the horrors of bureaucracy rather than deal with Howard. It shows an immense amount of maturity on his part that later that same episode he goes to see Howard following the same kind of random paths of desperation and tries his best to tell her how tough a case he and Crosetti found it and how hard they worked on it. That Howard is, if anything, harsher to him in this encounter – essentially telling him to get lost for the second straight time – clearly affects him. His next action is to go to Giardello and see if he’s ever going to get another partner. (He won’t, at least in Season 3.) Meldrick’s behavior towards Bayliss involving Emma Zoole was pigheaded and irrational; the grudge he holds against Howard going forward is as least explainable if you consider the context.

There are more immediate problems. At the start of the episode Felton looks like he’s on the upswing after spiraling the last few episodes, at least to Howard. But every other detective can tell just how heavily he’s been drinking the last few weeks. “His eyes are red, his gills are green,” Munch points out and all of Howard’s colleagues are just as clear as to how shaky he’s been. Howard tries to excuse him giving his personal life. “Myself, I’d rather have backup I could depend but that’s just me,” Munch tells Howard. It’s not the first time Munch makes an astute observation of one of his fellow detective drenched in sarcasm but like everything else he says, it’s ignored.

Felton’s apparent recovery is based on the possibility that Beth is coming back home and is bringing his kids back. He spends much of the first act almost ebullient, seeming like a good detective, talking about the future with Howard and even Bolander. Then that night he picks up the phone and his son’s on the line. Zach sounds afraid and then Beth picks up and tells him she’s not coming back.

This episode is a tour de force for Daniel Baldwin as Felton, as he plays the entire range of emotions in a way he almost never got to do on Homicide. That’s on display during that conversation when we see him in the space of less than a minute express the full range of emotions. Then when its done, his shoulders slump and he determined leaves the squad room.

When we see him the next day he’s clearly slept in his clothes after a night of drinking. We see him pleading with Gaffney in missing persons and (in a rare display of sympathy and empathy) after being chewed out, Roger provides him with the number of a private investigator. (In the classic case of the broken clock, this will end up helping Beau in the end.) Then Beau walks into the squad room and realizes he’s misplaced what appears to be critical evidence in the Chilton murders. Howard lays into her partner, calling him a liability and seems to dismiss: “Why do you go across the street and have another drink?” she says scornfully.

For the rest of the episode we see Felton desperately trying to atone for his mistake and we see him completely break down. At the end of the episode he ends up on Russert’s doorstep, not for sex but because he needs a sympathetic ear. In a heartbreaking scene, he confides in Megan in how lost he is without his family and how he doesn’t know who he is without them. He descends into alcoholism and self-pity but he’s never entirely unsympathetic even then.

During this same period Gee is going through his own in what is a subtle but unsettling subplot. Homicide was ahead of the curve on television when it came to dealing with racial issues but almost all of them dealt with the job. This is one of the few times we see what it means on a personal level to the detective. Al agrees to go out with Russert to have lunch with one of her friends, Amanda. Amanda is also African-American but as any observer can see she’s lighter skinned than Al. The three of them have a pleasant lunch and the two seem to hit it off. However Amanda talks to Megan and says she’s not interested in seeing Al sociably.

The next day Al wants to ask Amanda out. The reasons are never made explicit but what matters is what Al thinks. He believes a light-skinned woman didn’t want to be seen with a darker-skinned black man.

Yaphet Kotto actually proposed this subplot to the writers based on his own personal experience. As he told TV Guide, “I was not able to attract a lighter-skinned black woman. They perceived me to be too ethnic-looking and not Caucasian looking enough.”

Every so often Tom Fontana and his writers were willing to take suggestions from the cast as to where to take the characters. This would frequently lead to some brilliant emotional moments. We can see in Kotto’s performance as Giardello tells Russert how a woman once said she wouldn’t date him because “My nose was too big. My lips were too thick.” No matter how much Russert tries to assuage him, he is convinces of the truth.

When he returns to the squad he is in a rage. And it’s here we get another view of the value of Ned Beatty to the cast. Because of his age Bolander has always had the ability to get both suspects and other detectives to confide in him in a way no other character could and he is also the only one who has the nerve to approach Giardello for lunch, retreat when he says know and then come back later that night with dinner and not take no for an answer.

And Al does confide in him in a way he rarely does to anybody. He lays himself bare in a truly powerful way: “Right now, I want to tell you. I hate myself. I don’t have any friends to speak of. All I have is this job, and it disgusts me.” This is not the man who cheerfully hustled Bayliss at hearts the previous episode. He tells Bolander of how much comfort his wife gave him, what it was like when she was dying of cancer and his theory as to why Crosetti killed himself – he thought he had turned completely inward and he felt he had nothing left to live for. It’s something that Bolander understands very deeply as well.

The one ‘light’ moment in the entire episode is that during this period the loan to pay for the Waterfront has been approved and Bayliss, Munch and Lewis are finally owners. But not even this is without its gloom. The detectives have to pay another $9000 in incidentals, they can’t open the cash register and they have to turn over all the alcohol in accordance to city regulations. At the start of the episode they were worried about food they could serve, now they have to buy more liquor. This is far from the end of their problems.

By the end of the episode Howard is convinced by Bolander that maybe the mark of a great detective is to move on. And Howard appears to do so when she picks up the phone at the end of the episode and moves the case aside. But she will not let Chilton go and she makes it clear she’s not going to. The case will end up getting closed but, in typical fashion, it will not be because of any one thing she did.

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

“Detective Munch” The conversation between her and Laureen when she tells them that they the bank always gives good news in person.

Laureen: “Surely you do the same in your job.

Munch: “We’re detectives.”

Laureen: “Yes.”

Munch:  “Homicide Detectives. We never give good news.”

Laureen: Never?”

Munch: “Well, hardly ever. Unless a wife is glad to hear her husband took a shotgun blast to the head.

Laureen: “Well, that’s not never.”

 

Future Inmate: Dean Winters makes the first of what will be three appearances in three consecutive seasons as Tom Marans, Erica Chilton’s former boyfriend who seems so broken up by Erica’s death and hands over the letters from her old boyfriend that Felton loses. This was actually the very first acting appearance Winters ever did and it led to Fontana eventually casting him in what was his breakout role as Ryan O’Reilly on OZ. After that he  would play Detective Cassidy on the first season of Law & Order: SVU (Munch’s first partner there!) and has been a presence on TV ever since. He would play Charley Dixon on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Denis Leary’s brother Johnny on Rescue Me, Liz Lemon’s hysterically lousy boyfriend Dennis on 30 ROCK and Keith Pembroke on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Last year he appeared as Father Morgan on Tom Fontana’s most recent project Monsieur Spade and PI Dick Frank on So Help Me Todd. And of course he’s known to many as Mayhem in commercials for All-State. (His brother Scott is an actor as well…but we’ll get to that.)

This was only the second episode of TV directed by Tim Van Patten, who had previous been an actor. He would slowly build up a reputation as one of the greatest directors in television history, working on Sex and The City, The Wire, and Deadwood. But by far his biggest breakthrough was working on The Sopranos for which he would direct twenty episode, among them such classic Long Term Parking and the series finale. He later directed eighteen episodes of Boardwalk Empire and three episodes of The Pacific. He also co-wrote the legendary Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos. He won two Emmys one for producing The Pacific, the other for directing Boardwalk Empire. He has also directed the pilot of Game of Thrones, which he won the Hugo for. He has been nominated for fifteen Emmys, won two Directors Guild Awards for television, two PGA awards and one WGA Award. He is on the short list for one of the greatest directors in television history. (And no, he never worked for Vince Gilligan.)

The Chilton case will end up being resolved in the fourth season. The scene where Howard tells off Felton will be reused in Season 5.