Homicide Rewatch: Fire (Part 2)

 

Written by Jack Behr; story by Henry Bromell & Tom Fontana

Directed by Nick Gomez

 

At the end of the episode with the killer having confessed and the names changed from red to black,  Bayliss goes on the roof to talk to Frank, who he can see has been brooding more than usual. He tries to cheer his partner up and Frank talks about his new child. Earlier Bayliss pointed out that when Frank first brought it up, he acted like it was the end of the world. In typical Pembleton fashion, he turned it on Bayliss saying whether he should have been more cheerful and passed out Cubans. This would have been out of character with what we know about Frank the last three seasons but it does seem off.

It's a measure of not only much Frank has changed but how impending fatherhood is having an effect that he opens up to his partner. "You want to know why I wasn't excited? Because I'm scared. Every day I see another reason not to bring a child into this world." The long-time viewer remembers that not long after they first met Frank said that Bayliss would never be a great detective because he doesn't have a killers mind and Frank did. To this point we never thought Frank regretted this decision and for the first time, he does. In this case in particular he points out that the world is horrible and 'there's no one to protect them. Not even their fathers." Bayliss knows better than to offer false comfort so he just says nothing and when Frank agrees to get a beer with him, he smiles and says fine.

Contrast with Mike Kellerman who spends much of the episode saying that he serves at the altar of fun. "I worship fun," he tells Frank at one point. One wonders if he remembers the talk he had with Anne – who we learn in this episode is his ex-wife – who told him that he was too set in his ways. "I run into burning buildings," he replies. 'After the fires are out," she says cheerfully. We also hear Kellerman say to her for the first time that he respects Bayliss and Pembleton in a way he can't say to their faces.

It's easy to understand why Frank is acting the way he does as the investigation into the second arson which has a second teenage body attached to it towards Kellerman in particular. He is the primary and all of the pressure is falling on him in a way it's not quite hitting Kellerman yet. Mike is just as determined to solve the case as Frank is and it is clear he is very good at his job. He pays a second visit to Zithead and he gets information that finally starts to point the investigation in the right direction. He is told that someone bought five gallons of gas, stole all the toilet paper (which we now know was the fuse) and that the individual was a chemist. This goes against the wall that Frank and Tim have been pounding their heads against.

The second victim is Bonnie Nash, and unlike Mark Landry, she was killed first and then the fire was set. Bonnie Nash was a wild girl who didn't run in anywhere near the same crowds as Landry. Giardello essentially forces Frank to make a public appearance on television to plead for help, which in the 1990s is pretty close to admitting the police have no leads. The difference is this time it works – sort of.

The informant who called Frank during the first episode gives him another tip, telling him the night of the first fire he saw a blue van driving away that had a bumper sticker. He speaks with a kind of pejorative attitude: "It was blue. A van. I don't read bumper stickers, they're moronic." This time the police do trace the call but it leads nowhere because their 'Good Samaritan' is a burglar.

Finally after being forced to 'start over', they go back to the scene of the first fire and get a lead from 'ghosts'. It is striking that in two episodes with two teenagers dead by fires it is the scene that follows that is the most haunting. Here we see the homeless and disenfranchised taking up territory in a building that has just been burned, playing checkers with bottle caps,  living in the wreckage of dead cars. They are led to Mrs. Rosen, a woman who Frank can tell in an instant is detached from reality. "I'll ask you some questions and then I'll be gone." Braugher shows his capacity for range in this scene. We've seen him fierce and pugnacious and almost always combative but in this voice he is purely gentle with no apparent guile in his voice. We don't recognize the man who was so combative with teenagers the previous day.

This eventually leads to Gavin Robb, a chemistry teacher who admits to taking Mrs. Rosen in a van ride once and had Bonnie Nash in his high school chemistry class the previous year. The interrogation scene is one that we have yet to see in Homicide to this point. We're used to the combative style of Frank and the somewhat kinder style of Bayliss, but now there's a literal third wheel in Kellerman and he actually takes Robb's side. Robb recognizes this as 'good cop, bad cop' when Pembleton's storms out but Kellerman manages to turn it on his head by saying that Frank was the good cop because he's good at his job. It's actually the first respectful thing he's said about him on the job – and critically he waits until Frank is gone from the room to say it.

He also lays out a fairly fundamental truth about the show: a good cop expects everybody to lie and he honestly doesn't think Robb is going to tell him that he set the fire and killed two people. "He's not going to ask you that. He wants you to lie because lying digs you in deeper."

Kellerman is saying in no uncertain terms exactly what has been happening in the box for three seasons. Then he tells Robb what the detectives know and what they don't know. He lays out the case while getting close by mentioning Robb's dog Atilla and saying there was a dog who died in the first fire. He lays bare the entire case the detectives have and then says Robb can go. As Robb gets up Kellerman says causally: "Why'd you kill the first dog?"

Robb absent-mindedly says: "I didn't know it was there." The truth then follows immediately. Robb didn't mean to kill Landry either. He only wanted to kill Nash. He thought that if he set a fire and Nash was the only victim, they'd think it was murder. He set the first fire to cover his actions in the second. But in keeping with how the show works Robb will not reveal why he killed her.

At the end of the episode Kellerman is trying to figure out why an ordinary chemistry teacher would go around at night, helping homeless people and setting fires to kill teenagers. Giardello tells him: "I don't need the why. Give me the who, the what, the how and the where. The why I can live without. You'll sleep better." This is very much the mission statement of Homicide though as we know Bayliss has always been obsessed with the why and given Frank's general malaise at the end of the episode, it's hard to imagine you sleep better regardless.

It's worth noting that all of the detectives are dealing with their own issues and we see them in this episode. Bayliss has been diagnosed with a degenerative disk in his back and it has made his life more difficult. (On several occasions he has to ask for Kellerman to help him to his feet.) Lewis is still wandering, partnerless. Howard is cramming for the sergeant's exam and its clear she's very nervous about it. The fact that Munch seems to be engaging in psychological warfare throughout the episode doesn't help.

At the end of the episode, while we don't yet know for sure if Howard has passed we know Munch hasn't because he didn't show up. Considering John's general lot in life I have no doubt every detail he tells Howard and Lewis about why he missed the exam is 100 percent true, Even though he has lost a lot of money as a result he takes his defeat in good humor and will later say he's happy for Kay. I think that is genuine because in my heart I don't think Munch wanted to become a sergeant. He has always questioned authority and the bosses and I think the only reason he did so in the first place was to prove he could. There's a part of me who thinks he would have been happy to fail even if he had taken it.

Both parts of Fire are well-done because they demonstrate Homicide playing by a different set of rules than most dramas. In shows like NYPD Blue (far more comparable to Homicide then Law & Order) when a new detective was introduced they were immediately thrown in the deep end and the viewer would follow them. The viewer has known since the moment we saw Reed Diamond in the opening credits for Season 4 that he would be joining the squad but instead Season 4 spends the first episode getting to know him, only having Russert making clear that Giardello will be getting a new detective by the start of the second episode (a promise that she has extracted in writing) and Giardello doesn't offer the job until Robb is arrested. Even then Kellerman doesn't immediately accept. We see Mike go to visit his father and for  the first time get a sense of his background. His father has blue-collar roots and it's clear he's not happy with his job but keeps it because he can't afford to quit. The exchange really explains much of Kellerman's behavior towards life and why he reconsiders. Diamond would later say that this scene was his favorite in the show because "You can see there' something he wants to get away from, something other than punching the clock."

So the episode ends with Kellerman knocking on Gee's door. But we also know Mike's not going to change completely. We've seen him spend much of the episode saying he's quitting smoking (even though he lit up with Frank earlier in the episode). Before he goes in, he bums a cigarette and a light. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

 

'Detective Munch': Despite all of the brilliant humor raised about his efforts to take the Sergeant exam and his attempts to psych out Kay, the highpoint of the episode comes when Bayliss first comes to talk about his back pain. He tells Tim that there was an experiment divided among three groups with back pain. One went to see doctors; one went to chiropractors and the third did nothing. "And you know what did the best? Nothing worked," Munch says cheerfully.

What makes this a highlight is (in what is now becoming a pattern now that Bolander's gone) Bayliss decides to take the piss out of Munch. He says that he's been doing nothing ever since and the pain's excruciating.

Munch: Well, doctors have a lobby. Chiropractors have a lobby. But who lobbies for nothing?

Bayliss: You, Munch. Every day in every way, you lobby for nothing.

With that mic drop Bayliss walks off.

 

The episode makes it seem like Mike has an amicable relationship with Annie his ex-wife. He will later give us reason to doubt this, most notably in 'The Hat'.

 

Get The DVD: If you see this episode on streaming you will miss two brilliant musical set pieces. The one that has more force is Matthew Sweet's 'I Alone' which we hear when Kellerman goes to visit his father at a liquor bottling plant and hear again when in the final minute when he goes to accept Gee's decision to become the newest detective at the squad. In both cases it speaks to what Kellerman has come from and what he hopes to move on to.

 

Hey, Isn't That…Frank John Hughes, who plays Zithead, has since become a ubiquitous character actor. His first job as a series regular was Charlie O'Bannon in Dick Wolf's Players, which ran for one season before cancellation. He then had the role of Agent Brooks in the Limited USA series Cover Me. His most famous role was as William Guarnere on Band of Brothers and he has worked consistently ever since. Video Game fans will know him for his voiceover work in Call of Duty 2 as Private Bloomfield. In the final season of The Sopranos he played Walden Belfiore and in the final two seasons of 24 he was a regular as Tim Woods. He was most recently seen as Frank Sinatra in the Paramount Plus limited series The Offer.