Teleplay by D. Maria Legaspi; story by Tom
Fontana & Henry Bromell
Directed by Gwen Armer
At this point Homicide was officially at
the halfway point of its fourth season and viewers who watch it get a real
sense of how Fontana and his writers are going to play things from this point
on. For the first half of the season they've basically indulged the network
heads by mostly engaging in sensationalized, eyeball grabbing storylines that
while still uniformly excellent by any other show's standards seem like
something of a betrayal by those few who had watched the show the first three
seasons it was on the air.
Now for
the second half of Season 4 the show returns to much of what made the fans love
it in the first place. To be sure they're will still be somewhat sensational
episodes but all of them will be at a slower more measured pace as well as the
kind of experimenting and playfulness the fans have come to love. You get a
sense of it throughout this episode from start to finish but as always the
writers go out of the way to lace it with the darkness that Homicide has
always been known for.
Steve Crosetti's suicide laid bare a fundamental
question about Homicide: how well do the detectives in this unit really
know each other? What's fascinating for a show that at its core is a character
based drama is how close everyone in the unit keeps their cards close to the
vest. Munch is really the only detective who shares everything (to a fault, one
might say) and Kellerman's relative openness with Lewis may be due more to his
being the new guy than anything else.
Bayliss has an easier time getting suspects to reveal their greatest
truths in the box than he has learning Frank's secrets, and while he wears his
heart on his sleeve in the unit it will become clear in later seasons that he
has been keeping his greatest secrets in a vault even tighter than Frank's. The
title in this episode basically refers to Meldrick's revelation halfway through
the episode but only because he tells it to Kellerman. The rest of the unit is
as much a closed book as ever.
Munch spends most of the episode trying to
unearth Kay Howard's deep dark secret: who is it she's currently having an
affair with? Munch has always been first among sticking his nose where it
didn't belong, something that drove his old partner to distraction. Now that he
is partnered with Russert the first thing he wants to do is unearth the darker
truth about his sergeant. It should be
noted he is rebuked in this by Russert as well as Lewis who points out the obvious
that just because they work twelve hours together doesn't make them bosom
buddies. (This is something that Lewis
came to realize in the aftermath of Crosetti's suicide the clearest of anyone.)
But Munch puts a level of detective work we rarely see him put into solving a
murder and doesn't do much better a job in investigating: he is caught by
Howard going through her desk looking for a love letter.
Howard makes it clear something that none of the
other detectives have put into words: she believes in compartmentalizing her
life. "I want you to have a few bits or me and Gee another few bits and my
sister a few bits and so on," she tells him at the end of the episode.
Munch seems willing to accept this; at least he never openly pushes the issue
on her for the rest of her time on the series. (We never learn who the
'Antonion Banderas look-alike' is but it turns out someone in this unit does
know and has more discretion that John does.)
The more serious secret becomes clear in what
really seems for the first half of the episode to be the comic subplot. In the
teaser we see Kellerman and Lewis trying futilely to chase down a miniature
Hulk named Peter Wolsky who has apparently dropped a television on his father's
head and who we shall later learn murdered his mother as well. Kellerman and Lewis are beaten to a pulp
trying to use what would be excessive force on most suspects and who Wolsky
just brushes off. (The teaser ends with Kellerman gasping: "He got
away." Lewis: "Good.")
A similar attempt to bring him into custody at his father's pool
hall ends just as disastrously as Wolsky throws one of the patrons at Lewis and
they duck after him. By that point Kellerman's suggestion of tranquilizing him
"like the rhinos on Wild Kingdom" seems like a valid
suggestion. It's only on the third try they find a tearful and pathetic Wolsky
at his home, digging up his mother's body because he wants to bury him with his
daddy. Lewis is surprisingly gentle asking: "Please let us arrest you
now."
It's after Wolsky has been drugged and wrapped up
in a straitjacket that the secret of the episode comes out. Wolsky has been
diagnosed with schizophrenia and Kellerman is not sympathetic but Lewis is.
When Kellerman asks why Lewis says: "Last time I saw my brother Anthony he
was wearing a coat like this."
Kellerman seems a bit hurt that he's bared his
soul to Meldrick over the past four months of everything that matters (though
as we shall see next season, he didn't tell his darkest one either) but he
doesn't known Meldrick had a brother, much less a crazy one. It's then we get
why Lewis went out of his way not to tell anyone about Anthony. The story he
tells is very much that of paranoid schizophrenics over the years, only its
understandably worse because Anthony grew up decades before the diagnosis of anti-=psychotic
drugs. The family dealt with it for years and then one day Meldrick came home
and Anthony was sitting on the edge of their terrace apartment. (This was when
they were still living at Lafayette Towers.) He'd tried to stop him from
jumping so many times before but this time Meldrick didn't and Anthony broke
most of the bones in his body. The real secret of the episode, I'd argue, is
the reason Lewis hasn't visited his brother in eighteen years: it's not about
Anthony but himself. He is dealing with the guilt of the fact he wanted him to
die.
And typically with Homicide this episode
resolves nothing. At the end of the episode Meldrick goes to visit his brother
for the first time in eighteen years but he is told Anthony doesn't want to see
him. Lewis finds this funny but it's keeping with how this show works: just
because you're ready to confess your sins doesn't mean you'll get absolution.
The main story of this episode is one of the best
in Season 4. Yet again we're dealing with a Bayliss and Pembleton story but
there's no red ball behind this, no tragedy at the center. No this is no doubt
a case like so many of the others that we don't see them investigate on the
show, exactly like the majority of the murders in Baltimore then and now. The
victim is Gabriel Slayton, ironically nicknamed Angel. He is all of 22 and has
spent more time in jail and juvie then the free world, who the last time he
sees his girlfriend he beats her up and steals her car, who decides his partner
is ripping him off and gets shot. When
Bayliss and Pembleton discuss Gabriel Slayton's character and Pembleton tries
to argue that Bayliss still has redneck in him Bayliss is unusually cold:
"A five-time loser who beats up his girlfriend? I weep for him."
The thing is there is absolutely no evidence that
Angel Slayton deserves redemption, that he will be missed by anyone (except
maybe his mother). Homicide never argues that so many of the dead and
the criminal are innocent bystanders the way Simon and Fontana later will argue
in their later shows as being victims of the system. If so many of these dead
were not the worst of the worst, it would not be so hard for these detectives
to do their jobs. Pembleton's insistence that every life matters is important
because the moment we start doing this kind of moral arithmetic we are back in
the jungle. And that's why it makes so much of what happens in this case so
much more difficult.
Slayton was shot in the groin but didn't die
immediately. He was taken to a hospital and sewn back up by the man who shot
him M.C. ("Mr. Clean," he tells us when Pembleton asks what the
initials stand for.) He picks a fight with one of the orderly and checks
himself out AMA. The detectives find him in his girlfriend's car after all this
happens and spend the first half of the episode figuring everything out. When
they arrest the partner for shooting Slayton Bayliss thinks his job is over.
The problem is that Slayton's mother is a nurse and has decided to sue the
hospital because she believes the shot wouldn't have killed her son. Danvers
and the states' attorney need to know if there is any wrong-doing by the
hospital's part so their case doesn't end up falling apart.
Bayliss and Pembleton spend half of the episode
in a nearby emergency room talking to the doctor and orderly that treated
Slayton. Bayliss is particularly taken by the work of Dr. Kate Wystan, who they
see save a man's life as he calls her the worst kind of names.
Much of this is clearly done to make fun of ER
as we watch Bayliss talk about just how wonderful these doctors are while
we cut back and forth between the discussion with Wystan in the kind of
stylistic tricks that Homicide is known for. At the end of the
discussion Frank actually makes the reference out loud in what has to be a
knock at the way both shows were viewed at the time by audiences:
"You want glory? Go work at ER. Homicide's
fine by me."
But there's a larger point to Frank's complaining
then an in-joke. As he points out (and indeed if you've seen ER) you
know that his larger point is correct: half the time these doctors lose
patients and then they're just as depressed as the detectives are at the end of
the day. And just as ER is set at an understaffed urban trauma center
where gang violence plays out over and over with so many minorities coming in
over and over until they die, Homicide makes clear that it is just as
true in Baltimore whether you work in a hospital or the PD. (Indeed during the
early episodes of ER one storyline was of a liquor store owner who
Benton treated every week from being
shot in a hold up.)
We see the stress of this play out with both the
nurse Sherman and Dr. Wystan. Sherman is an African-American who grew up in the
same neighborhoods as the Angel Slayton's of the world. He has pulled him out
of the cycle, worked his way through college, nursing school and intends to
work his way through med school. But he is just as tired of African-Americans
killing other African-Americans as so many other people are and even more
exhausted by having to treat the people who do so. The fact is Slayton ignored
his orders to rest and then picked a fight with him before he checked himself
out AMA. We are meant to believe he is the villain until we learn the greater
truth.
And the truth is just as unsurprising. We learn
that Wystan's husband was held up and beaten by two armed robbers to the point
he may lose an eye just two weeks earlier.
This has understandably done something to Wystan's gallantry towards her
approach to medicine, which for all Tim's willingness to put her on a pedestal
is clearly flagging already. She works at an understaffed ER, keeps seeing the
same thing happen day in and day out, has no doubt seen the patient like
Slayton half a dozen times. She might not have actually killed Slayton but she
didn't do her best work. In the final scene in the Wystan house she seems to
indicate she just let events play out a certain way but even then it's hard to
see whether or not this means she's liable. Frank might want to arrest her
right there but Bayliss knows his job is to put this in front of Danvers and
have him make the call.
The final scene outside is one of the best I've
seen Homicide do in its entire run because it's one of the subtlest.
Bayliss knows what his job is but he knows the kind of man Slayton was. He puts
forth that even if Wystan doesn't go to jail she might very well lose her
license to practice medicine. If that
happens more people will die, some of them like Slayton but if we argue that
every life has meaning then that is a bad thing. All Frank says is: "The man is dead.
That's all I have to say." Bayliss gets out of the car, supposedly to do
his job. And then he stands outside it. "It's so quiet," he says to
Frank. Frank also gets outside the car…and then the episode ends with no clear
idea of what the detectives are going to do.
For all of the ambiguity of Homicide in so
much of its storytelling, it's rare for an episode to end so ambiguously and
that is the right call. Slayton's name is written in black in future episodes
but we never learn what Bayliss chose to do. Did he arrest her? Did he take
this back to the states attorney? Did they decide not to charge her? We never
find out and we don't need to know. Some things are best left a secret. I have
my interpretation and you have yours and the truth is left to how you want to
see it. It's the clearest sign that Homicide has moved away from the
idea of our detectives being the heroes they were portrayed in so clearly in
the first half of Season 4. The way forward will only become grayer from here
on.
NOTES FROM THE BOARD
When Meldrick goes to visit his brother in the
hospital, Anthony's brother is Dr. Battey. This is the first in a running gag
on Homicide involving Lewis and certain detectives and situations that have
appropriate names that border on puns.
'Detective Munch': We see Munch engage in the
first of his dialogues with Russert, officially his new partner. He talks about
his determination to live on 1500 calories a day, not go on the same benders as
he used to, and that he doesn't smoke. (Hmmm.) He says that he's going to live
to a hundred and live a simple, quiet life something Russert mocks. He then
speaks that Howard, like him, is living a life of 'quiet desperation'. Then he
sees her engage in a lip lock with her beau. "Let's get a double cheeseburger
with mayonnaise"
Hey, Isn't That…Mimi Kennedy, who plays Dr.
Wystan, began her career in TV when she starred in the Stockard Channing series
Just Friends in 1979 and then played Nan Gallagher in The Two of Us. She played
Doris Winger in the series Spencer and then played Ruth Sloan in the ABC series
Homefront set in WWII. She played Abby O'Neill in Dharma & Greg for all six
seasons before finally making it big as Marjorie, the head of AA in the Alison
Janney-Anna Faris comedy classic Mom. She can be seen as Dr. Mildred Newman in
Season 3 of Monster.
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