Homicide Rewatch: Blood Ties (Part 1)

 

Written by Anya Epstein ; story by Tom Fontana & Julie Martin

Directed by Alan Taylor

 

How does Homicide choose to begin its sixth season? 

Bayliss and Pembleton return to the squad after three months spent in robbery. Lewis went to vice (though we learn he didn't go that far) and Kellerman went to auto.  We're told essentially that all of the detectives at the end of Season 5 went out on rotation to other units. (Except for Munch who never goes anywhere.) Through the magic of the rotation (and television) the entire unit is being brought back to Homicide three months later.  (The exception is Howard who has been shifted to fugitive and will not be seen again for the rest of the series run.)

Bayliss is speaking rhapsodic terms: "Give me Homicide or give me death," certain that Giardello and the unit will be thrilled their back. And the show immediately undercuts them by having the bosses cheering the unit and then first Munch, then Giardello saying: "Nope you were missed at all. In fact the closure rates never been better."

So the tables have been turned yet again. Now it's not just Frank who has something to prove but all the detectives who've come back. And all three of the new detectives – Falsone, Gharty and fresh from Seattle Laura Ballard – who have new detective smell and have the edge going forward.

Homicide has never once been concerned with making its viewers comfortable, whether it comes to attracting new faces or isolating the old. So it begins its most triumphant season with two ambitious storylines: one of which is clear from the jump, one which will only become clearer as the season unfolds. The former is the most prominent as Homicide embarks on what is it first three-part episode since Season Three led by one of the greatest actors of all time and two of the greatest African-American character actors in history, though it would be a while until the latter demonstrated it. The latter is by far the most ambitious storyline Homicide would ever do and whose likes would not be seen again on network television until more heavily serialized dramas like 24 would debut at the start of the new century.

What's remarkable about the show going into the new season is how brilliantly all three new regulars hit the ground running. This is particularly impressive when it comes to Callie Thorne as Laura Ballard. Historically Homicide has a hit or miss  track record when it comes to new characters particularly female ones and its astonishing that Thorne – who at the time had only three films to her credit and no history in TV – is immediately superb. And all the more so because she's the first female detective the show has introduced since we met Howard. Ballard immediately makes it clear she will not be trifled with, sarcastically mocks Frank as being a low-key Type B guy'  and then proves the point when Pembleton is enraged to find Ballard has not only taken over his old desk but that Al tells his ace learn to share.

The other problems are subtler. Lewis shows up and makes it clear he wants a new partner though he refuses to tell Al why exactly. When Kellerman asks him later why he ended up with Falsone – and Meldrick immediately lies and says Gee put him with Paul  - it confirms what we suspected: Meldrick wants to get as far away from the shooting of Luther Mahoney as possible and that means not working with the man who shot him.

Kellerman actually doesn't seem that bad when we first run into him – or rather into Cox. Their relationship is clearly in the awkward small talk phase though Mike's clearly making an effort. When he tells Juliana he hasn't been going to the Waterfront in a while, it's a pleasant surprise as is the fact that he clearly seems happy to be going back to Homicide. Given how badly the previous year was for him Mike is clearly hoping that he can start in the rotation with a clean slate. He doesn't know that being partnered with Munch is the best change that's coming to him.

While we get hints of the major plot in the opening sequence where someone in a motorcycle helmet with a gun seems to be stalking several detectives at the unit we're almost inclined to dismiss it because we've spent most of the first act catching up with old friends and meeting the new people. The active plot comes when we learn that Al is attending a black tie dinner for Felix Wilson, the snack cake king and that Al is a friend of Regina, the man's wife. "There's a lot we don't know about you," Munch says when he learns that. As it turns out Al knows less about his friends.

Frank ends up picking up the phone because Ballard offers to first do so. There's a murder at the Belvedere hotel: a woman's body has been found in the second floor men's room.  When Ballard and Gharty offer to help Frank pushes them off and only because of Bayliss saying that there will be nearly 200 guests to interview does Frank say: "We'll make this a road trip." He doesn't know what he's stepped in for his triumphant return.

The women in the men's room has been thrown into the wall and someone tried to clean up the mess. We learn almost immediately this is where the function that Giardello is at it taking place and while he doesn't know the victim the Wilson family does – Melia Brierre, a Haitian domestic. It's when Frank refers to Felix Wilson as better known for his good work to the black community then his cupcakes. Al makes it clear he grew up with Regina in Perkins Homes – and then he gets called away from what's been going on without him knowing.

Its at the first commercial when Lewis and Falsone are driving back from dinner and complaining about the check that shots start being fired at their black and white. It's the driver from before but we still don't know who it is. Only that he was firing .50 caliber rounds.  Bonfather shows up and for once his fear has less to do with PR: he makes it clear he wants all plainclothes wearing Kevlar from now on. And because this is Homicide Lewis and Falsone are immediately called to a murder.

There is another familiar face: Stivers, whose been rotated to robbery. She was interviewing a woman named Molly Bowman and while she was talking to her Bowman was shot dead.  Tellingly Al makes it very clear he wants the Bowman murder put on hold: he wants them to find out who's taking shots at his detectives. "I'm not going to any more police funerals this year," he sees meaningfully.

Each of the detectives takes one of the Brierre family. Bayliss talks to Thea who says she brought her in from Haiti to try and save her. "Arrogant, Ivy League me."  Gharty talks to Regina and tells her that Al needs to separate himself from the interviews. Ballard talks to Hal the son who asks almost dumbly: "Did it hurt?" Ballard in her fashion says: "Yeah, it probably hurts like hell."

And Pembleton and Felix Wilson get into a longer talk then he usually has with witnesses to murders about a woman named Hattie Caroll, a woman who was casually hit by a blue blood and the woman dies of a heart attack while the white blue- blood gets away with a nothing sentence. The first real sign that this isn't business as usual comes after the interviews ends and Bayliss asks Frank a question we've never heard him ask Frank in five years: "If this wasn't Felix Wilson, would we have just let him leave?"  Frank, who has a rejoinder for everything Bayliss says, simply says. "It's time to go."

Cox tells the detectives (including Ballard and Gharty) that in addition to being beaten and strangled Melia Brierre had what appeared to be consensual sex before she was killed. Pembleton then wants to talk with Thea Wilson about potential lovers, which would be the next step in the investigation. He's told that Melia's last boyfriend, a man she knows only as Caja a member of the Haitian Army before Aristide took over, Caja becomes the suspect.

Ballard actually has a conversation with Cox which basically passes the Bechdel test before the term was coined. Ballard is trying to think about what it means to be a good cop and that she respects Pembleton but she thinks he's undercutting her.  Cox says to stand up to him. "That's easy. You have height on your side,"     Ballard jokes.

Munch actually seems to be looking forward to working with Kellerman – he reminds us the bad luck he has with partners. He flinches when he hears a noise which Kellerman mocks but Munch – who's been shot at before is nervous about. Immediately after shots ring out and Kellerman gets nicked in the arm.  After that Falsone puts two and two together and figures out the three detectives who've been shot at all were present at Luther Mahoney's death. This immediately pisses off Kellerman who wants to work the case while bleeding.

Jon Seda would start taking abuse almost immediately as Paul Falsone and I suspect much of it had to do with his apparent determination to get to the truth behind the Mahoney shooting. Because Falsone was the new guy and Kellerman and Lewis were established characters it was natural long time viewers took sides – that combined with the 'cop-a-ganda' narrative that Homicide basically resisted but that was still baked into 90s TV.

The show tells us that the Mahoney empire is being divvied up by a bunch of wanna-be Luther's and no one wants to talk about whose shooting even though these people will 'roll at the drop of a crack pipe.' When Falsone tries to reconstruct the shooting with an already hostile Kellerman he tries to be honest but admittedly does so in a way that really seems like he's trying to get a rise out of Mike when he details everything that happened as well as the fact that Lewis can't look him in the eye as well as that Mike seems perfectly fine with it. I suspect we're uncomfortable because we actually know what happened and Falsone is making the viewer complicit in rejoicing in Luther's death. It doesn't help that Mike is starting to ask with a snideness and unpleasant we're not used to from him. It really does seem like Falsone and Mike are going to come to blows before Meldrick brings Falsone down to talk to one of Luther's old suppliers Willkie Collins.

Falsone and Lewis go to town on Collins. Falsone brings up the fact that cops are being shot and that doesn't muss Willkie's hair. Its when Meldrick starts threatening his cash flow that Willkie takes it personally. "I'm an import/exporter," he demurs. "You are a narcotics trafficker!" Meldrick snarls.  "But I'm also a reasonable man." Willkie takes the position not unlike Stringer Bell would with Avon Barksdale that the Mahoney family had too much killing and not enough business. He gives up the shooter as Junior Bunk.

Junior has not changed since we first met him: he runs for the door the moment Lewis and Stivers track him down, he starts crying the moment he's caught and he flips the moment the heat gets too bad. Lewis takes his normal tone; Falsone is far more aggressive. And we learn who sent Junior on his rampage: Luther's sister Georgia Rae Mahoney. Georgia Rae is convinced that Kellerman, Lewis and Stivers set her brother up to be killed because they couldn't make a case against him. (The look that Lewis and Stivers share when Junior says that makes it clear they know this is bad.) Georgia Rae has been in the Caymans handling the money and now that her brother's dead. "She has my uncle's way of seeing things," Junior says.  And talk about dysfunction: Junior is more than willing to give us his mother in exchange for a deal.

Much of what happens has quite a bit of action heavy level – bullets flying and hitting police cars and regulars, a helicopter chase to a private airstrip, Georgia Rae greeting Kellerman by kneeing him in the grown. Some fans saw this as action heavy but I have little doubt this was not far removed from what the producers had done during Season 4 when they'd successfully managed to boost the ratings. As always the show remained true to itself keeping it within the context of Homicide. Georgia Rae is caught but its clear we're nowhere near finished – though at this point we can't guess how. Falsone is still pushing at Lewis at the end, and Meldrick clearly doesn't want to talk about it.

The final scene demonstrates just how good Callie Thorne is. It takes a great actor to go head to head with Andre Braugher and keep even. Ballard makes it very clear that she wants to talk to Felix and Hal Wilson in regard to whether they had a relationship with Melia. Frank, who's mostly held it in, says he had no reason to dislike Ballard but that he is the primary and he will run this case the way he sees fit. "This is the way I've always worked. Do we understand each other?"

We've seen other detectives react in anger or frustration or just walk away from Frank for five seasons. Ballard doesn't even blink. "Perfectly." Before Frank can say good Ballard says sweetly: "So I guess that means you want to handle the press?"

Frank blinks and says what. Ballard's eyes flick towards the outside of the squad. She barely cracks a smile. "Smile Pembleton. It'll look a lot better on television." Then the two of them walk outside and Ballard basically lets Pembleton face the vultures on his own.

And in the final shot we see Georgia Rae in a jumpsuit and behind bars. She tells the guard to send a message to Kellerman making it clear that they have no idea what they're in for and what they've unleashed. And like her brother before her, this is one promise that will be kept.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

"Detective Munch" The moment Frank and Tim show up Munch describes Ballard as 'flavor of the month, detective de jure,". When Frank asks which makes us Munch replies: "Well the phrase 'chopped liver' comes to mind. He then says thanks to Ballard they're all getting citations of merit and then says "Welcome back. I gotta get my picture taken."

That line's nearly as good as after Munch finishes the interview and leaves he says: "I feel like I've been in this ballroom all night. Maybe it's because I've been in this ballroom all night." Of course two minutes after he leaves he and Kellerman get shot at…

The episode explains Max Perlich's absence from the show in one of the greatest in-jokes. Brodie's documentary (the one we all saw in the episode of the same name) won an Emmy and he moved to LA. "An Emmy?" Bayliss says snidely. "They give those to anybody." No, the cast and crew of Homicide is not the least bit bitter that they only got one Emmy nomination in 1997. Not at all.

Get the DVD: As the Mahoney crew is rousted you'll hear Terrell's 'Black and White Blues'. In the bar when Junior is rousted RunOn's 'Bring Her Blues can be heard.' The helicopter chase is scored to INXS 'Elegantly Wasted'. On either the DVD or streaming you can hear the Jason Stevens Quartet play 'Say What in the Belvedere ballroom before the arrest.

Considering the incredible caliber of guest stars in the first three episodes alone I'm going to highlight each of the big names in their own episode of Blood Ties. I will start, as you can imagine, with the biggest.

Hey, Isn't That…James Earl Jones was arguably the biggest get Homicide had managed since Robin Williams had appeared in Bop Gun back in Season 2. While he's understandably known for his movie and Broadway work, I'm going to focus on television which during his more than six decade career was just as impressive as anything else.

For one he was the man who generations of people knew said 'This is CNN. But his career dated back to playing the Prince of Morocco on the TV series Monitor back in 1962. He played Dr. Jim Frazier on Guiding Light for 2266 episodes in 1966. While he had many small TV roles in in the interim he played Long John Spoilsport on the 1975 series Vegetable Soup. He played Balthazar on the 1977 series Jesus of Nazareth (the same year Episode IV came out) and played Alex Haley in Roots: The Next Generation and Father Divine in the Emmy Winning TV Movie: Guyana Tragedy. He played the title tole in the short-lived series Paris in 1979-1980, Lou Garfield in the justly forgotten TV series Me and Mom and Lee Atkins in two episodes on L.A. Law which earned him an Emmy nomination. He played Gabriel Bird on the TV series Gabriel's Fire, then again on Pros and Cons. (He's also known to this viewer for playing Thad Green on the Mathnet sequence of SQUARE ONE TV) He served as the Narrator on the first season of 3^RD Rock from the Sun, the Angel of Angels on Touched by an Angel and countless  other roles.

Jones would be nominated for eight Emmys and win two, both in 1991. He won Best Actor in a Drama for playing Gabriel Bird in Gabriel's Fire and for playing Junius Jackson in the TV Movie Heat Wave. He was nominated for playing Alice in the HBO TV movie  By Dawn's Early Light in 1990, for Best Guest Actor in a Drama for Bryant Thomas in Picket Fences in 1994, for Best Supporting Actor in a dram for Under One Roof, for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy for Frasier in 1997 and for Guest Actor in a Drama for playing Will Cleveland in Everwood. His last major award nomination was for playing himself in The Big Bang Theory in 2014.

Of course there's always been a fair amount of voice work connected to his major works Star Wars and The Lion King and every TV show connected with it. He last did the voice of Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2022. He passed away much beloved and honored in 2024 at the age of 93.

Robert Chew who plays Willkie Collins will later go on to play a very similar character in The Wire, Prop Joe. Those of you who remember that series will know he met a similar fate as he will in Homicide.

It's Baltimore: Lenny Moore who introduces Felix Wilson was a halfback and flanker for the Colts from 1956 to 1967. He was MVP of the NFL in 1964 and was selected to the Pro Bowl seven times. Incredibly as of this writing he is still alive at 92.