Homicide Rewatch: The Subway

 

This episode requires a bit more of an introduction that is typical for this series and I think it should be more personal.

During the 2000s I was starting to consider whether television criticism was something that I do professionally. I'd been writing articles about it more and more frequently, usually for internet sites that don't exist in the same way they did twenty years ago. I was also reading almost to the point of studying those whose main job was to criticize TV. In those days much of it was still in professional publications such as newspapers and magazines, most notably TV Guide.

I believe it was in 2009 that TV Guide published a fairly in-depth articles about what they considered 'The 100 Greatest Episodes in TV History'. I'd seen articles like this in some magazines, including TV Guide but by this point I was actually looking to see how many of these episodes I'd actually seen in the last decade which by this point was in the middle of the new Golden Age of TV. For the purposes of this articles I'm going to focus on episodes of dramas that were from that first decade.

Many of them are familiar to those who are familiar with TV during this period and I've actually written about a few of them, such as the 'Two Cathedrals' episode of The West Wing. Number 1 in 2009 was the 'College' episode of The Sopranos in which Tony kills someone in what amounts to real time which in 1999 was a big deal. There was also the pilot episode of Lost and the series finale of Six Feet Under which rank as the best in TV history more than twenty years after the fact.

Most of the candidates for the great shows of that period were here, though quite a few of the choices might puzzle even the most devoted fans of the shows involved. In some case it had to do with it being 2009 and many of the great moments of those series were still ahead of them. 'Kennedy/Nixon' of Mad Men and 'ABQ' of Breaking Bad were extraordinary episode but both series had far greater moments ahead of them. Other choices were more eccentric. For Battlestar Galactica we saw 'Blood on The Scales': the final season episode where Gaeta leads an insurrection against the Fleet for embracing the Cylons. For The Wire the season four finale was chosen instead of 'Middle Ground' (which would make a later list) where Stringer Bell met his end. In some cases it was a matter of opinion: Buffy The Vampire Slayer chose the landmark musical episode 'Once More, With Feeling' where as I still believe 'The Body' is the better episode and will die on that ground.

I'm mentioning all of these incredible episodes because I believe by this time the average TV viewer has seen or heard of most of them and knows just how sweeping, dark and often brutal these episodes all were. I've seen all of them too – multiple times in many cases – and I will not argue how magnificent they are in terms of quality at every level.  But with that all said almost none of them had the brutal simplicity and power as what was the choice TV Guide made for Homicide. This episode.

I saw this episode when it first aired in December of 1997. (It was aired out of sequence by NBC but as you'll soon see that did nothing to really make a difference for the course of the episode.) I knew very quickly that this was a great episode, mainly because for once the Emmys was willing to acknowledge it. It would be nominated for Best Writing in a Drama at the 1997-1998 Emmys, the first time since 'Three Men and Adena' Homicide had been nominated in this category. Vincent D'Onofrio would be nominated for Best Guest Actor in A Drama and while I have no idea if Andre Braugher submitted it for consideration (he always had a lot of great episodes to choose from every season) it would shock me if he had. The episode would also be nominated for a WGA award for episodic drama, which I wasn't aware of at the time.

Furthermore this episode turned out to be the focus on PBS's  Frontline one year after it aired which demonstrated every step of its being created from the writing inspiration to the casting to how it actually aired. (The special was called 'Anatomy of a Homicide'.) I don't believe PBS had any idea what a masterpiece they were witnessing being made but they certainly covered just how rhapsodic the critics were when the episode aired. Entertainment Weekly gave it an A+ and Tom Shales of The Washington Post gave it four stars as did USA Today.  Back before the internet was a big deal this was how things went viral.

Whether this episode is the greatest episode of Homicide is a matter of debate: many of the best episodes of television, period are not always per se, the best episodes of the series there a part of. Part of that reason is because 'The Subway' is one of the most radically different episodes in a series that has already broken so many rules of television you barely notice when it breaks its own – and 'The Subway' absolutely does that.

For starters this is the first episode in the entire run that doesn't for a single moment go anywhere near the squad room or the unit. This isn't entirely unprecedented by Homicide's standards: 'Full Moon' basically spent the entire episode at a motel with about five minutes back at the unit. But for the first time we have nothing familiar, no board, no box…nothing to distract us.

Furthermore this episode only features four of the series regulars, which for a show that is basically ensemble is even rarer. Most of our attention is focused on Pembleton, we see some scenes with Bayliss and Falsone and Lewis show up for a handful of scenes. And for the overwhelming majority of the episode we're watching Frank talk to the 'victim'.

The episode also, for what is basically the only time in the show's history – and for that matter something unheard of in 1990s TV -  unfolds in real time. The opening shows us John Lange going into the subway, something happening that gets him stuck between the car and the platform and then the teaser ends. Frank and Tim are called to the unit because the medics have told them a simple story. Lange falls between the opening of two cars and gets pinned. The train is still moving but because of being pinned, his legs are under him dragging three, twisting everything below them 'like a rubber band'. His spinal cord has been severed.

 Lange is positioned in such a way that the moment he is removed from the tracks he will die. They are prepping Lange in order to give 'the poor bastard some hope.' If they don't do anything immediately in somewhere between thirty to forty minute. The second they move him he's dead. There is a paramedic there to give him the idea of a million to one shot.

Because here's the thing. Lange is still conscious and because of the fact that he's paralyzed below the waist because of his injuries, he's in discomfort but not pain. When Pembleton meets him he has no idea what's going to happen to him because the medics were trying to keep him calm. So the job falls to Frank.

All of these things were unprecedented for TV beyond even the scope of what Homicide had tried. We were still a few years away from 24 and the idea of events unfolding in real time but that show was an action thriller in which Jack Bauer could never pause long enough to mourn the people who kept dying around him. Technically you could call this a bottle episode – it almost entirely takes place on the platform -  but you can't comfort yourself with the idea that 'nothing significant is happening in the story'.  Yoshimura, Braugher and D'Onofrio never blink from the horror of it: we're watching in real time the last hour of a man who is the victim  of random violence. By contrast watching Tony Soprano tracking down a rat in New Hampshire then choking him to death in full view of an unprepared audience is a walk in the park.

As I've highlighted ever since 'Bop Gun' Homicide has at least once a season gone into great detail to show the trauma and ramifications of what happens to those who must live in the aftermath of the murders that are a day's work. 'The Subway' takes this to what would seem to be the natural progression: looking at a murder from the point of view of the victim themselves. Furthermore this episode, chronologically speaking, is a foreshadowing of a major theme of Season Six: where we will spend far more time with the 'living dead', whether it comes to seeing the murders take place more often then we ever have before or in fact witnesses many people for whom death is a reality whether it comes at the end of the episode or far sooner than the average citizen.

At the center of this is Vincent D'Onofrio's work as Lange, one of the four or five greatest single one-shot acting performances the series would ever do. D'Onofrio is just a presence in 21^st century TV (there's going to be a lot in Hey, Isn't That) that it will stun you by his work here. So much of his work is built on physical presence and emotional control and none of that is here as Lange. He spends the majority of the episode pinned between the car and the platform so by definition he seems incredibly weak and small. And the moment he finally realizes the horror of what is going to happen to him D'Onofrio gets to run the full gamut of emotion in a way that he almost never got to in the entire decade he spent playing Bobby Goren. I've always believed that this work is the single best performance on TV I ever saw him give and even after nearly three decades of watching him work, it's a hill I'll die on.

For Frank Pembleton this is a situation he is completely unprepared for, as indeed any detective would be.  One of the recurring phrases of this show is that detectives 'speak for the dead'. But when Lange says with all the sarcasm he can muster: "It's not every day you talk to a dead man?"  Frank for once can only shake his head.  Bayliss, for a change, has the easy job: talking through the witnesses and Larry Biedron, the man who ended up getting tangled up with Lange did so deliberately or if it was an accident.  That its quickly found out that Biedron was previously institutionalized for a similar incident doesn't offer the usual relief we get from these episodes, not even for Pembleton. For once figuring out who the killer is offers him no closure because the fact that this was a random act of violence – basically because Lange chose to take the subway today instead of driving – won't solve anything. We'll later see the name written on the board in black but that's not the point of this episode for once.

Much of the drama is about something Falsone and Lewis trying to find Lange's girlfriend who went out jogging at the start of the episode and who Pembleton's trying to get there for a last goodbye. This is futile from the start and Lewis and Falsone know it as much as Pembleton does. But it's the last request of a dying man and they do their best to solve it. The fact that they very nearly do is the great tragedy of this episode – and the way the episode makes it clear in the final seconds is the ultimate kick in the teeth.

Having seen the episode yet again, I've decided to do something unprecedented in these reviews of Homicide as well as with almost every landmark episode review to this point on my blog. I'm not going to tell you any of the specific details. It's not because I want to avoid spoilers because it has been nearly thirty years since the episode aired. And its not because there are any miracles – this is Homicide, after all. Its because the power of this episode can't be put into words. It has to be seen and experienced.

I can't do justice to how Braugher manages to find layers you don't think he's capable of and how in the final minutes when its all over he seems to go back to normal, out of necessity. I can't explain how Bruce MacVittie, who plays Biedron, is one of the most unsettling portrayals of detachment from reality I've seen on TV in all my years – and I've seen many. I can't put into how Gary Fleder directs this episode in such a way to like a story whose outcome we all know is preordained from the start and yet manages to milk every bit of suspense and agony out of it. And thirty years later I still haven't found the words to accurate describe all of the nuances and emotion D'Onofrio puts into Lange every second he's onscreen in a performance that you can never look away from, no matter how much it hurts.

Tod Hoffman writes "More than any other episode 'The Subway' slams home the sometimes forgotten fact that homicide means a person has died." I'd argue that by the time TV Guide listed this episode as one of the 100 greatest of all time in 2009 the average viewer was practically numb to character death and by this point in our viewing experience we expect it so much of a given that even when it’s a character we've been invested in for years like Stringer Bell or Hank Schrader or  Teri Bauer (I've picked just some of the shows that were on the original list) its more for shock and the impact goes away within days of our viewing.

'The Subway' stands apart on television even thirty years later like it did in 1997. I barely got to know John Lange save for the last hour of his life but I felt the loss as much as Frank Pembleton does when he walks out of the station. He puts his game face on because its how he gets through the day but we all know he's not going to easily forget it like so much else. I've seen more than my share of TV characters who died who I had more invested in and whose loss has left an impact on me beyond the run of the show they were part of.  And it says something that Yoshimura and Homicide had the ability to make me feel the same way about a character I only knew for an hour thirty years ago. Not enough television shows have done that as often or as well. And that's the trademark of one of the greatest episodes ever.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

This episode was ranked in a survey by viewers from Court TV 4^th in the fifteen greatest episodes in Homicide's history. And while that may seem like an outlier compared to what I said above, the three above it were Crosetti, Three Men & Adena, and the Pilot.

As we see in Frontline, Yoshimura got the inspiration for the story from an episode of HBO Taxicab Confessions when a driver picks up a subway official in New York and described this exact event using the same dialogue the paramedic does. Frank saying growing up in New York and hearing about this happening from time to time is Yoshimura's subtle reference to this story.

On The Soundtrack: The band playing in the subway in the opening of the episode is Love Riot doing a superb version of 'Killing Time'. Lisa Matthews, the lead singer, is seen interviewed as a witness.

Gary Fleder, who directed this episode, had already directed Things to Do In Denver When Your Dead and the first Alex Cross movie Kiss the Girls in 1997. For film he would end up directing such movies as Runaway Jury and The Express. His record in TV is more impressive, directing episodes of The Shield, October Road, Turn Washington's Spies, The Bold Type and most recently Reacher. He has served as executive producer on many shows such as Beauty and The Beast and Tiny Pretty Things

Hey, Isn't That…Vincent D'Onofrio first came to the attention of the masses as the doomed Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. He'd follow that up with a turn in Mystic Pizza. He would work for directors such as Oliver Stone in JFK and played the writer Griffin Mill kills in The Player and played Orson Welles in Ed Wood. But it wasn't until he played Edgar, the farmer who a Bug uses as his human host in Men In Black combined with his Emmy nominated work in this film that Hollywood took notice for good. He did a mix of independent films that didn't break out (Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Movie, Carl Stargher in the Cell) before he was cast as Bobby Goren in the Criminal Intent spinoff of Law & Order, a role he would play for the next decade.

Less then four years after that he was cast in an even more iconic role Wilson Fisk in the Netflix version of Daredevil, a role he's played in Hawkeye and Echo as well as Born Again when the series was rebooted on Disney In between he would play Hoskins in Jurassic World, Jack Horne in the Magnificent 7 and The Wizard in the short-lived Emerald City. He's played Jerry Falwell in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. His most significant role other than that is Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante in MGM+ Godfather of Harlem series which he played until the fourth season finale when the character met his real life end. He is scheduled to play the lead role in A FALL From Grace, one of the last project David Lynch worked on before he died.