Homicide Rewatch: All Is Bright

 

Written by Rafael Alvarez; story by James Yoshimura & Julie Martin

Directed by Matt Reeves

 

Homicide's track record with introducing new characters has always been decidedly hit or miss and that's particularly true with female regulars. Generally the show's pattern has been that they start out like gangbusters and then as time goes by they become less significant to the overall plot until they eventually end up leaving. While there were outside factors in each case, we saw this play out with Isabella Hoffman as Russert and we've been seeing it playout with Michelle Forbes's Cox this season.

It would have been easy to assume the same pattern was going to play out with Callie Thorne's Laura Ballard.  Just like Russert she was introduced as a force of nature in the three part season premiere and has been less of a presence ever since, barely getting ten minutes of screentime in the four episodes that followed. But perhaps because they were now facing the certainty of their star leaving the show and a still uncertain future the writers now knew they had to build up the new arrivals as forces in their own right. They've spent much of the first third of the season on Paul Falsone to the point you might have forgotten that Ballard and Gharty were still there.

All is Bright seeks to rectify this in what is one of the biggest departures from the pattern. This is the first episode in years in which the main story features entirely along two detectives who the viewer has little knowledge of. Gharty has the advantage of having been around a few episodes over two previous season so we know his character a bit but we don't know his prowess as a detective and we haven't seen Ballard in action at all. So there's something of a thrill that when the teaser ends and a name is written in red under a detective who to this point we've never seen investigate case as a primary.  The result is a tour de force by Thorne and it confirms that the writers have no intention of failing Ballard. And though the viewer can't know it yet it's a harbinger of how well it will do by the various newcomers who will join the unit during the final seasons.

That is does so in one of the bleakest storylines the show has done – in a Christmas episode, no less! – is a tribute to how the series has complete confidence in everything it does even as it's future is still uncertain going into the end of 1997.

Its entertaining seeing Ballard and Gharty bickering about how apparently a waitress at Jimmy's mistook them for a married couple. (Considering how so many partnerships are closer then marriages its harder to argue this.) Ballard's annoyed about the assumption, Gharty's annoyed that Ballard doesn't think he's good enough to be married to so Ballard just says they'd be fine together. Pembleton and Bayliss talk about the darker parts of humanity while driving to crime scenes, Ballard and Gharty bicker about whether the fact that he spills gravy on his pants is a disqualifier for a husband.

The victim is Philip Longley, killed as his local laundromat with a bottle of liquid detergent and he hits the machine on the way down. Cox actually misses that at the crime scene someone poured bleach down his throat. This leads to Gharty asking at the morgue: "Anything else in his system? Drugs, alcohol, fabric softener?" (It was that line, more than anything, that made me accept Gharty as murder police.) The owner doesn't know much. She went to get quarters for the machine and when she came back Longley was dead on the floor.

Longley's parents assume that their son was a victim of urban crime, but we already know this isn't a robbery. As we'll see they didn't know their son at all or for that matter, neither did the many women he was seeing. Gharty handles it with decorum we haven't seen him use so far this series and he and Ballard get to some part of it.

Philip seems to have been what was then referred to as ladies' man and now more accurately might be called a 'man-whore'. We see four different girlfriends, all of whom seemed to be fine just sleeping with him. And its clear he was whatever each of the women he was sleeping with wanted him to be.  "Pick your adjective we got it covered," Gharty tells Giardello. Its clear all of them knew about the other women but none of them had a reason to kill him. Then we get to the very real motive: Longley was HIV positive.

Its worth noting Longley was aware of his diagnosis and yet made no effort to tell any of the women he was sleeping with during this period. Ballard immediately finds this as a reason to hate the victim and honestly it's hard to blame her.  It's one thing to be a womanizer, it's another to be one who has a fatal disease that is transmitted sexually and not tell your partners. Gharty immediately shows his problem saying Longley had AIDS and doesn't want to tell the mother.  Tellingly his mother knows and has been keeping it from her husband, not even planning to tell him if it led to her son dying. She spent all her savings keeping him alive for the last six years. Gharty actually has the moral high ground when he points out she also knew of her son's womanizing. He swore that he used protection and she believed him – except with Rita Hale who isn't his address book.

There are many extraordinary guest performances in Season Six and the Emmys was more than generous for once. But Kathryn Erbe's work as Rita, the woman who was a victim of Philip Longley before he met his end, is one of the most haunting in the entire series. Considering that during the 1990s Hollywood was giving a fair amount of awards recognition to those who played victims of AIDS its surprising that Erbe didn't get nominated. Then again, maybe it's not. With the sarcomas of the disease all over her face and a death shawl practically hanging over her, her Rita has all the mark's of someone dying of AIDS but doesn't wear the cause of victim. Indeed her first line is of someone who is expecting the cops to show up at her door, who almost seems more than happy to confess to her crime.

Much of it involves a long monologue by Erbe in which she tells the detectives the story of who she was before and when she met Longley. She was practically a virgin, still waitressing, barely out of college and she fell in love with him because he put maple syrup on his scrambled eggs like her.  Marriage and children were discussed. Then there was a blood drive.  She learns she's HIV positive. And Phil reveals what we already know. He played the same line on her with every other woman he's been with. "My life is over, Detective, I get sicker and sicker. Soon enough I die." The treatments that are working just fine for the man who infected her are not doing a damn thing for her. She makes it clear that all the headlines about the AIDS epidemic being contained are a bad joke as far as she's concerned. "Their cocktails work for two-thirds of the people who need it. For the rest of us, it doesn't do jack." She has less than five months to live and nothing to lose.

She's on the verge of confessing when Ballard walks out the room with Gharty behind her. Ostensibly its because she doesn't believe in her condition a woman of Rita's size can do this. Gharty says "You're angry enough you find the strength." He points out she did just admit. "He gives her AIDS. She gets sick. He doesn't." Ballard doesn't want to get the confession out of her.  Gharty keeps pressing her and blows up: "You don't want to go after her because she's sick." Ballard retaliates: "You want to go after her for exactly the same reason." Then she loses her ground saying: "You know what's unfair? What Longley did to her." Gharty then acts like a grownup (for once) "Let's forget about the disease…and treat her like any other suspect."

The show also takes a bit more of the shine off Falsone. The moment he learns Hale has AIDS he's stunned that Kellerman and Lewis don't seem more bothered and seems determined to get the courthouse. His excuse is that he's suing for custody of his son and he doesn't want this to be used against him. But that's a straw man argument and we all know it. The way he argues against Meldrick saying that you can't get it by breathing the same air really sounds like the kind of rhetoric you'd hear from an anti-vaxxer. That immediately afterwards Kellerman confronts him about leaving the Mahoney file on his desk – and then he starts right up taunting him again – is perhaps the best explanation why so many fans took a very hostile look at the character by this point.

The scene in the box between Gharty, Ballard and Hale is one of the best scenes in the entire season, arguably one of the best interrogation scenes of the entire series. Considering that at this point the two actresses had little experience in TV and the other has no experience in the interrogation room, its striking just how well it holds against any of the scenes we've seen Braugher and Secor do over the years.  What's also clear is the empathy she shares with the suspect: they're both 29, she broke up with her fiancée in Seattle and she's dating again.

When they go back in the room Hale almost seems to enjoy haranguing the detective about the single life: "Always wear a rubber." She says she should do public service announcements instead of sitcom stars. (That said her argument about using her as a public service announcement does foreshadow how some groups have dealt with diseases like lung cancer in the 21^st century.) Eventually Gharty starts leading the conversation where it needs to go. Finally Hale denies it saying that she was at home sick as a dog. Ballard tries a sympathetic approach saying that if she explains her story to a jury it'll be okay. Hale explodes. "Nothing will be OK!"

Both detectives get to the same point. Gharty thinks she did this because she felt nothing mattered she was still going to die. Ballard says the killing was justifiable based on Longley's actions. "So you gather up the last bit of strength that you have and you follow him to the laundromat."

(I have to tell you when Rita tells you that poor people are told 'a healthy dose of bleach will clean out the virus', you might get triggered, )

Her last words on the subject will haunt anyone. "Philip Longley murdered me. I murdered Philip Longley. Wouldn't you have done the same?"

Ballard actively pleads with them not to charge her and Giardello is utterly unsentimental. "Don't we have an infirmary at the state prison?" He points out Rita Hale committed premeditated murder and ignores Ballard's attempt to try and argue this is self-defense. He tells her that in Italy a person with AIDS can't be sent to prison. (Or at least it was true in 1997.) He tells them of one man who robbed eleven banks in one summer and each time he was caught and released. Ballard tries to argue that this is a reason to let Hale go. Gee reminds her this is Baltimore, not Italy.

Ballard storms off and Gharty finds her. He admits he understands why she did what she did but he doesn't believe she should get away with it. He's closer in spirit to Pembleton in this case. Ballard then says that she's worried about all of Longley's girlfriends who didn't know about his having HIV.  So then they spent the next several hours notifying them of his condition and we see it play out (see below)

 

What stops this episode from getting too bleak is that the B-plot centers on John Munch. Munch has no more use for Christmas now then he was partnered with Bolander but now he owns a bar and has to get it ready for Yuletide customers.  Now he's summoning his inner Charlie Brown saying that Christmas is too commercial. His fellow detectives and Billie Lou are helping him at first but in typical Homicide fashion one by one he's abandoned.

It is the fact that he's busy cleaning that we finally meet someone we've never met in five and a half seasons – Munch's own Ghost of Christmas Past.

 Yes its his first ex-wife  Gwen, played by that fireball of comic energy Carol Kane. In a wonderful touch a performer known for her brilliant eccentricity a comedienne chooses to turn her panache so low its practically a straight woman.  And that's because she knows Richard Belzer is the comic star of Homicide and when you get a chance to use that power you don't get in his way. She can joke with the best of them but all of them are delivered almost deadpan. She's here for a sad reason: her mother has died. John can't even bother to mask his unhappiness:

John: She loathed me and I loathed here right back.

Gwen: She didn't loathe you.

John: She despised me.

Gwen: She didn't despise you.

John: She disliked me?"

(Pause)

Gwen: Okay, maybe loathed is the word.

Munch doesn't know how he can help his mother-in-law met a horrible end. Gwen's response: "Sorry to disappoint you." She needs him to plan what she believes will be a very elaborate funeral.

Gwen's mother was a literary critic of some note and she is planning a funeral in which she expects everyone she ever reviewed to show up to pay their respects. (Clearly Gwen has to good a view of both her mother and critics overall.) Gwen goes through the funeral with starry eyes, thinking of what an extraordinary life her mother led and so many experiences. Munch argues she did a number on him and he honestly thinks she did on Gwen. When Gwen says she likes some of the men she brought home John can't contain himself: "Briscoe?"  The more he brings it up Gwen tells him to stop the car and she gets out in the middle of the road, hailing a cab.

The joke, of course, is that Mrs. Munch is buried to an empty room with only Gwen, a shill that Bernard paid as the deluxe package and Peter Maas, the author of Serpico and The Valachi Papers, among others. (Of course he knows David Simon from around.) John immediately tries to console his ex-wife. "It's not an empty room, there's you…and me…and a woman crying…" Maas came down from New York to "have a last laugh at a petty, vindictive, parasitic old hag."  He uses his own prose to illustrate that Gwen's mother was a bitter old crone who didn't know "good writing if it were tattooed on her forehead."  He came to the funeral to make sure the woman was really, most sincerely dead.

The end of the episode balances all the parts. We have one of those rarities for Homicide a conversation between two female characters. I'm not sure it was quite pass the Bechdel Test; they're not talking about men so much as their fears of the single life. Ballard talks about her failed engagement without every mentioning the man's name (save to say he was an idiot) and that while she's cautious, she's not sure she trusts her own judgment. Cox points out she's no help as she definitely doesn't trust her own. (We're going to get an example of that in the final minute.) Their final exchange is about how frequently you should get tested.

The final scene is in the Waterfront where the Yuletide joy is in full swing. Pembleton has a drink and goes home to be with his family.  Gwen is now in the position of realizing just what a monster her mother was and John is trying to make his wife feel better.

And what happened next? Well in the Waterfront they say Munch's heart grew three sizes that day. He raised his glass and says one of the sweetest things he'll ever say on the show:

"On this evening a solemn ceremony was held to convey the remains of Genevieve Talbot. She was a strong woman possessed of many opinions. She lived life on her own terms. She had a daughter, a beautiful daughter, who took as her husband a charming if somewhat peculiar man. Genevive Talbot loved her beautiful daughter and so feared for her happiness that she did everything she could to discourage this union for the man was hopelessly peculiar and quite perverse. And the daughter, she was a rare gift, who deserved much, much better."

And after a season of flirtations and longing on one part Bayliss gives Cox a Christmas present and the two kiss for the first time. On some shows this would be a sign for happiness going forward. On this show…well, that's actually one of the more daring themes of the final season.

To wrap this up I have to tell I have a special place in my heart for All Is Bright because it's one of the darkest Christmas-set episodes in all my years of TV viewing. Does that make me peculiar and perverse? Maybe. But maybe once you've been deluged in twenty-four hours of It's A Wonderful Life sometimes you want a different kind of Christmas episode. Because a lot of Christmas's are really like this, with random hookups and bad holiday experiences. I love 'The Constant' don't get me wrong but there's something to be said to ringing in the holidays with Blood Makes Noise over a woman getting tested for HIV.  And sometimes we need it more than we think.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

"Detective Munch": Typically for Christmas we get to see a lot more of Munch's Jewish side then usual, starting in the Waterfront. Lewis actually gets the best line: "Hey Munch, you're gonna make some poor orphan I nice Jewish mother someday.  

As you'd expect the best scenes come with Undertaker Munch who seems determined to mark up the price.  John then tells his brother: "When you were nobody, when you had no connections, when you asked your brother the Homicide cop to pass around a few business cards to the relatives of those recently  departed, who was there for you?" Bernard then meekly goes back to his calculator and comes up with a reduced rate. "You're a real mensch. "

That plus his eulogy at the end really shows the worst and best parts of him

Mahoney PTSD: Kellerman gets back to the squad and finds pictures of Luther Mahoney on Falsone's desk. It's almost as if Falsone is openly taunting him now. He confesses to Juliana he has yet to tell Lewis or Stivers about what Georgia Rae has on him. Kellerman is dodging it, saying he's waiting until after Christmas. Juliana tells him to man up. When he does tell Meldrick at the end of the episode he tries to assure Lewis that even if Georgia Rae has a videotape we don't know what's on it. Lewis doesn't bother with this: "We know what's on it. Kellerman ices dealer. News at eleven." Kellerman tries to tell the story on the official report and Lewis makes it very clear that this he's not buying that either.

Continuity Error: When Munch goes to SVU we'll eventually see Gwen and she seems to have lapsed into some kind of mental condition, either bipolar or schizoid-effective. There's no real evidence of it during this episode, though her outburst might be a precursor of a condition that developed later. (There was a lapse of nearly a decade between that appearance and this one.)

FUTURE INMATE: Kathryn Erbe already had a decent resume having starred in What About Bob, the sequel to The Mighty Ducks and the Nicolas Cage film noir Kiss of Death. Then after this role Tom Fontana would cast her as Shirley Bellinger, the Susan Smith type killer who spent the better part of three seasons as the only woman on OZ waiting on Death Row before being hung. It was one of the most memorable stints on this series.

Immediately after her character was killed off she would be cast as Detective Eames on Law & Order: CI. (And in the way episode are aired 'All Is bright' aired immediately after The Subway, which meant if you watch Homicide that December you saw the two main leads of that show and didn't know it.) She was so focused on that she did nothing else during its run and has done relatively little for awhile afterwards. But by 2017 she was acting more regularly playing Kay Ambrose on Season 1 of The Sinner, Jacqueline on Season 4 of How to Get Away With Murder (Jimmy Smits' ex-wife) and has since been seen on Pose, Instinct, The Good Fight, The Blacklist and had a recurring role on the series City on A Hill. Her last role was in the Emmy nominated Black Rabbit,

Hey, Isn't That…Carol Kane broke into Hollywood in the 1970s starring in small roles in such seminal films as Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail and Annie Hall. She was nominated for Best Actress for playing Giti in Hester Street in 1975. She would start in such cult films as When A Stranger Calls and La Sabina before finally breaking out as Simka, the girlfriend and future wife of Latka on Taxi. She is best known to millions for playing Valerie ("I'm not a witch, I'm your wife)in The Princess Bride and the Ghost of Christmas Present in Scrooged.

Let's focus on TV for the rest of this. She played Aunt Sylvia on the Emmy winning Brooklyn Bridge and received an Emmy nomination for playing Marguerite Birch on Chicago Hope in 1995. She had the role of Annie in the one season show Pearl, LL on the Showtime critical hit Beggars and Chooser's, would play the Penguin's mother on Gotham  and Lillian on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She PLAYED Bianca on Los Espookys, Mindy Markowitz on Hunters and is currently playing Pelia on Strange New Worlds. I could tell you about her voice work but that's another page.

By the way you'll blink if you miss her but Jenny is played by Rhea Seehorn in what was her first screen role. Her career for the next fifteen years was not that great. She was a regular on one season comedies like 'I'm With Her'  an even more short-lived series The Singles Table, a role on The Starter Wife and played Roxanne on Whitney for three season, and the recurring role of Ellen on Franklin & Bash.

All of which is to say if you never heard of her before she was cast as Kim Wexler its not your fault. Vince Gilligan seeing something in her as Kim is just as remarkable as what he saw in Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk.

Oh and in case you were wondering…yes the Matt Reeves who directed this episode is THAT Matt Reeves. He was a TV director for shows like Felicity and Homicide before he managed to direct Cloverfield. After that came the Andy Serkis led Planet of the Apes franchise and now Batman. It's not just great actors that get their start in TV.