Homicide: Life on the Street, Season 5

The Review

By cellphone, a gunman demands a six-pack of beer and a pig—a Vietnamese potbellied pet pig, to be exact. Baltimore police respect the request as the lives of 15 middle school students and their history teacher are at stake. Four bodies already litter the grounds. A school shooting as a season opener should grab our attention and excite us about a new year of Homicide: Life on the Street. And it does, but not nearly as much as the return of Det. Frank Pembleton [Andre Braugher], whose mouth and body still stumble from the stroke he suffered in the Season 4 finale.

For a viewer who has followed Homicide from the beginning, Season 5 is different. Detectives still work interesting cases, relying more on their brains than on their guns. And the variety of deaths still make a viewer conclude, as Det. Stanley Bolander [Ned Beatty] points out in Season 1, that any human is capable of murder, whether it is a child firing her father's revolver out the window [the stray bullet hitting a woman loading groceries blocks away] to planned executions by drug lord Luther Mahoney [Erik Dellums]. Circumstances, though, have crippled a number of the characters, and Season 5 inserts us into their shoes so well that we understand how badly shaken are their lives.

Sometimes the damage to a character is physical, as is the case with Pembleton, who returns to half-day desk duty until he can pass his firearms test. We immediately notice the lack of precision—in speech, memory, and small physical tasks like punching the correct numbers to return a call to his wife. The contrast is stark, for we remember the competent Pembleton of past seasons whose movement was as meticulous as his dress, whose voice had more agility than the hands of an archeologist as it excavated the truth. We get to see the indignity of his weakness: His wife Mary [Ami Brabson] doesn't trust him with the baby, Lieutenant Giardello [Yaphet Kotto] doesn't want him at investigation scenes, and the office staff sends him on lunch runs. Even after he returns to the streets, his tape recorder—a crutch for his still shaky memory—makes colleagues wonder if he is competent enough to do the job. These trials play out over nearly three months of episodes, which adds to the reality of the injury. And Braugher depicts a stroke victim with such authenticity that we want to believe, as his character does, that "bagel" is that dark brew people enjoy for a jolt of energy.

Having seen Pembleton at his most vulnerable, his partner Tim Bayliss [Kyle Secor] finally admits wounds of his own—emotional damage this time. We learn that an uncle sexually abused the young Tim, and more devastating than the inappropriate contact was that Bayliss's father accused his son of lying. The admission of the abuse, which brings the damage back to the surface, inspires Bayliss to track down his uncle whom he plans to confront as an equal adult. What he discovers, however, is a frail old man unable to fend for himself. Bayliss, ever the sensitive champion of the weak, ends up buying groceries and cooking eggs. His behavior confounds the audience: Is Bayliss such an exemplary man that he can come to the aid of any fellow human, even his own sexual abuser? Or is Bayliss such a pushover that he is now willing to offer up his homemaking skills, too powerless still to demand that his uncle pay for the sexual deviation?

Season 5 also takes a long look at police corruption and the spiritual damage a cop suffers when wrongly accused. During a grand jury investigation, Det. Mike Kellerman [Reed Diamond] finds himself betrayed on all sides. Kellerman is a man who finds comfort in following rules. So when he worked in the arson unit, he never took a bribe in exchange for calling an intentional fire accidental. Moreover, he agreed to the unwritten code that governs police behavior and did not rat out fellow investigators he knew were dirty. Despite his good behavior, he discovers that he too is under suspicion, for his former colleagues have lied to prosecutors to get lighter sentences for their own misdeeds. Spinning with disillusionment, Kellerman eventually realizes his black and white notions of morality have bled into gray. We are not surprised when he contemplates suicide or when he takes the law into his own hands during the arrest of Mahoney, a man who could have been punished through the courts. We understand Kellerman's predicament: If no one else is playing by the rules, why should he?

Like Kellerman, Assistant State's Attorney Ed Danvers [Zeljko Ivanek] must face the collapse of his own intellectual constructs. If a win means sending a criminal to jail, then Danvers is a successful prosecutor. But he has sought impressive numbers, not real justice, negotiating plea deals that disappointed families of victims, pursing life without parole as the highest penalty because he doesn't believe in capital punishment. Then, during an armed robbery of a bridal boutique, a gunman kills his fiancée, which awakens Danvers' own blood lust. He realizes that his complacent prosecution style is not what he wants for the murderer, that he desires instead the proverbial eye for an eye. His professional reappraisal makes us pause: Are we giving at work as much as we would expect to get?

Season 5 also introduces the new chief medical examiner Dr. Julianna Cox [Michelle Forbes], a character who initially seems the least damaged of the regular cast. In her first episode, Dr. Cox conveys such authority that we never ask how this young snot acquired the medical expertise and political savvy to run a big-city lab, and so we don't question what inadequacies her ambition must be filling. Her authority appears grounded in an appreciation for the big issues in life, not the small stuff too many people sweat. For example, she champions a dead prostitute, firing an established older peer for helping a lazy detective ignore a murder he could pass off as an overdose. She insists on professionalism, disciplining Det. Meldrick Lewis [Clark Johnson] when he moves a body before her arrival at the crime scene, but admits her own fault to another officer as she politely accepts a [deserved] speeding ticket. When she remarks at an exhumation that she likes cemeteries, it's not a goth fascination with death but an evolved recognition that our inevitable demise should inspire better behavior the short time we're alive. Her idealism and edgy beauty attract Kellerman, but when Cox learns the toll of the false accusations against him—his flirtation with suicide and spiral into self-pity—she withdraws, choosing drink and a long-haired poseur over earnest Mike. As many women would rush to fix a broken man, we can only wonder what damage Cox has suffered that makes her retreat in the season finale.

Despite all the crises in the characters' lives, the work still gets done, and done well. The focus of Season 5 might be different, but the stories are still first rate.

 

Video Teasers

You can view a very moving scene featuring Det. Bayliss and Dr. Cox at YouTube.

To Own the Season

Homicide: Life on the Street, Season 5, is an easy purchase at Amazon US or UK.

Cross Post

This review exists at Amazon US.