📺 See No Evil
This post contains plot spoilers about a 30-year-old television show.
I've been working my way through Homicide: Life on the Street since it came to Peacock and have been absolutely loving it until I got to Season 2 E1: See No Evil1, guest starring Wilford Brimley. Brimley, who carved out a real niche for himself as a crotchety old everyman well before actually attaining senior citizenship, plays the terminally ill father of Detective Beau Felton's childhood friend, Chuck Prentice. It becomes pretty clear early in the episode while Beau visits him that this is going to be a very special episode about assisted suicide.
On the surface I have no objection to this plot, it's timely and relevant- then and now. I sympathize with people's desire for agency when facing a painful and prolonged decline and eventual death. My own father died from terminal cancer. But the way it all played out was utterly ham-fisted and horrifying.
It's revealed early on that Brimley has been in contact with some kind of Jack Kevorkian-like suicide doctor and when Beau realizes this he immediately tries to dissuade his friend from helping Brimley carry out this plan. They've now opened a legal can of worms for their friend the homicide detective. In fact, Beau doesn't particularly help things by asking a hypothetical question about the situation to his colleague, Lewis, when he returns to the station.
Thankfully the rest of the episode's other plotlines are pretty good, but somehow behind the scenes, Brimley has changed his plans to end his own life. He now has a gun in his dresser and he asks Chuck to kill him with it. This is where the episode went off the rails for me. Of course, his son doesn't want to do it and tells Brimley to do it himself if that's what he wants. Brimley pleads with him that he can't because he's afraid to do it himself and he's in so much pain. And then off-screen his son actually does it... in exactly the most botched way possible to cast suspicion on himself and require Homicide's involvement.
Needless to say, my derision for Brimley's character and his son knows no bounds. I don't care how much pain you're in, I can't imagine asking your child to live with killing their parent in a gruesomely violent fashion. Let alone leave them to deal with the legal consequences that will surely follow.
Speaking of those consequences. Guess who the primary detective is on the case? Lewis, the detective Felton talked to earlier about his hypothetical question. He suspects Chuck's claims of suicide are bogus, and immediately knows something is up when Felton intervenes and tells his friend to clam up. So we get a juicy confrontation between Lewis and Felton in the bathroom over the investigation tampering. They hash it out, and Lewis unbelievably decides to help the son out by letting him wash up before they test him for gunpowder residue. The case gets filed as a suicide and Felton and Chuck have one last scene together at the docks where they reminisce about Brimley.
Now admittedly I'm early in the series, but it feels like this episode was a bit of a one-off that won't have any further consequences. I hope that's not the case and there are callbacks and repercussions to this case in later episodes. I've thought about this episode a lot more than the previous ones but for all the wrong reasons. Hopefully, the rest of season two and beyond will get back to the level of quality that I saw leading up to it.
Originally this aired as episode 2 of season 2 because of the whims of NBC, but I believe Peacock is listing them in their intended order.↩