NYPD Blue, Season 2, Episode 12, "Large Mouth Bass" Writte by Theresa Rebeck Directed by Charles Haid PLOT ONE: THE STEPFATHER Sip and Simone get called in on a very brutal homicide - a young woman who was hacked to death on the steps of her apartment building on the way to work. There was one witness, an elderly woman. The dead girl's mother, Mrs. Cantwell, claims that her ex-husband (the girl's stepfather) did it - he's a very disturbed individual looking to hurt his ex-wife in any way possible. The police artist's sketch based on the witness' description looks like the ex-husband, one Derrick Cobb, and Sip and Simone figure they've got a case here. Two problems: 1)Cobb's boss at the Department of Transportation claims that he saw Cobb hanging around the garage all day; and 2)The new Borough Commander (more on him in a minute) is very reluctant to give out overtime pay, so when Cobb finally does get picked up at night, the night tour guys are told to handle the interrogation themselves, and they botch it and Cobb gets lawyered up and released. Andy's furious, but Fancy convinces him to go at the case from a different angle, so he heads back to the Department of Transportation to work on Cobb's boss, who he knows is lying. Turns out the boss is an on-the-job lush, and when Sipowicz threatens to use a bottle of vodka he finds in the boss' desk drawer to get him fired, the boss acquiesces and tells them that he wasn't watching Cobb all day, and that if Cobb did go into Manhattan to commit the murder (the DoT garage being in another borough), he would've had to sign in on one of the bridges. Using that info, the detectives get a search warrant and find the murder weapon, a bloody knife, in the truck Cobb had used to go to Manhattan. They arrest him again, and Sipowicz has to be restrained from hitting him after he makes comments about calling up Mrs. Cantwell. Mrs. Cantwell herself shows up at the stationhouse with a gun in her purse, ready to blow her ex-husband away, but Bobby talks her out of it, and Andy agrees to dump the gun in the river. PLOT TWO: FROM THE 'ALL BOSSES ARE ASSHOLES' DEPARTMENT.... Replacing the dearly departed racist prick Captain Haverill as Borough Commander is Captain Clifford Bass, who's spent his whole career in uniform and knows virtually nothing about detective work. His main concern seems to be avoiding overtime pay - he insists that Fancy call him to request it. One problem - Bass is working under the notion that when one detective goes home, another one on a new shift can pick up his case just like that. After the Cobb investigation almost blows up in his face, Bass relents and apologizes to Andy and Bobby, saying he'll try to be more open-minded in the future. PLOT THREE: CHILDHOOD CHUMS Ray diSalvo, who used to look out for Bobby when they both were kids, is brought into the 15th Precinct after a cop finds drugs in his car trunk. Bobby convinces the officer to let the charges go after Ray assures him that he's clean and didn't know the drugs were there - besides, he's in the process of buying a nightclub, so why would he risk getting busted for posession? He invites Bobby to the club in Bay Ridge, and Bobby brings Benita (say that five times fast) with him. It turns out that Ray is actually little more than a glorified bouncer at what appears to be a mob-owned club, but he assures Bobby the place is legit. They have a good time, but the next day Fancy tells him that Narcotics has the club staked out and is ready to make a bust soon. Bobby feels an obligation to Ray, and tries to warn him without actually giving away the time of the bust. Ray seems to take the hint, but when the bust goes down, Ray's still there and gets busted, too - and this time, Bobby refuses to help Ray out. That night, as Bobby and Benita lie in bed (presumably after a bout of lovemaking), Bobby tries to reconcile the guy he worshipped as a kid and the "wise guy-wannabe" (as Benita calls him) he's become. PLOT FOUR: IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY? Yet again, Lesniak gets a case involving some sort of sex crime (sort of). It seems a con man has been going around selling "beauty boxes" to plain woman for $2,000. The boxes, which he claims moisturize the skin and bring out the inner beauty, are utterly worthless. Adrienne and James convince one of the women to let them observe her paying for an additional "power pack," but when the con man shows up, he's so smooth - even inviting her to a romantic dinner - that she decides to drop the charges. After yet another woman shows up with an identical box, Adrienne decides to take more serious action. She brings in the con man on a parking ticket charge and puts him in Interrogation - with Medavoy locked in the cage, posing as another bunco artist. While the con man explains his whole scheme to Medavoy, intent on selling him a "franchise," the two women watch and listen to the whole thing in the observation area and agree to press charges. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Review part's gonna be short this week. I've gotta go to work, and besides, all you whores care about are the summaries, right? :-) The show definitely seems to have pulled itself out of the rut it fell into after the first few Simone episodes. The last two episodes - the story arc with Webster and the downfall of Haverill - were superb. "Large Mouth Bass," while not quite in that league, still seemed fairly fresh for a self-contained episode and managed to squeeze both the funniest scene and the sexiest scene in the history of the series into one hour. Not bad. For starters, we have the "A" murder. Although it was inevitable that they get their man - still the show's biggest weakness, by far - they at least did it in a different way than the standard Big Interrogation (tm). Captain Bass saw to that. What made this case were Andy's instincts - both as a cop and as a drunk. The minute the guy at the garage slammed his desk drawer shut, Andy knew there was a bottle in there, and without it, he would've gotten nothing. The look of contempt on his face when he put the vodka back was perfect - nothing gets under a recovering alcoholic's skin more than seeing a drunk who still won't help himself. More important, IMHO, than the murder case, was the storyline involving Bobby and Ray. While Simone on the job still seems to slip into the territory of his predecssor from time to time (the bit where he convinced Mrs. Cantwell to give up the gun was vintage John Kelly, right down to the way Smits held his chin), Simone the person is an entirely different entity - he's much more human than Kelly ever allowed himself to be. There were two scenes that really drove this point home. The first was the riotous singalong bit - the funniest thing ever on NYPDB, by far - when Andy first gets into the car and Bobby is rocking out to "My Sharona" by the Knack. "Just got laid" or not, that was the kind of loose-spiritedness that we never saw in Our Hero John Kelly (tm). The second was at the nightclub - specifically the moment when Ray pulled Benita onto the dance floor and Bobby gave her that reassuring nod, then sat back and enjoyed watching her dance. Benita's little lambada number there, btw, is by far the sexiest moment I've ever seen on the show - and (GASP!) she has all of her clothes on while it was happening. I still feel half the time that the nude scenes are thrown in purely gratuitously (but that's an entirely different thread :-)). As for Captain Bass, whether he turns out to be an asshole or a righteous guy, I like him, because he's totally different from Haverill. There's definite potential for conflict between he and Fancy regardless - the whole "uniform cop trying to run a bunch of detectives" angle and so forth. And if he does turn out okay, so much the better - I'm always in favor of change. Finally, we have the beauty box plot, which was exactly the wrong way to handle the Obligatory Comic Relief Subplot (tm). They could've used the whole bit to show us some more of James and Adrienne's relationship, or to give the vastly underused Donna Abandando some air time - I think having Donna try to give makeup tips to those "plain Janes" would've been a riot. At the very least, they could've found a way to involve Sylvia, who appears destined to only appear in Andy-related plotlines from now on. Sigh... Shorter takes: -Good to see Detective Vince Gotelli back for a moment, albeit without his beloved (and broken) Tit-Cup. -Speaking of nudity, I guess Smits definitely decided to forego the "no nude scenes" clause in his contract. -For the New Yorkers among you, I guess Bobby was listening to K-Rock or WPLJ (WNEW and Z-100 wouldn't play "My Sharona") and Andy has the radio preprogrammed to CBS-FM. Oh, and I think that Smits and Franz have got to cut a record of "Duke of Earl" at some point in the very near future, or I'll be very upset. -For those of you who pay attention to the credits, tonight's episode was directed by Charles Haid, who played Renko on Hill Street Blues and played Kelly's rich buddy Charlie Lear in a late-season episode of NYPDB last year. Anyway, I'm outta here - got a magazine to put out. See ya in the funny papers! -Alan Sepinwall -sepinwal@mail.sas.upenn.edu Check out my new homepage! -http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~sepinwal/ QUOTE OF THE DAY: "You forgot to read your fortune cookie. It says 'You're shit outta luck.'" -Clint Eastwood, "The Dead Pool"