"Homicide" begins a two-part season finale Friday night (it's coming back for another year) in which two of the show's departed characters return out of the blue -- and only one of them is alive. This drawing on characters thought long gone illustrates one of "Homicide's" greatest (and rarest) strengths -- nothing on this tightly written series goes to waste; every scrap of plot and dialogue has a purpose. For instance, Detective Tim Bayliss' (Kyle Secor) revelation this season that he'd been sexually abused as a child seemed to come out of nowhere. But when you go back and watch the nightly "Homicide" reruns on Lifetime cable, you see Bayliss' obsession with one particular case, the unsolved molestation and murder of a little girl. You see his self-loathing and his strident moral rigidity, and you realize that he'd been gearing up for this revelation all along.

In previous seasons, Bayliss tended to be overshadowed by his arrogant, intense partner, Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher). Actually, everyone in the ensemble cast tended to be overshadowed by the riveting Braugher, which must have been one of the reasons the writers had to take his character down with a stroke. With Frank recuperating this season, we got to see more of Bayliss, and of Detective Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), the show's clean-up hitter. Lewis is the guy who's always around to take care of other cops' problems, but someday soon that solid, carefree facade has got to crack. For now, though, the most intriguing character to emerge from the ranks has been Detective Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), who joined the homicide squad last season as a transfer from the arson unit.

Kellerman is the most ambiguous and unsettling regular "Homicide" has ever had. A cop so fresh-faced his partner Lewis calls him "Mikey" (and, once, "Opie"), Kellerman has slowly revealed himself to be a guy with too much ego and very poor judgment. In many ways, he's the show's Mark Fuhrman, and what's fascinating about how he's been presented to us is that the writers spent the first half of the season building sympathy for him. Facing a grand jury investigation of bribery in his old unit, Kellerman staunchly maintained his innocence and refused to rat out other cops. Then he flirted with suicide over his tarnished reputation. Just as we were ready to believe that Mike Kellerman was the straightest, most wrongfully put-upon cop ever to take the oath, we saw the dark side of his the-badge-is-sacred code. On the April 25 episode, "Deception," Kellerman shot his and Lewis' nemesis, the suave drug dealer Luther Mahoney (Erik Todd Dellums) dead -- even though Mahoney had his gun down and was about to surrender.

Was it a clean shoot or murder? Is Kellerman a good cop or a loose cannon? Every one of the characters on "Homicide" is a riddle, a puzzle, to themselves as well as viewers. Yes, they're wonderfully gabby, especially when it comes to inventive ways of boasting about their overworked, lonely misery. But for all their dazzling, hard-boiled verbosity, these characters are utterly clueless about what's really eating them.

Sometimes, though, in the course of investigating the stuff the dead leave behind, the detectives and the show's new medical examiner, Dr. Julianna Cox (Michelle Forbes) -- a tough cookie with a soft center for booze and self-destructive cops -- manage to trip over their own psychological baggage. Other dramas build episodes around a central theme; "Homicide" builds entire seasons. And this season, "Homicide" was about victimhood.

The peerless depth and unity of the show's writing was exemplified in the April 11 episode, "Double Blind." Emotionally manipulative Kellerman plays the victim, using his attempted suicide to regain Cox's interest. A bitter patrolman who was shot and blinded in an episode in the first season returns to testify at a parole hearing for his attacker, but at the last minute realizes he has to stop being a victim and move on. Cracking under the strain of his childhood abuse memories, Bayliss pitilessly interrogates a teenage girl suspected of killing her abusive father. At the end of the episode, Bayliss goes to confront his molester, his uncle; when he finds that the uncle is no longer a monster but rather a pathetic, sickly old man, Bayliss can only sink into a chair and croak, "Where do I put my hate?"

The writers are so good at getting you to see the small picture through the blinkered vision of its characters that, like the cops, you don't see the big defining moments coming. Bayliss' fizzled confrontation with his uncle, where he realized that he could either forgive him or continue to die inside, and Kellerman's shocking -- there's no other word for it -- shooting of Luther Mahoney were two of those moments. They made for great TV, but they also rang true. In the real world, judgments are made and fates are sealed in a flash, and "Homicide" is a show of flashes: bullets, impulsive actions, split-second decisions, moments of passion. But where "Homicide" really gets you, haunts you even, is the way it plays out the consequences of those moments, the long aftermaths. Nothing is simple, nothing is forgotten, nothing is finished. When "Homicide" is gone, we'll still be dealing with it.
May 9, 1997

Homicide: Life on the Street (10 p.m. Fridays, NBC; 11 p.m. weeknights, Lifetime).

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