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So a newly-returned Vietnam veteran is found beaten to death in a park, and it looks like we're about to get ourselves a Very Special Episode about America turning its back on those who serve it. But then, it's discovered that the guy was beaten to death not because he was veteran but rather because he was gay, which is an entirely different Very Special Episode altogether. Did you like how Life on Mars threw you a curve ball like that? Or are you just put off by the Very Special Episode-ness of it all? Yeah, me too. Well, let's grit our teeth and get through this together, then.
Yeah, so like I said, a body turns up in a park, and since the deceased just got back from the 'Nam, the detectives quickly conclude who is responsible for this atrocity -- Hippies. Because if there's one group known for its proclivity toward violence and unchecked aggression, it's Moonbeam and Sunflower and all the other Merry Pranksters. Also, hippies ruin everything.
But while hippies will have to answer for many things before all is said and done -- horrible fashions, the brief popularity of the sitar, patchouli oil -- killing this particular guy wasn't one of them. No, there's another culprit on the loose here, which rapidly becomes clear as further investigation reveals that the deceased enjoyed the company of his fellow man more literally than figuratively.
This, of course, makes Carling -- gung ho about hunting down the perpetrator when there were hippie skulls to crack -- less enthused about brining the killer to justice. But then he gets a talking-to from Gene Hunt of all people, and while Gene may not like gays or hippies or anyone really, he likes murderers least of all. And after Sam and Annie use Detective Skelton as bait -- after all, what gay basher could resist Skelton's charms? -- they're able to capture a roving trio of Neanderthals who happen to have seen the Vietnam vet's unfortunate demise. Turns out he was done in by his commanding officer, who held quite firmly to the belief that what happens in Saigon stays in Saigon.
So what's Sam to do after laying down some 2008 enlightenment upon 1973 (tediously, I might add)? Why, track down the 1973 version of himself, of course, since the victim's family lived in the same neighborhood that Sam did briefly when he was just a youngster. And Sam does manage to see the younger him -- they clap eyes on each other at subway station outside a Knicks game. Which I find confusing, frankly -- I mean, isn't there a Time Travel Paradox that maintains one of them has to die now or that they have to battle each other in a knife fight or that Willis Reed ends up being Sam's father? That's just too heavy for me to think about right now.
-- Mr. Sobell Want more? The full recap starts right below!Hello! Mr. Sobell's computer imploded on Sunday evening -- erasing all his work and his recently-downloaded copy of the last Life on Mars episode -- so he invoked the subclause in our marital compact that require us to assume each other's recapping duties in case of emergency. Please do not be alarmed. He will return with your RDA of Lisa Bonet jokes week.
Speaking of whom, this episode is beginning with the same type of multicuturally-suspect hippie shindig that Denise Huxtable would have loved -- tons of people in silly stoner outfits twirling about to sitar music in the park, a few Hare Krishnas in the mix, some space cadet blowing bubbles. The detectives are walking through the park, and Ray grunts, "I thought Nixon ending the war was going to put an end to this freak show!" No, it did not. And Ray, you will want to forever avoid Berkeley, because said freak show is still going strong there, especially on weekends. Sam prophesies that, "This counterculture will one day be looked upon as a time when politicized youth rebelled against the excesses of the Vietnam war, the excesses of corporate arrogance, and the excesses of racial intolerance." And in looking at the world today, you can tell all those Be-Ins totally worked. Ray protests that politicized youths tend to do things like blow up national monuments and suchlike, but he's really irritated by the fact they "make their own jewelry out of seashells." We all have our one irrational grudge.
Sam then flashes back to playing in the park, and right after he does that, Windy calls out for him, then asks, "You come here to find yourself too?" Before Sam can answer her, Chris nudges him -- "Crime scene's over here" -- and when Sam looks back, Windy's disappeared.
Cut to Ray dripping his lunch all over the bruised body of the murder victim. Sam settles for giving him an "Are you kidding?" look and quickly notes that the man was beaten to death. As Chris goes to roll the body, Sam is a little horrified, but Chris produces the man's wallet with a "ta-daaaa!" flourish and Sam just rolls his eyes at the primitive forensics minds with which he must deal. We soon establish that the victim is Robert Reeves, Jr., and he was in the Navy, a veteran of Vietnam. Both Ray and Chris sigh dolefully, and Chris explains, "The last time a vet was killed, the lieut burned this city down 'til we found the killer. Only thing worse than killing a cop? Killing a vet." Sam looks at the military-memorabilia lighter and broods. Ray is delightfully oblivious; he's wiping his mayo drippings off the corpse and quipping, "Rest in peace, my man, 'cause you just cinched it that we ain't gonna."
Back in the precinct, Gene's vowing, "We're going to get the tough guy who did this, and I'm going to look him in the face, and I'm going to make him cry for his mother." Everyone takes a moment to imagine that, then begins talking about the case: Robert Reeves was 31 years old, he lived in Queens, he's got a wife and son, he'd been missing for a week already. He was also in the Black Berets so, Gene asserts, Robert Reeves was "a tough SOB, to boot." Sam asks if Gene served, and Gene smarts that he would've, but he was too busy burning his draft card and dancing with the Hare Krishna. Sam replies, "I had you down for some kind of military personnel, although I'd have guessed the guy who ties the blindfold for the firing squad." Gene laughs mirthlessly and says, "I'd like to tie a blindfold around your butt to keep you from talking." Anyway, Gene exhorts his entire squad to get this guy.
Cut to Annie mimeographing something as Sam gets the worst end of a telephone conversation with the tinpot dictator at an impound lot. She inhales her stack of fresh copies, then walks over to Sam, who says, "The future may be uncertain, but thing's for sure: things will happen a whole lot faster there. You know, someday even paper will be obsolete." Annie protests that she likes paper -- "I like the way it feels between my fingertips" -- and despite himself, Sam looks a little charmed. Annie heads off, quipping, "I'd love to stay and gab, but I've got to get back to my important work. Annie Norris -- she puts the 'cop' in copies!" Sam is not blind to Annie's potential: he asks her to head down to the impound lot the morning and give Robert's car the once-over to see if there's anything useful there. She's thrilled, and Sam replies, "Annie Norris -- she puts the 'imp' in impound."
Naturally, along comes Ray to wreck the moment. It's time to notify the -of-kin, and he asks Annie to come along with Sam and himself with this can't-refuse invite: "Saddle up, No-Nuts. The deceased had a kid. We're going to need that dewey-eyed doo-doo that only you do." Annie's expression stops somewhere between bemused and irritated.
Cut to a nice outer-borough neighborhood. Sam looks around, as if this is vaguely familiar to him, but he's all business when they meet with the widow Reeves. We see that Annie's expected to break the news separately to the son, outside.
Inside, Mrs. Reeves muses on the oddity of having her husband survive two tours of duty only to die six months after he came home, and she wants to know why Robert died. An uncharacteristically couth Ray assures her they're working on that, then prods for cues to Robert's state of mind. The widow Reeves says that Robert had seemed happy to be home and happy to be with his son, Robby. Sam says, "So, all things considered, he was happy?" The widow Reeves says tearily that Robert had good days and bad days, and he had "re-entry problems" on certain days. We also establish that Robert didn't hang around with too many war buddies, but he did field a call recently from his former squad leader, John Fisher. "I think that he missed the camaraderie, you know? And for that one afternoon, he had it back," the widow Reeves says. Sam then says, "I hate to ask this, but do you think there could have been another woman." The widow Reeves whispers, "Oh, no. No, that just wasn't Bob. No, amongst all my girlfriends, I was considered the lucky one. My friend Marie was very fond of saying a woman could trust no man except for maybe Bob Reeves." Boy, if this isn't a sign that Bob's sneaking around, I don't know what is -- except maybe that anvil pinning my foot to the ground and bearing the legend "There is no way Bob is wholly trustworthy." Sam then sees Annie and Robbie talking and excuses himself to hang out with them.
After a desultory sorry-about-your-dad, Sam notes Robbie's Knicks t-shirt and shares that his dad once took him to a Knicks game -- "It's one of the last memories I have of him." We find out that Sam's dad walked out on the family; Sam then tells Robbie, "We're going to find whoever did this to your father." Robbie stalks off, and Sam lapses into a blue study. Annie snaps him out of it by calling his name, and Sam muses, "Sorry, he just reminded me of -- wait a minute. I'm here!" Annie is like, "You sure are!" but Sam explains that he just blew his own mind by realizing that a young Sam is here, somewhere: "We moved so much when I was little that I don't remember where exactly I lived in the city in 1973, but I'm here! I have to be! I can't believe I didn't think of this before -- it's so obvious what I have to do. It could be the key to getting back home." "And what is that, Sam?" Annie asks, clearly humoring him. "I need to find myself, Annie," Sam says.
We go to the credits. Or, rather, every other viewer in America did. Mr. Sobell and I went into a back-and-forth discussion on the time-travel paradox, wherein Mr. Sobell postulated that you can't meet yourself when time-traveling because "Don't you then have to die, or knife-fight your other self to the death?" and I told him he was clearly thinking of the time-travel paradox where you can't, by definition, go back and kill your own grandmother because then you've disrupted the reality that brought you there in the first place. At one point, I may have been shouting, "Which one of us has read more X-Men stories about time travel? That makes me an expert!" Anyway, we blew our own minds before we even got into the whole idea of quantum physics and parallel universes.
So we go back to the 125, where Chris is regaling Sam with anecdotes involving a Marine bludgeoned to death with a dictionary and Gene executing a personal vendetta against the city's librarians in response. Sam shrugs that it's important to look through old files and "track down every perp who's assaulted a return veteran in the past six months." Chris is incredulous that Sam's plumbing the files. And then Ray comes in to hail Sam with, "Space man! We found Reeves' old war buddy Fisher. He's an uptown man, so you and I are going uptown."
We cut to the two cops listening to someone who could have been a model for Tom's of Finland, down to his well-groomed mustache. Sam notes, "If you don't mind my saying, you look like you're well-acquainted with the kind of people who could have kept you out of Viet Nam." Ray gives Sam a look as if to wonder why anyone would possibly want to hide out from the war in, say, the Texas National Guard or a deferment. John Fisher explains, "I love my country. My father is a highly-decorated admiral. My grandfather helped chase the Kaiser to the Netherlands in World War I. You might say I was bred for combat." Sam adroitly sidesteps any comments about similarities between this obviously wounded war veteran and scion of the military and, say, someone who might happen to be running for president this year, then asks if Fisher can explain why he contacted Robert. Fisher mumbles something blaming the hippies for Robert's frame of mind. Embolded by this display of hippie-bashing, Ray's all, "Goooo onnnnn," and Fisher carries on for a while about the filthy no-goodniks of today. Sam's compelled to speak up: "[The hippies] think they're just being patriotic. They do have a right to peacefully protest." Both Fisher and Ray give Sam a look conveying how they wish they had the right to peacefully kick his teeth in. Sam then says that if you take away free speech, "you might as well be living in Iran." Wrong evil nation, Sam! You should have gone for something behind the Iron Curtain. Anyway, Ray likes the "unwelcoming committee" of hippies.
Cut to a precinct huddle where, frankly, it's not looking good for the hippies. "A privileged band of college hippies who avoided the war with educational deferments" were apparently responsible for seven veteran beat-downs in the last six months. Gene is outraged by the unwelcoming committee: "We came home to parades. Confetti, drums, bugles. Giggling factory girls, all only too happy to share. Today, they come back to getting attacked by the very people they served? When did it all come apart? When did it all come apart?" We cut to Sam looking thoughtful. Ray's just thrilled because he feels he's been given a mandate to beat hippies.
Cut to a squad car pulling up to a building, ostensibly to go visit the club at the top. Some jackball in a dashiki asks indignantly, "Who are you to intrude on our kingdom of awareness?" Ray scoffs, "1968 called. It wants its dashiki back." 1968 is going to be on the phone awhile -- the hippies are still clad in their summer of love togs out here. (Which I find weird and baffling: it's been 40 years. Why can't so-called progressive protestors progress beyond tie-die and peasant prints?) Anyway, Ray's up to the third floor, where some bearded loudmouth named Sticker is holding forth with dorm-room BS. He heckles Ray and the rest of the cops with a humorless prodding that is far too tedious to recount here, and Ray walks right into his role: "A vet gets killed in our precinct, and we asked ourselves, 'What anti-American scum that we know is most likely to have beaten a Navy man until he killed him?'" Ray's betting on Sticker. Sam correctly pegs Sticker as tall bong, no sticky, and dismisses him as a dead end. Then he goes into a flashback -- himself in a park -- and tells Ray that he'll start asking around the other radically chic people in the loft, so Sam'll catch up with everyone else tomorrow. Ray collars Sticker with a jovial "All right! Let's go talk like men who hate each other's guts!" (Oh, Michael Imperioli! Your comedic chops are tasty indeed.) Sam has another flashback to the park, and decides to head up a flight of stairs. He happens to run into Windy, who greets him with a joyous "Two-b! What's this? Twice in one day, we just run into each other!" Sam stammers that he guesses so. Windy won't hear of it: "I guess not. I don't believe in coincidences. I believe in the curliqued whimsy of fate. Everything is connected! Come on, 2B! Let's fun up!" She then drags him down the stairs again, and we enter a much trippier proto-disco with the shimmering and the people dancing. Windy tells Sam, "If you can't find what you're looking for here, then you must have already found it." Who knew Sam was looking for go-go dancers?
Sam and Annie go over the contents of the car -- there's the business card of an accountant, and that's about it. We quickly zoom to the accountant being brought in for questioning. Lawrence R. Jones is like the dapper, left-brain version of John Waters, so I'm beginning to detect an undercurrent of foreshadowing here insofar as why Robert Reeves was killed. (And it is not "He loved movies about Baltimore?") Larry the accountant claims that Robert had tax questions, and Sam pounces, "Taxes? In May?" "Something about an inheritance," Larry says. "Who died?" Sam asks. Larry feints. He then claims that the bar where he met Reeves was at the Carlyle Hotel. The music there is "sensational," a word that Annie picks up on.
We cut to Sam picking apart Larry's story and Annie musing, "If I didn't know better, I'd say that Jones was [waves hand vaguely]." Sam's not getting her tactful little non-verbal cues, so Annie finally whispers, "homosexual." Sam wants to know what made Annie think that, and after dismissing the psychobabble of the day as a load of hooey, Annie says, "Just something about the way he sat, the way he was fussing with his clothes, he used the word 'sensational' like it was made out of milk chocolate ..." Sam smiles at that, then comments, "Women have such great gaydar." Annie's very tickled by that word; Sam modestly disclaims any credit for inventing the term.
Gene comes in and asks for an update, and Ray demonstrates what a bully he is by saying, "Annie brought in a tax accountant, which I think is a great lead if it's April 15." Sam, of course, rides to Annie's defense and says she's got a great theory. Unfortunately, Annie's more attuned to the gender nuances of the 1973 workplace than Sam is, so she punts back to him and Sam says, "I think maybe Robert Reeves is -- ah, was, was a homosexual." Ray immediately begins snickering. Gene demands Sam explain himself. Annie says, "They met at a bar, and ... and if the accountant were gay, and they were meeting after working hours --" She has to stop there, because Gene's brain refuses to contemplate the idea that men can be heroic in battle, then weak in the knees for other men. Gene has clearly never studied his ancient history. Anyway, this ends with Annie rolling her eyes at Sam's crazy ideas, Ray basking in the imagined glow of his own superiority, and Sam wondering why his crazy time travel couldn't have put him someplace cooler. ,/p>
In the scene, Sam and Annie spy Robbie in the alley to his house and swing by to ask if his mom's home. (Answer: No. She's at the butcher's.) While Annie makes small talk about the Knicks, Sam starts tossing a ball with Robbie while saying, "My dad had this way about him. He was the man. The way he dressed, the way he laughed -- something about him, whenever he was near, I felt like nothing could go wrong." Robbie cuts through the BS with, "I don't care about your dad. Your dad left. My dad died." We cut to Annie, who may well be thinking, Oh, SNAP, only in groovy 1973 terms. Sam admits, "It's true. But your dad didn't give up on you. Your dad didn't have a choice. My dad made two promises to me. The first? When the Knicks made a playoff game, he'd take me to it -- and he did. He honored that promise. We took the subway; it was my first time taking it. He held my hand. God, I remember it like it was yesterday. He had a tattoo on the hand that always held mine, it was a cobra, 'cause that had been his nickname when he was a kid." Robbie wants to know what the second promise was. Sam tells him, "It was my fourth birthday party. He went for a walk in the woods and said he'd be right back. That was the last time I ever saw him." Then Sam asks for Robbie's smokes. Begrudgingly impressed by Sam's detecting skills, Robbie hands the pack over; they were his dad's, and there's a matchbook tucked in the side of the pack. Once Sam's done with that, he notices the house across the way. His attention is riveted by the decorative window with three small diamonds; its arrangement echoes the henna tattoo on the maharishi's forehead a few scenes back. Sam tosses Robbie his basketball and goes to check out the house with the diamond-patterned windows.
It's an apartment building, and Sam walks into an empty unit. As he peers in one bedroom, he flashes to it, filled with a child's belongings. Through a torrent of flashbacks -- including that running woman in the red dress we've seen before (from the waist down) -- Sam makes his way over to a corner, pries loose a baseboard, and finds a Thom McAn box. More flashes, then Sam opens the box. We see a family snapshot of an African-American girl standing with her parents, and a box full of doll heads and hair fasteners. Sam studies the photo, and we get a flashback to a little girl playing in the park. His reverie gets interrupted by Annie. Sam haltingly says, "I saw the diamonds. I came in. Loose baseboard ... I found this picture. This looks just like a place I remember living. I even found this box, right where I thought it would be, but look! No G.I. Joes. Wait! Don't you see? This case brought me to this apartment building so I could see this box. I think this is where I lived. I think this was my bedroom." Annie puts on her soothing-the-crazy-person tone and says, "Maybe. And maybe it was just a coincidence." Sam says, "I don't believe in coincidences. I believe in the curliqued whimsy of fate." Annie is more willing to believe in the possibility of lingering brain trauma following a head injury. Sam insists, "Everything is connected!" He looks down at his matchbook ...
And now we're at the bar, Along Come Marys. Gene is looking at two men slow-dance with a mix of disgust and anthropological curiosity, and when his whiskey finally come along, he clicks his glass to Sam's with, "This proves I'd go anywhere for a drink." I like Gene -- he's a resilient old reptile. Sam lays out the case that Reeves used to visit here. Gene's impassive. Sam continues his one-man tolerance crusade with "A lot of people are gay and you can't tell?" Gene demands names. Sam says, "Rock Hudson." Gene groans, "Tyler, you sicken me. The Rock was doing things with Doris Day you could only dream of. What's the matter with you?" Sam prudently decides not to bring down everyone's mood in the bar by foretelling AIDS and Rock Hudson's terrible final days; instead, he calls for the bartender's attention. After a bit of badinage, the bartender says bitterly, "So they finally killed one of us, and now you guys care. Who's the dead guy -- a Congressman?" Sam bites back any quips he had concerning Barney Frank, and the bartender provides backstory on Robert with, "He's one of those guys who just figured out who he really was." Sam asks if Robert was seeing the accountant Jones, and the bartender dismisses that possibility with "Larry's so deep in the closet, he passes out business cards hoping to get rich, not lucky." Oh, that was just weak. Why not "Larry's so deep in the closet, he's got cedar paneling to prevent moth damage" or "Larry's so deep in the closet, he's replaced his aftershave with lavender sachets?" In any event, the bartender helpfully backstories on how the drunken bigots at the bar across the street like to get lit up and then go gay-bashing, since nothing says, "I like women!" more than engaging in vigorous, close physical activity with men. Sam insists to Gene that "Reeves' murder is looking more and more like a hate crime." Gene asks, "As opposed to an I-really-really-like-you crime?"
Then we're in the precinct and Sam's got a stack of files for everyone, as there have been numerous incidences of gay-bashing reported previously. Ray asks, "Gay-bashing? What is that, throwing a party for a queer?" Chris snickers, but he still takes a file. Ray, however, could not care less. He shares that he's thinking of taking "the old lady" (nice) to see Soylent Green. Sam is indignant: "We're not going to put this case on the back burner because Reeves turned out to be homosexual." Ray pushes a file back at Sam and snots, "I don't know what you're talking about." Sam stalks off with his files and slams them down -- which somehow manages to get everyone's attention. So Sam speechifies: "This kind of rampant hatred and prejudice is going to, some day, quite literally, change this city -- the physical landscape of this city -- in ways you can't even imagine! It'll get us into other wars, for even flimsier reasons than the one that just ended!" On the one hand: when you think about the restraint it must take to hurtle back in time and not comment every time you see the Twin Towers, it's sort of amazing Sam's as vague as he is. On the other hand: didn't the Stonewall riots take place a few years before? Wouldn't the police already be revisiting their attitude vis a vis homosexuals and civil rights? ANYWAY. Ray is outta there, so Sam resorts to the only weapon he has left: rampant spoilers. He shouts, "The crackers are made out of people! Yeah!" Ray stops and gives him a look like Jerk!
Sam rallies his two remaining troops (Chris and Annie) and crafts a clever plan: they'll bait the weekend gay-bashers and catch them red-handed, thanks to said bait wearing a wire. Poor Chris is not too thrilled to be said bait ...
... And when we go to the sting operation, Sam is not too thrilled to discover that police technology has not yet evolved to the point where someone's thought to invent two-way radio. He can hear Chris, but Chris is flying deaf and blind. Sam sighs, "Won't it be great when they invent two-way technology for this thing?" and Annie scoffs, "Right after they invent a world without paper." Sam smirks. Chris's voice comes in as he says tremulously, "Just thought you guys should know that this is making me really, really uncomfortable." Things get a little more uncomfortable, when an older guy cruises by and rejects Chris outright. Chris fusses, "Oh, that guy looked just like my Uncle Harold. But my Uncle Harold, he wasn't a-a-a ... no, no, no, he took me to my first Broadway musical." Sam is choking on his own amusement. Annie begins laughing as Chris stops short, realizing that, "Uncle Harold?"
We cut back to the squadroom, where Ray is chillaxing before spending some quality time with Charlton Heston. Gene emerges from his office and wants to know where the others are. Gene tells him, "Tyler got a lead on the dead fairy and went to chase it." Gene asks why Ray didn't go along, and Ray says, "Eh, you know. What's one less rocket-lover in the world?" For some reason, this sets Gene off: "So he's a fruit fly! You know what's worse than a fruit fly, Ray? A murderer! There's nothing lower than a murderer! So what's the difference who the victim was? No man has the right to take another man's life." So Gene's anti-death penalty then? Anyway, Ray has messed up, and once again, Sam has emerged from the midden heap smelling like a rose.
Back in the park, Chris's complaints about nothing happening are interrupted by a beating from three guys. Sam and Annie sprint from their hiding spots and leap to Chris's defense: Annie hops on one guy's back while Sam wades in and begins flinging people around. He soon pulls his gun and has all three youthful bigots on their knees, hands behind their heads.
Back in the interrogation room, Chris, Sam and Gene are settling down for a nice chat with the three young men who beat down Chris in the park. Gene says, with surprising mildness, "Look at my guy. Look what you did to his face. He's a beautiful boy. Look at him now." Except the guy sort of can't, because Gene has decided it's more important for the shaggy-haired kid to look at the tabletop. From a distance of half an inch. Warming up to his subject, Gene continues, "Let me remind you that the murder victim is a decorated Viet Nam vet." He backhands the second subject and the kid goes down with a meaty thud. By this point, the third kid is trembling in anticipation of whatever beatdown he'll get. The slapped kid defends his gay-bashing with "He was a perv and a queer." Gene replies, "Which, in your mind, means he didn't have the right to a long and happy life. And his son didn't have a right to have his daddy." Slappy protests, "We like to mess those guys up. They're disgusting, okay? But we didn't kill anybody. We're just having fun, all right?" Gene gives Slappy a delighted grin and chortles, "So am I!" Then he takes the guy out with a punch to the jaw. I suppose I should be outraged by all forms of police brutality, but I'm willing to make exceptions. Gene spitting on the now-downed Slappy more or less demands it.
By this point, the blond kid is probably in need of a change of drawers. Sam taps him on the shoulder, and the kid nearly jumps out of his skin. Sam sits down and helpfully points out, "So the thing to remember about prison -- which is where you're going to go if you don't cooperate -- is this: in prison, these things you find so offensive, well, they're an everyday occurrence, perpetrated by big strong men on little skinny men as regular as breakfast. In fact, a typical day in prison goes something like this: breakfast, sodomy, exercise yard, sodomy, lunch, sodomy, arts and crafts, sodomy, dinner, major sodomy --" Gene interrupts him to ask, "Detective Tyler, what is the difference between sodomy and major sodomy?" Sam deadpans, "Major sodomy has a big kissing component." The blond guy breaks and babbles that he saw it. From his position on the floor, Slappy shouts, "Jimmy, you don't gotta tell these guys nothing." As Gene slams a chair down on Slappy, he comments, "Neither do you." Jimmy explains that he saw two men in the park -- our deceased veteran and a mystery man -- and after a brief lover's tiff, the second man beat Robert to death with his bare hands. Sam's hung up on why the murderer didn't also kick Robert, then asks, "When the killer ran away, was there anything funny about the way he ran off?" Why, yes -- the guy had a serious limp.
We zip to John Fisher's office. Gene is sitting down, making small talk about Fisher's climb up the military ladder, while Ray stands with his back to the wall, just in case any random acts of buggery threaten to break out. As Sam casually inspects the contents of the bookshelves. he says, "I see you got a lot to lose here -- your honor, your family's respect -- but Robert Reeves -- by all accounts a family man and a good officer -- is dead." We cut to Gene, who is looking as though he keenly regrets putting on so much eyeliner that morning. As well you should, Gene. As well you should. Sam continues, "This isn't how we do things in the squad back where I come from, but if you just tell us what happened, nobody has to know why you did it." John looks around at Chris (still sporting many wounds), at Ray (still protecting his tushie from sudden sodomy), then at Gene. Then he says he won't give a blow-by-blow (as it were) of what happened over in 'Nam because "it's nobody's business" but the real problem was that "Bob wanted to bring it back here, into the world, where everything's different." Gene asks, "Where everything's different? Where you don't get to decide who lives and who dies, captain ... you think you couldn't live with homosexuality, but you could live with being a murderer? Over there, you killed to survive. You killed here because you didn't like a guy was queer!" John loses his temper and stands up, saying heatedly, "Bob thought he was living a lie when he got back. He thought that a man of integrity wouldn't fear what other people thought of him." Gene is irritated that John fears what people think of him, then adds, "Bob had courage." As John babbles that he didn't mean to kill Robert, Sam watches intently. Gene finally orders Chris and Ray to cuff John, then heads over to comment to Sam, "Gays in the military! Unbelievable. What ? They're going to want to get married?' Oh, ha, ha, it's so funny because our Nixoneolithic ancestors couldn't conceive of homosexuals as deserving of full civil rights! It's not like today at all!
As Ray helps march John out of his office -- taking care to ensure that he doesn't accidentally absorb any of The Gay via direct skin-to-skin contact -- he quips, "Lucky coincidence, Tyler, you just happen to collar the very guys who see [John] killing Reeves." Sam deadpans, "I don't believe in coincidences, Ray. I believe in the curliqued whimsy of fate. After all, everything's connected."
Then he's back in Reeves' neighborhood, walking under a sepia-toned blue sky, and Annie catches him. She questions why Sam really has to out Robert to his widow, and Sam says, "The only question Caroline Reeves wanted answered was 'Why?' And now we know why." When he's in the Reeves living room, Sam starts with, "There's something I wanted to say about your husband, Mrs. Reeves, something maybe you didn't know, something you need to know," and Annie sucks in her breath in alarm. Fortunately, Mrs. Reeves is oblivious to all but Sam's steadfast delivery, and she tells Sam to bring it (not in so many words). Sam says, "Your husband was a very brave man. More courageous than most -- much more. And he died for what he believed in, Mrs. Reeves. And I wanted you to know --" Caroline cuts in to ask, "Are you saying someone killed him because of the war?" Sam bites back the reply, "No, I'm saying he believed in the right for two men to buy property on Fire Island" and right as he's about to explain that Robert died over the radical premise that homosexuals have nothing to be ashamed of ... the kid pops downstairs and Sam decides against wrecking the kid's childhood by posthumously outing his dad. He tells Caroline that "It was John Fisher, [Robert's] squad leader." Caroline breathes, "John Fisher? Why?" and Sam looks at Annie for help. She looks back all Hey, this was YOUR bright idea. You're on your own. Sam finally says, "Because [John] resented your husband's bravery. He resented his honor. Because John Fisher realized he could never be the man your husband was. And sometimes the most intolerant men are also the most afraid." And sometimes even the most tolerant time-travelers from the future can maybe think about easing up on the preachy soliloquies. Just a suggestion, Sam.
We cut to Sam walking outside with the kid, warping him for life by telling him to stay strong for his mom. No pressure! He leads the kid through a guided visualization exercise, all, "If you can feel your dad, then he's not really gone. He's here now. So any time you need your dad, close your eyes, he'll be right there." Is every odd-numbered episode going to end with Sam haunting some preadolescent male?
Then Sam's back at his place and rapping with Windy. She asks if he found his self yet, and he replies, "Nah. Came close a couple of times. I'm starting to think that you're right: 2008 is the illusion and 1973 is the definitely a reality. The only thing that exists is right now." Windy exults, "Trippy! I think you're finally getting the hang of this." Hands up, all of you who think Windy's wholly a product of Sam's subconscious and is here as some sort of mental-health safeguard. As the music tells us "I'm changing/ I'm changing everything around me," we zip from Sam to Annie, who is listening to the widow Reeves (who may be, for all we know, saying, "I thought for sure it was the gay cruising that would get him. Who would have guessed that it was a grudge from Viet Nam?"). The song tells us "The world is a bad place/ a bad place" and we cut to Gene draining his hip flask dry, then switch to the squad room where Chris is writing up a report and Ray is looking aggrieved.
Then we cut to the exterior of the subway station for Madison Square. A vendor's selling Knicks pennants and people are pouring out of the station on the way to the game. Sam's walking against the tide of people but is brought up short when he see himself as a tiny child, holding the cobra-tatooed hand of his smiling father. Sam stops, poleaxed. As small Sam passes the adult, we hear the steady thrum of a heartbeat and fix tight on Sam's stunned face. The boy turns around and catches Sam's eye for a second, Sam looks ever more bewildered, and then everything fades but the heartbeat. Oh, Sam -- one step forward, two steps back.