By Omar G
The Third Watch writers spin the Wheel of Character Development and the spinner lands on Ty. So we get an entire episode devoted to him. So far, it's been Sully, Faith, Doc, Jimmy, Kim, and now Ty. Hang on to your hats, it's going to get paternal around here.
The Previouslys remind us simply that Ty's dad had been accused (before he died) of being on the take, but nothing had ever been proved. Ty asked Sully and his mother about it and never got a real answer.
The episode (which is called "The Tys that Bind," and I wish I were making that up) opens with Ty floating, face up, in a pool of water as a very bright light is hitting him. As quickly as we see it, the shot's gone, replaced by Ty sitting up in bed. Dramatic music lets us know that he's conflicted, as if we needed that. Ty takes a gratuitous shower where we get to see the sun-shaped tattoo on his right upper arm. (By the way, Ty: niiiiice torso.) Ty gets dressed, and we see that his mirror is decorated with pictures of him and his father when he was a pre-teen. Ty brings up his gun and dry fires it, and all of a sudden, it looks like he's in a bad made-for-Showtime Rutger Hauer movie where he's going to avenge the death of his partner.
At the breakfast table, Ty is reading the newspaper as his snappily dressed Mom is telling him that a refrigerator is going to be delivered. Ty makes some noise about working on the trim in the living room, and he is ribbed good-naturedly about his supposed laziness. Ty makes some mock excuses and gets two kisses from the woman he calls "MaMa."
In the patrol car with Sully, Ty is talking about how nice it would be to have a career as a detective. Sully complains that it involves a lot of paperwork and boring crap like that. Ty complains that it's better than being bored. "Oh, I'm boring now?" Sully asks. Ty says he thinks the job is boring, not Sully. Then he goes on about how maybe doing undercover work would be "dope." Sully laughs, joking around about how funny Ty would be in baggy jeans, and she does a Duddly Do Right voice to imitate him. "The day you work Buy and Busts..." Sully begins, and Ty cuts him off: "...is the day you do a sit-up. Oh!" Heh. It's pretty funny. Sully tries to start again and gets cut off a second time: "...is the day you eat a salad. Oh!" Very nice, Ty. You get some snaps.
Ty and Sully get called to the scene of an accident. When they arrive, a helicopter is flying erratically overhead. A man inside a truck is bleeding. Ty finds a brick and says it's the third time that week that someone got hit with a brick from overhead while driving. As Doc deals with the accident, Ty notices the helicopter flying in circles. "Mayday!" is called and as Ty, Doc, and Sully watch, the helicopter goes past the bridge and down into the water. My Closed Captioning says a woman is yelling for help, but I don't hear it. The police rush toward the edge of the water and then stop, as if it's a pool of acid. Ty starts taking off his gun and gear to jump in. Sully and Doc try to stop Ty, but it's too late. He jumps into the water. Cut to opening credits.
As we return, Ty is climbing on top of the sinking helicopter. Hey, won't that make it go down faster? A woman inside is reaching down into the water, trying to keep the pilot afloat. It's not working. Ty grunts and tells the woman to keep the man's head up. It's still not working. She's still got her seatbelt on. Ty tells the woman to let go. She's starting to go under too. We see a wide shot of Ty sprawled on top of the helicopter door, reaching in. Sirens arrive in the distance. Ty gets the woman to let go of the pilot and pulls her out of the door. Kim and Bobby arrive in the ambulance. Doc and Sully watch Ty swim back with the woman. A little help, anyone? As Ty reaches the shore, Doc finally moves to help. Kim ventilates the woman and she coughs. Nobody even mentions the pilot, long forgotten in the water. As Doc wraps a towel around him, Ty looks up at the bridge and sees his dead father standing among a group of people. Sad, thoughtful music plays. Ghost Dad walks off.
On TV, Ty is saving the woman again. At the station, Ty walks past the TV and is greeted by Sully, who calls him a "crazy son of a bitch" and gives him a rough hug. "Good job!" Sully says. True male bonding is at hand. Yokas and Bosco add their congrats as they walk by. It's truly a good day to be Ty. At least, early in the day it is. Everybody is giving high fives. Ty sees himself on TV where he's giving a humble interview saying he wished he could have saved the pilot. Or at least mentioned him at some point in the rescue attempt. A woman behind Ty says, "Excuse me," and asks if that's him on TV. Ty says yes, yes it is. The woman asks if she can buy him a cup of coffee. Forward, are we? No, not really, I'm just jealous that Ty gets asked out to coffee by strangers. I mean, just because he saved someone's life, big deal...Ty agrees to the coffee and to meet that night after his shift. The woman introduces herself as Gwen Gerard. She knows that Ty is a Jr. Davis and then plays it off that she saw the full name on the news. Sully does a double take and immediately takes a call on his radio. He answers the call and tells Ty to hurry up and get dressed. Way to bust up Ty's action, Sully.
On the call, Sully tells Ty that he shouldn't go on the date. She could be a stalker or a groupie, or "a badge bunny," as he phrases it. He warns Ty to stay away from the nice, attractive woman. Yeah, Sully, try taking a vegetarian to Ruth's Steak House. Ty and Sully arrive at a big trash bin under a trash chute at the bottom of some building. An old gent leads them there over some woman's complaint and when they look inside, a hand is sticking out. Yuck. A woman is lying in there, covered in trash. Sully and Ty, who are wearing rubber gloves, speculate on a possible cause of death. No blood or marks. Probably suffocation before being tossed down the chute. A noise accompanies a slew of trash coming down on the body. Ty complains that the coroner won't come for an hour, and they should move the body. Sully resists because it's a crime scene. More trash comes down as they decide to move the bin.
In the locker room, Bosco comments on Ty's overly fragrant cologne. "It smells good, doesn't it?" Ty asks. Bosco invites Ty to a poker night, and Sully butts in to tell Ty he should definitely go and reconnect with his manhood. Which sounds vaguely dirty.
Sully goes outside and sees Gwen waiting for Ty. He makes up some baloney about Ty having already left for the night and how he's a heartbreaker. Gwen, who looks disappointed, starts to leave. Just as you'd expect, Ty walks out and sees her going. Sully tries to cover his tracks by pretending he thought Ty was already gone even though he saw him just a few seconds before. Sully, is there some deep dark secret, possibly involving Ty Sr., and possibly cribbed from the movie Lone Star that you're not sharing? As Ty and Gwen walk off, Sully looks on, all concerned.
Over drinks, Ty tells Gwen that Sully acts paternally toward him. Gwen awkwardly tries to talk about something, but Ty cuts her off and asks her to go to the zoo with him. He makes a lame "Lions, Tigers, and Bears" joke to which Gwen responds. Ty offers to pick up Gwen for a date the day and then gets open and crass by proposing that they get together romantically. Gwen cuts him off. She pulls a picture from her purse and hands it to Ty. It's a young girl and Ty's dad. "This is my dad," Ty says. "Is this you?" It is. "You knew my dad?" "I'm your sister, Ty," Gwen says. Dum, dum, DUUUUUMMMM! "What are you talking about?" Ty asks. Gwen says it again because he didn't hear her the first time. We go to commercial. Oh, brother. No, really!
The hotjobs.com commercial with the chick hatching from the egg and escaping is terminally cute. I feel my glands shriveling and my brain shrinking from its sheer adorableness.
Oh, and on ER this week, a helicopter carrying Dr. Greene is going down. What, did John Wells just Xerox the episode, scratch out the title with a pencil and write Third Watch on the script? Sheesh.
We come back to Ty submerged in a pool of blue water. I keep thinking Leonardo DiCaprio is going to swim by and start kissing someone. Ty breaks out of the dream sequence to where he's standing -- in front of a school visiting his sister, the teacher. Ty cuts right to the chase and tells her about Gwen. "I know," Sis says. "She called me." Ty finds out that Sis knows Gwen and has known her for a while. "Who else knows?" he asks. Sis says that right before Ty's dad died, he and Ty's mother were trying to work out the situation. Ty gets upset: "I had a right to know," someone should have told him, blah, blah, blah, paternitycakes. Sis says to leave it alone, or it'll just make things harder for their mom. Ty walks off.
At home, Ty is packing up his things when Mom gets home. She knows what's going on. She found out from Ty's sister. She says that if he wants to know something, to just ask. Ty says simply that he's moving out. Mom asks if Ty thinks it's a conspiracy. Ty says he would have moved out when his Dad died, even though he was only eleven. Ty gets all accusatory and tells his Mom that she should have left the cheater. Mom says Ty is being holier than thou and that things were more complicated. They start to argue about the custody of Ty's bed, which she paid for. He leaves.
In the patrol car, Sully is spouting off about working the subway. Ty drives in silence. Ty stops the car in front of Gwen's house. "You know where we are?" he asks Sully. "Is this where you sat?" Sully says that it never occurred to him to tell Ty the situation, and it wasn't his place to do so. And yeah, he sat there, maybe eating a donut, or a cruller, or better yet, a Krispy Kreme cruller. ["Dude, you're killing me!" -- niki] Ty's just mad.
Under the bridge, Ty and Sully arrive on the scene where a little girl got clocked by the phantom brick thrower. The girl is on the ground, bloody and crying. Ty goes to question some kids who might have seen the assault. The three kids try to describe the brick thrower. They keep changing their story. He had a hat. He didn't. He was tall. He wasn't. He was a black guy, definitely, one kid says. "The suspect is taller than four feet," Ty finally concludes to Yokas, who is standing nearby.
At a hot-dog stand, Sully is explaining the virtue of a hot dog without too many condiments. The secret, he reveals, is eating twelve hot dogs at a time, with mustard. You can streamline the process without all the extras. Ty drinks a bottle of water and ignores Sully. Sully is asking what's wrong, and Ty gives him the silent treatment. Sully sticks up for Ty's dad. He was in love with two women, Sully says, and he never neglected any of his dozens of kids. Ty walks off. Sully looks sad, remembering the good old days when you could get twelve crullers for a dollar. "Give me a cruller dozen for a dollar," you'd say.
That night, Ty shows up at Gwen's door. Gwen looks happy to see him, but it'll be short-lived. "What do you want?" Ty asks bluntly, wondering why she came into his life. He wants to know why she came to the station the day before. She gives a sweet answer: she looks for him all the time, thinks he's a hero, and brags about him to all her friends. "So what, do you think I owe you something?" he asks. She says she doesn't want to be the bastard sister. Ty starts pulling out the cheap blows. He says that his father would have been with her family if he'd really wanted to. "I'm not your brother. You were a mistake," Ty says. Oh man, please kick his ass, Gwen. Just pull your arm back and clock him in his mouth. Instead, Gwen asks Ty to come in. He starts to leave. Reluctantly, he goes inside. What, are you going to pee on her curtains and kill her cat, now? Geez. Just as he walks inside, Gwen's mother comes down the stairs. She is pretty and looks like a nice lady. She says she always wondered what she would say if she met him. "This is horrible," she says finally. She says she's sorry and goes back up the stairs. Gwen calls after her and then goes after her mother. Ty goes to a wall of photos featuring his dad prominently. Dad was the Charles Kuralt of the NYPD.
Back after a commercial, Ty is swimming in uniform again in a blue pool. We come back up to Ty dozing in the assignment room. Cops are being sent out to find the brick thrower. Ty is assigned to ride with Bosco. "Since when?" Sully asks. Turns out Ty requested the assignment. What are you, nuts? "Aren't you being a little juvenile about this?" Sully asks. "No, you are, poopie head!" Ty thinks, as he broodily walks off.
Bosco and Ty take off down the hall. Bosco needed a partner since Yokas is taking her kids to the Poconos. Bosco lays out his rules for good policing. If he sees a black man with a nice car that doesn't belong to him, they pull him over. As they do their thing at the urinals, Bosco concludes, "You ride, I drive."
Following that rule, they're on the road. Bosco asks what's up between Ty and Sully. Lovers' spat? Ty doesn't respond, prompting Bosco to bitch that he's stuck with a totem pole. Ty asks if Bosco looked at the brick thrower sketch. Bosco says it looks like half the guys in the neighborhood, including Ty.
The two stop at the impending danger of an overturned trashcan. Bosco spies a man in a suit sitting on some steps and decides to start fucking with him. He describes a dangerous criminal who fits the man's description exactly. Bosco mocks his baldness and his style of clothes. The man nervously takes off. "This is what you do for fun?" Ty asks. "You ain't seen nothin' yet," Bosco responds.
Bosco and Ty discuss Ty's moving out. He's looking for an apartment. Bosco suggests that Ty look in his little black book and crash with some booty-call nominees, including Gwen from the night before. "That was my sister," Ty says, then lays out the short version of the sister story. "Dad kept busy, huh?" Bosco asks. Ty gets mad, and Bosco congratulates him for having a dad who was a Bonus Round Playa'.
Ty swimming again. Okay, we get it.
At the end of the shift, Ty and Bosco agree that they had fun, what with the fighting crime and harassing people. Inside, Sully asks how it went. He also mentions that Ty's mom called him. Sully suggests that Ty stay in a cell of the detective units because hotels are expensive.
Later that night, Ty is trying the cell thing, but I mean, damn, it's a cell. He tries to call a few numbers and eventually reaches someone. He shows up at Sharon, an old girlfriend's, doorstep and gets reluctantly invited in. She makes him promise it's not a booty call, which it is, and she lets him stay. "Baby, baby, it's not," Ty says. Oh, you are so sly on your way to the booty.
Commercial and booty break.
Ty's no longer in the water, but now he's walking in brightness. The morning, Ty shows up as everybody from Kim to Sully is getting ready for work. He's suddenly confronted by Sharon who yells at him for leaving in the middle of the night. "You are a little boy!" she yells, much to everyone's amusement. "I don't want to know who you are, not anymore," she says and tells him to grow up. As she storms off, Ty blows off the encounter. Sully looks on, all dad-like.
Inside, Ty and Sully agree to hook up again. Sully comes in and asks about Sharon, but gets the silent treatment. I feel for ya, Sully.
Ty and Bosco are called to a brick incident on a double-decker bus. "Another brick?" Bosco asks. "In the wall?" I think. A woman has been hit, and the driver is hysterical. Bobby and Kim call a time of death. Sully shows up, and Ty sees him, looking conflicted.
After the call, Kim is talking about how freaked out she is about the bricks. She asks Ty if he had a rough week. Her theory, she says, is that men and women should avoid each other most of the time. At least when they're not stalking their ex-husbands, right Kim? The most outlandish thing happens then. She offers Ty a place to crash. He politely declines. She says Ty can stay in Joey's room. Oh, wait. Kim is hitting on Ty! Holy crap! It's not enough she slept with one guy she works with, now she's trying to go through the whole roster? Kim, put a muzzle on it. Seriously.
As Ty is standing around trying to get the skank scent away, the driver comes up to him and tells him that he sees the brick thrower. The man points to a guy in sunglasses and a plaid sweater. Ty gets Bosco's attention and tries to get an inconspicuous chase on. Ty says he's faster, so he'll run while Bosco gets the car.
Foot chase courtesy of Ty. Ty chases the guy and finally catches up in a tunnel. He tackles the guy hard and then starts beating the living bricks out of the dude. Bosco pulls up in the car and then stands by and watches as Ty repeatedly punches the guy in the face. Sully shows up just behind Bosco and has to physically drag Ty off the beaten man. Ty struggles and yells, "Get off me! What!" to Sully. Sully pushes Ty back and yells, "What are you doing?" Tense moment. Ty looks down, and it's his father's face on the criminal. Ty takes a walk. The guy on the ground tries to remember if he has Al Sharpton's number on his cell phone's speed dial.
On the roof that night, Ty finds Sully and they talk a bit. "I was gonna kill that guy," Ty says. "No you weren't," Sully tells him. Sully reminds Ty about the swim meets that his father used to take him to. He tells him that Ty's father's second family used to go to the swim meets and that Ty had met them several times. Then Ty reveals that he can't remember his father's face, which is bunk because he keeps imagining it all over the place. Sully talks about Ty's dad being a good guy. He stood by the extra family, giving over all the extra money he had. "You all done?" Ty asks. Sully suggests that Ty is punishing everyone around him who cares. "Why?" Sully asks. "He was who he was. Deal with it." Ty's got more issues than a TV Guide library.
day. Ty shows up at the graveyard. Alright, Ty guy, time to resolve your conflicts. Ty hunches over his father's gravestone. He broods. Starts to walk away. Comes back. Kicks the stone. Way to show that slab who's boss! Then he starts to push over the gravestone as dramatic music plays. You know, the music may make it sound like an epic moral struggle, but it's still vandalism where I come from. Ty walks off and sees his father standing by. Ghost Dad disappears. Then he shows up further down the path as Ty is walking along. They walk with their steps in perfect sync. The episode ends.
Feels like nothing much was solved. Ty is still selfish, Sully is still paternal, and now Ty's little bubble has burst. Wanna make a bet how quickly all of these developments are forgotten in favor of a completely unrelated new episode?
week, the whole cast gets involved when they see something horrific that the preview won't reveal. It's called "The Aftermath," or as it may end up, "The Aftercrap." Only a few more days till we know for sure.