[NOTE: This is one of those cases where writing the review almost immediately after watching the episode wasn't such a hot idea; my main gripe is that I thought that the character of Jerry McCabe was being shoehorned into continuity, as I didn't remember him from the episode in Season One where Andy Jr. gets arrested. So I wrote this big long rant about how annoyed I was with the episode, only to have several people go and check their tapes of that original episode to find out that, yes, the actor and the character had made a brief appearance in that first episode. Whoops. I guess you win some and you lose some...] NYPD Blue, Season 2, Episode 14, "A Murder with Teeth in It" Written by Franklyn Ajaye & Barry Douglass Directed by Donna Deitch PLOT ONE: SIPOWICZ'S FRIEND FROM THE MIRROR-MIRROR UNIVERSE Sip and Simone get called in to investigate the murder of a pimp. When a Department-issue slug is found in the corpse, they figure a cop did the killing. A rival pimp fingers a cop named Jerry McCabe, who supposedly helped out Andy when Andy Jr. was locked up last year in a case of mistaken identity. Andy also says that McCabe was an old partner of his, and that they both used to drink together. McCabe is brought in, and agrees to plead guilty to Manslaughter provided that the sexual details of the case aren't made public (to avoid embarrassing his family). Internal Affairs allows him until the next morning to take care of his affairs before he's arrested, but in the interim, the story is leaked to the press (see Plot Two), and McCabe kills himself. PLOT TWO: ADIOS, BENITA The night before McCabe's suicide, Bobby and Benita are having a post-coitus chat, and Bobby reveals the bulk of the case's details to Benita because he feels uncomfortable with the whole thing. When the story appears in Benita's paper, albeit under the byline of another reporter (who's a friend of hers), Bobby is convinced that she used their conversation to get the story. He's very broken up - if Benita was the one who leaked the story, then Bobby may as well have pulled the trigger on McCabe himself. Benita angrily denies the whole thing, but Bobby's convinced he can't trust her anymore, and they break up. PLOT THREE: SPEAKING OF BREAK-UPS.... Donna's old Ranger beau shows up - he and his wife are separated, and he's looking to start things up with Donna again. She declines, saying she's happy with Greg. Unfortunately, Greg becomes even more paranoid than usual, convinced that she's seeing the hockey guy on the side. He even spies on her when she has lunch with her sister Dana. Eventually, Donna gets fed up with Greg's neverending unhappiness, and they break up. PLOT FOUR: GEE, THANKS FOR YOUR HELP, DETECTIVE... Despite the fact that Greg isn't the suavest guy on the squad, James asks him for advice on how to ask Adrienne out. Greg's distracted, but tells James to just come right out and ask her. However, Adrienne is suffering from a sinus infection, so James holds off for a better moment to ask. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- There. Writing even that much was a major chore - this episode *really* pissed me off, and I need to vent. Even in the worst episodes of the series ("Double Abandando" comes to mind), I usually found some sort of redeeming feature. I had to look long and hard tonight to find one. The closest thing I could come up with were the good performances by Smits and Franz, but both were tied to such absolutely phony stories that I really didn't care. First, we have Jerry McCabe, who most certainly was *not* the detective who helped out Andy last year - that cop was in his very early thirties, slim, and didn't know Sipowicz from Adam. All of a sudden, we're being asked to care about the fate of this Jerry McCabe because he brought Andy and Andy Jr. back together, despite the fact that any regular NYPDB viewer with half a brain could tell that it's not the same actor, or the same character (I don't remember if the name was even the same). Quite frankly, I am very insulted. The writers were apparently so lazy that they couldn't come up with an interesting backstory to get us interested in McCabe - and I think the fact that he was an ex-partner of Andy's might have been enough - that they had to shoehorn him into another pre-existing character from an old episode. That's more than just laziness - that's stupidity. Because of this gross inconsitency, the minute we actually saw McCabe, I lost all interest in his story. Until then, I was fairly engaged - I liked the interrogation of Silkie (the other pimp), and I thought Smits and Franz were doing a bang-up job of showing how crazy investigating a fellow cop can make you. But as soon as McCabe walked into Interrogation, I became distracted, and when they started to retcon the character, my jaw hit the floor in disbelief. Everything that happened afterwards seemed like a waste of airtime. As for Bobby and Benita, I don't think their break-up could have been any more forced. Any two adults with half a brain would've said right at the start of the relationship, "Hey, you're a cop and I'm a reporter. We need some kind of groundrules here. Either we don't talk about your job, or we do it off the record, or we do it all on the record, but we need to come up with some guidelines." The fact that Bobby and Benita hadn't already done this was pretty unbelievable, and I once again found myself disinterested in all that followed. About the only good thing to come out of the Greg/Donna subplot is that they've broken up, which means that hopefully Donna will be given some storylines that have absolutely nothing to do with Greg, who's been like a crutch to her character since she was written into the show. Other than that, the return of Dana Abandando once again signalled a shift in tone to some sort of "Threes Company"-esque sitcom. I really don't have much else to say about "A Murder with Teeth in It" - I'm not even going to do shorter takes (including the Line of the Week) because I really don't feel like wasting any more of my time tonight to the episode. Maybe I'll cool off in a day or so, but right now I'm very annoyed. -Alan Sepinwall -sepinwal@mail.sas.upenn.edu Check out my new homepage! It's at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~sepinwal/ RANDOM QUOTE: "Hey! The missing evidence in the Kelner case! He really was innocent!" "Frank, Kelner went to the chair two years ago." -Leslie Nielsen & George Kennedy, "Naked Gun"