While North by Northwestern was on break, FOX’s The Chicago Code aired new episodes. The past three weeks have showcased both the lowest and highest points of the series so far. Here are the recaps of everything you may have missed.
“O’Leary’s Cow”
Aired March 7, 2011
Now that we’re almost halfway through the debut season of The Chicago Code, it’s about time we get an episode that is more bad than good. “O’Leary’s Cow” weaves three different plotlines together to varying degrees of success, but the honest truth is that for the first time so far in its run, two of those plots were uninteresting and painted far too broadly. The strength of the crime-of-the-week managed to buoy the weaker material.
The episode centered on the murder of a young black boy in Chinatown, portrayed as an insular, uncooperative neighborhood with an unofficial mayor Lao (Francois Chau, or Dr. Pierre Chang from Lost) who disregards the police in favor of providing his own idea of justice in his section of the city. The idea of an ethnic community governing itself due to municipal indifference in the past makes sense, and the way in which Jarek and Evers keep running into roadblocks all over the place makes for some very lively scenes with Superintendent Colvin and Alderman Gibbons progressively twisting Lao’s arm in order to help them. Delroy Lindo as Gibbons in particular has some wonderful supporting work throughout this main plot, and he never fails to capture full attention. This also highlights one of the major flaws of the season so far: how little progress the police have made in uncovering very much about Gibbons’ dealings, and thereby getting him some more screen time.
The police hatch a deal with Lao: the police catch some muggers who are terrorizing Chinese women on their way home from casinos in Chinatown and Lao turns over the men responsible for the murder. The little twists along the way are intriguing if a little predictable, but the fact that they occur in a self-contained neighborhood of a city that is not New York or Los Angeles is the little sliver of originality The Chicago Code thrives on. It’s the first time that the show has survived on the strength of the main case that gets introduced and wrapped up all in the same episode instead of the overarching plotlines connected to previous episodes and going forward.
Superintendent Colvin gets her own B-plot dealing with her brother-in-law, who has taken a bribe in exchange for attempting to get Colvin to look into certain city issues. This particular part of the episode felt incredibly rushed, especially where the Superintendent finds out about the bribe, then meets the man who paid her brother-in-law. This plot is wrapped up in short scenes over the course of the episode, whereas it seems better suited to a multi-episode arc where these things could play out a little slower.
Finally, the C-plot and only major plotline dealing with the overall season arc has Liam the undercover cop infiltrating the Irish mob and getting initiated into an arson ring designed to net the mob remodeling jobs in order to pay off city officials and insurance inspectors on their way to reaping a large illegal profit. The more the show focuses on Liam, the more it suffers from not giving him proper motivation to be active in his role but not push so fast as to blow his cover. It’s a tightrope that the writers seem to just not have figured out yet. Even though Liam is sickened by just how far the mob will go to ensure his loyalty and put him between his police ties and new mob family by the end of the episode, it all feels too heavy handed right now.
Once again, everything that Alderman Gibbons does in this episode shines bright, especially the way he acts as puppet master. It shows just how much of a rock Delroy Lindo is as the centerpiece for the whole ensemble. The problem for The Chicago Code going forward is still how to figure out just how quickly to lay down its cards and make a big move between the police, the corrupt government officials, and the gangsters. For now, everyone is holding onto their hands and looking around, which makes things very slow as we inch towards the midpoint of this season.
Final Grade: B+
Other notes:
The police play 16-inch, no glove softball against other city departments. Jarek makes fun of Evers by telling him “this isn’t Evanston,” and thereby making it incredibly obvious that even though the show hasn’t told us yet, Caleb Evers has to be a Northwestern man.
Jarek and Evers pick a cop of Asian descent from behind a desk for her first field action in 12 years of work. How she handles it is just fantastic, even if she then has to be a translator in a later scene.
Nurse Natalie had better become a recurring character, because she plays off of Matt Lauria’s Evers so well, even if the whole romantic sub-subplot played out with the worst public servant danger clichés this side of Ladder 49.
The title sequence is growing on me — Billy Corgan finally wrote a worthwhile song this millennium.
I have to make a second note of Dr. Pierre Chang in this episode. Somewhere one of the last overly-devoted Lost apologists is trying to make a case for how Lao is tied into the rest of that show’s universe in a way that maintains canon.
“You’ll win him over someday.” “Yeah I don’t think God invented that day”
“Better cops have this smile?” “No they don’t.”
“Is it my dedication to a wide range of children’s charities? Because say the word, I will cut those little bastards off.”
“The Golden Coin Kid”
Aired March 14, 2011
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out whether or not the order in which episodes of a given television show were aired out of their production order. That’s not the case with this episode. It’s almost too obvious that somewhere in the course of production of the first season creator Shawn Ryan and FOX pushed this episode back a few more places into the season. The only justification I can come up with is that Delroy Lindo as Alderman Gibbons is nowhere to be seen during this particular excursion of Jarek and Evers. I buy that the network thought this was a weaker episode, mostly because it operates largely self-contained, separate from the police-versus-Alderman season arc. The great failing of “The Golden Coin Kid” is not that an episode that needs almost no prior knowledge of the series is a bad thing, just that most of the substance of these plots would’ve been interesting information to learn about a month ago.
Jarek has gone into Evers’ personal file to discover a few things that had become incredibly obvious: he went to college, specifically Northwestern, before entering police academy, and that he has a lot of ambition, and has even applied to the FBI. This discovery gives the partners a repartee that has already paid off with a lot of humor in previous weeks. In this way “Golden Coin Kid” feels like an awkward flashback episode, showing us how we got to where we already know we are, and that’s a little bit frustrating. We also get bits and pieces about Jarek’s 27-year-old fiancée and just how much Evers knows about what Jarek has been doing with his ex-wife.
One wonderful side effect of the show’s overeager attitude towards meticulously unnecessary details about Chicago is that we get mini history lessons about interesting parts of the city. Tonight we hear about undercover police at the World’s Fair that gave us the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel as well as a tidbit about the history of brothels and how they allegedly protected wives of prominent men from their more lurid sexual tendencies. These moments nudge viewers toward considering how the tactics of Jarek, Evers, Colvin, Moose, and even the people on the other side like Teddy Sr. and the madam of the nightclub echo the history of how Chicago deals with legal and cultural issues over time. As Professor Bill Savage might sight, it creates layers of vertical knowledge about this city and its specific places.
After the side moments that merit praise, we get to the main plot, where Jarek and Evers investigate a modern-day brothel operating inside a Gold Coast nightclub with high-roller clientele. The son of a prominent philanthropist OD’s on heroin, and the ensuing investigation finds the son’s escort girlfriend dead in a car in the river. From there, the show connects to a dot where Superintendent Colvin tries to wring money out of someone from the mayor’s office for better police radios. When Jarek and Evers dig up dirt on the brothel, they ruffle some feathers of the mayor’s big benefactors who may in fact be clients of the Gold Coast nightclub. This leads to a nicely-hatched plan from Jarek and Colvin to get the funding they need for the radios while securing a client list. That’s where the episode manages to work itself into a groove, when plans get set in motion, intentions revealed, and a little genuine frustration leaks out of Evers in response to getting left out in the cold by a partner who’s trying to get him transferred simply because he might actually live up to Jarek’s expectations.
There are a lot of small scenes that earn some credit dispersed throughout this episode, but it doesn’t really add up to much more than an interestingly average procedural episode. There’s some backroom dealing, a case gets solved and the police get some useful information. But whereas other episodes have taken big steps towards plot progress, they’ve never managed to take a big leap closer to solving or changing anything. Perhaps that’s the point the show is making about the institutions of Chicago. As far as narrative television goes, this episode took a baby step forward when it needed a nice big stride.
Final Grade: B
Other Notes:
We get the fictional mayor’s name in this episode: McGinnis. Apparently it’s a reference to a friend of creator Shawn Ryan.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to point out that I called Evers being an NU graduate, despite how obvious it may have been to everyone.
Jarek gets a few nice jabs at Evers with NU-themed jokes, calling him college boy, Wildcat, and a few other names. This works a lot better than over-reaching on the Cubs/Sox jokes in my mind.
“Black Hand and the Shotgun Man”
Aired March 21, 2011
Here it is, an episode that brings all the disparate plots together. Liam, the undercover cop who has been both literally and narratively strung out from the rest of the action in The Chicago Code finally has something active to do. Until now, Liam has only been tenuously connected to the Jarek and Colvin partnership aimed at bringing down Alderman Gibbons, but this is the episode that finally cements the undercover work as the most underrated yet important piece of the puzzle. Liam provides the proof, but in order to get in a position to see everything, he pays a moral and emotional toll. This was the missing element to the police work The Chicago Code tries so desperately to display accurately. Now that it has fallen into place, it seems much more possible that the show can kick into a higher gear for the latter half of the season.
We know the backstory: in order to get closer to exposing political corruption, Liam gets himself inducted into a part of the Irish mob committing arson to make money through insurance fraud and remodeling contracts. The mob plants a body in the house he burns in order to ensure his loyalty. This still gives Liam crushing guilt, leading him to riskily confront Jarek. His motives are substantive: he’s technically committed murder, and under normal circumstances he’d go to jail, and is undergoing a reasonable amount of stress, but Jarek presses home how important Liam’s job is, that his six months of training and year undercover are at stake if Liam can’t keep things together. It’s a wonderful mix of levity on either end of the scene with high tension and heavy emotion that gets everything right, all the way down to putting the scene in an interrogation room.
It’s obvious from the minute Liam becomes Alderman Gibbon’s driver, and that they are visiting the grieving families of Gibbons’ constituents that Liam will eventually come face to face with the family of the man who died in the fire he set, but the consequences of that meeting are far more insidious. Without giving away anything, Gibbons and Liam both understand what crime has been committed, who’s covering it up and the access Liam gains for his silence and service. Delroy Lindo does what now can only be referred to as trademark heavy lifting in his role, but Billy Lush holds his own for the first time, and grounds Liam with purpose.
The Chicago Code has established a rhythm to the way in which the stories in an episode play out. The case-of-the-week features Daniel Romero, a Mexican heroin smuggler found in Chicago trying to pay ransom for his son, kidnapped by Nigerian criminals. This plays out pretty much the way we think it might, with the kid safe and sound at the end, but how Jarek and Evers figure out the kid has been kidnapped, as well as the attempted ransom exchange provide enough twists and turns to keep things interesting. The final twist, that the drug kingpin is also a family man, exposes another deeper theme of the show: all of these characters, no matter what side they’re on, can be humanized and sympathetic, their motives can be justified and it’s just as likely to have a ruthlessly corrupt Alderman as it is to have a heroin smuggler family man sacrifice himself to protect his family.
The third plotline, the personal story, centers on Jarek having ex-sex with his ex-wife, and getting caught by his son leaving the house at three in the morning. This leads to a private referendum between Jarek and his ex-wife on what their relationship is, and what it means in the light of Jarek’s new fiancée. It’s a complicated relationship, and Jarek is the kind of guy who’s been taught since infancy to bottle up these kinds of emotions and not talk about them, so his inability to convey any kind of feeling to his ex-wife or his fiancée leaves him upset when his wife plans to go on a blind date, and silent when his fiancée wants to discuss wedding plans.
It’s taken a little while, but The Chicago Code is settling into a much subtler approach to every movement it tries to cover, from the sweeping to minute, peeling back layers of complexity to get at the heart of just how difficult it is to root out the political corruption in a big, industrial American city, and the toll it takes on the ones who attempt to do the work to root it out. Jarek isn’t a golden boy, none of the police officers are, but they’ve made the decision to work for the good of the people, and it’s Liam’s final declaration of purpose to Superintendent Colvin at the end of this episode that feels definitely like a signal change, the kind of drive that’s been missing.
Final Grade: A-
Other Notes:
The opening voice-over from Jarek about a cop’s nightmare is a great example of the fleeting side moments that the show can pull off with grace. They’ve done a couple of these to open episodes, most notably the chase along the El, but this understated moment landed with a nice impact.
One small gripe: Liam looks for Gibbon’s date book about five seconds after the Alderman leaves the car. That’s horrible undercover police work, or maybe amazingly playing the part of a nosey Irish mob member.
To me this is overly critical, but the racial portrayals of Mexicans and Nigerians aren’t incredibly positive in this episode. Romero’s wife has an emotional outburst yelling “mentiroso” all over the place, and the Nigerians have some pretty bad accents.
I haven’t seen a normal Chicago police patrol car in months, the kind that Jarek, Evers, and seemingly every other cop in this show uses. All I ever see are the SUVs — has anyone seen the run of the mill police cars lately?
“How about I throw you against the wall? Are you ready?”
“I said don’t worry, Jarek’s fine, aside from having not slept in a week, living on turbo-caffeine, and having sex with his ex-wife…I might’ve left that last part out.”
You can still catch up with the first seven episodes before FOX airs the last half of the season on April 11. Find the show online here.