Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
This episode made me cry.
Episode 6.4 “The Subway”
(Dir by Gary Felder, originally aired on December 5th, 1997)
It’s another morning in Baltimore. Salesman John Lange (Vincent D’Onofrio) goes to the local subway station with his girlfriend, Sarah (Laura MacDonald). Sarah goes on her morning run. John enters the station so he can catch his train to work. John is wearing a suit and he’s moving quickly and impatiently. When he reaches the platform, something happens. We see John and a shorter man falling forward as the train pulls in. We see the bystanders gasp. And then we see that John is pinned between the train and the platform. Only the upper half of his body is visible. The lower half of his body is twisted underneath the train. John is still alive.
Homicide is called because, even though John is breathing and shouting, everyone knows that he’ll soon be dead. Pembleton and Bayliss arrive. Bayliss interviews Larry Bierdon (Bruce MacVittie), a man who claims that he was pushed at the same time as John. Pembleton talks to John Lange. For once, Pembleton — who has always tried to remain coolly detached — finds himself dealing one-on-one with a man whose name will soon be going up on the board.
John is confused and he’s angry and he’s demanding to know why he hasn’t been freed yet. He yells at the EMT (Wendee Pratt) who is checking his blood pressure and continually asking him if he’s feeling anything. Everyone seems to know that John Lange only has 30 to 40 minutes left. Everyone but John. But eventually, Lange figures it out. While everyone else — the EMTs, the firemen, the cops — go about their job like any other day (and the EMT herself gets annoyed with John’s constant abuse), John Lange hopes that he’ll somehow get that million to one shot that will allow him to be freed from the platform without dying in the process.
Falsone and Lewis search for Sarah. Actually, “search” is a bit too generous a term for what they do. Falsone and Lewis wander around the harbor and glance at any women who they see jogging. Lewis talks about how much he hates getting older. They spend a lot of time shooting the breeze. At one point, Sarah runs by them and they don’t notice.
At the station, Bayliss discovers that Larry Bierden previously shoved a man in front of a subway in Chicago. Larry was placed in a psychiatric ward. When he was released, he moved to Baltimore and did it again. It becomes obvious that there was no grand reason for Larry pushing John. If Larry hadn’t pushed John, he would have pushed someone else. John’s death is a random case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As for John, he finally starts to feel the pain of being pinned. The EMT explains that she can’t give him painkillers in his current state because it will reduce the miniscule chance that they have of saving his life. Pembleton sits down next to the train and holds Lange’s hand. Pembleton talks about his stroke. Lange talks about how sugar maple leaves will turn whenever it rains. Lange tells Pembleton, “I’m okay,” just before the EMTS inflate the airbags that push the train away from the platform. Lange is freed and dies immediately.
Pembleton steps outside the station, where Bayliss is joking with a uniformed cop about how Larry Bierden apparently thought he could get away with doing the exact same thing that he did in Chicago just by moving to a different city. Pembleton stops to stare at Bierden, who is handcuffed in a squad car. “I want my ID back,” Bierden says, a complaint that he’s been repeating ever since Bayliss initially took his expired drivers license away from him.
As they get in their own car, Pembleton asks Bayliss if he knew that sugar maple leaves turn when it rains. Bayliss says that he didn’t. “Learn something new every day,” a shaken Pembleton says.
Meanwhile, Sarah runs past the station, little knowing that John has just died.
This was an incredibly powerful episode, one that had me sobbing from the minute I saw John trapped between the train and the platform. Vincent D’Onofrio gives an incredible performance as John Lange, one that works because the show itself refuses to sentimentalize the character. John Lange is angry and abrasive and the show doesn’t ask us to like him. Instead, it asks us to acknowledge the humanity that we all share. Lange may not have been a likable person but he was still a person. If he hadn’t been pushed, he would have gone to work like any other day. Instead, because he was pushed, he spends 40 minutes dealing with the realization that he’s going to die. He’s pissed off and he has every right to be.
This was an emotionally draining episode. As I watched, I kept flashing back to my Dad in home hospice care and his final words to me: “I don’t understand what’s happening. I feel so weak.” I was exhausted by the time the episode ended. John Lange wanted to say goodbye to his girlfriend and instead, he said goodbye to Frank Pembleton, the stranger who comforted him in his final minutes.
(Would it have killed Lewis and Falsone to have looked a little harder? To be honest, their failure to find her was realistic and it kept the episode from descending into sentimentality. Still, I’ve never been quite as annoyed with Meldrick Lewis as I was while watching The Subway. Given the previous three episodes of Homicide, I guess I should just be happy that the show didn’t have Falsone magically figure out a way to save John’s life.)
This was one of the best television episodes that I’ve ever seen. And I never want to watch it again.
