“Man, I’m batting one thousand tonight here, huh?” – Hank
The flashback narrative device is one that always seems to really work or really fail. Lost made them essential to its form and with a few individual exceptions, always provided interesting insight into what the characters did to get them to the Island, both the physical piece of land and the turmoil and regret that was an island in itself. A similar (in structure, not grandeur) show, The Event, uses flashbacks as a story-telling device first and foremost and the conceit offers little in terms of character development or emotional resonance. In that regard, The Event’s use of flashbacks seems inconsequential to the story as a whole. Sure, it allows for the occasional twist to be thrown in based on “past information” coming to light, but in general, the nonlinear narrative seems to be in place just for the sake of keeping up the appearance of ingenuity.
But Lost and The Event are shows, regardless of success with the flashback format, that use some version of it every episode. It can be far more jarring to see it utilized on a show that, for the most part, has stuck to a linear storyline like Terriers. “Sins of the Past” isn’t a perfect episode. One bit really bothered me, which I’ll get to later. But if you ignore this one element, you’re left with an episode that makes the various mental and physical hardships that these characters have been going through during Terriers’ phenomenal debut season seem all the more heartbreaking.
Laura Ross, the spunky reporter we met last week, returns to find Hank (Donal Logue) has been becoming almost serial killer-like with his wall of information about the Zeitlin conspiracy. And while I’m sure that will be the crux of the final two episodes of the season (and likely the series) will focus on said conspiracy, Laura is there to see if Hank remembers the name Billy Whitman. Of course, he replies, the Whitman case was the one that brought his alcoholism to a head and led to his firing and the destruction of his marriage. Well, it may be three years too late, but Laura thinks she solved it.</p>
So we take a stroll down memory lane, back when Hank and Mark (Rockmond Dunbar) were partners and back when both men still had their vices: Hank with his booze and Mark with his cigarettes. For the past few weeks, women who lived alone in condos had been getting raped. The Ocean Beach Police Department might have caught a break when a car-jacking suspect is brought in in the same vicinity of a victim. The car’s owner belongs to the rich heir to a SoCal fortune named Billy Whitman. The car-jacker is named Britt Pollock (Michael Raymond-James).
Britt is quickly dismissed as a suspect following his interrogation by Hank. In fact, the latest victim was saved from being actually raped because Britt happened to be breaking into her house at the time to rob her and came across the attacker, scaring him away. Hank doesn’t think much of Britt but can appreciate how much he actually cared about the woman and has him set free.
Meanwhile, he begins to wonder: what was a rich snob like Whitman doing in the low-rent neck-of-the-woods where the attack took place? Looking into Whitman’s past, Hank finds a lot of past transgressions with women that were mostly off-the-record thanks in large part to his parents’ wealth and influence. They even went so far as to build a new football stadium at his college following a frat party turned ugly. And in a stunning coincidence, Hank finds out that Gretchen (Kimberly Quinn), with who he is still married to at the time, actually dated Whitman in college and had a traumatic enough of an experience to never want to discuss it.
And it is the mystery surrounding Gretchen’s past with Whitman that really seems to push Hank over the edge. He becomes more and more obsessed with Whitman and his drinking problem is reaching beyond-dangerous proportions. These two factors lead to Hank ultimate disaster when during one of Hank’s blackouts, Whitman is driven off the road and various sexual assault tools are found in his trunk, though witness testimony proves that they were planted. Hank is accused and quickly fired from the force and Whitman goes free.
Intercut between the flashback storyline is the new information Laura and Hank bring to Mark regarding her new break in the case. Whitman is brought back in as a pair of panties found at a previously-thought-to-be unrelated rape in Temecula now seem to be connected, well before the rapist had perfected his method of destroying all physical evidence on the victim and her clothes. Mark attempts to scare Whitman into admitting he is the rapist, but he says nothing.
And here comes the twist I didn’t really like. Well, let me be clear, I did really enjoy one part of it. Whitman turns out to be innocent and I like that despite Hank’s obsession, he had the wrong man all along. This is a nice way of pounding it home that Hank’s alcoholism really did ruin his life and made him into a terrible cop/husband/human being. It also makes his redemption all the more impressive.
But here’s the part I didn’t like: the real rapist turned out to be Mark’s current partner, Detective Reynolds. They had hinted at it earlier in the episode when a victim had been brought in for a voice lineup and Reynolds had hopped in to fill the necessary quota. But when the victim vaguely thought he sounded like her attacker, the focus was shifted onto Hank trying to influence the woman that Whitman’s voice is the one she recognized. It was all too telegraphed and having a character we’ve met several times before randomly be a long-time rapist is just too much of a stretch. But this is one of those “ends justify the means” kind of things as the conclusion was worth it to gain all the insight we got into Hank’s character and his downfall three years ago. No matter who the right man was, it’s all the more important that Hank had previously fingered the wrong man.
Mirroring Hank’s mistake three years prior, Britt makes a similar incorrect decision in the present. After moving out of Katie’s (Laura Allen) house and into Hank’s, Britt comes across a Polaroid of Katie with her fellow student, Gavin, that had been flirting with her prior to her eventually sleeping with her professor. Assuming that Gavin was the “other man,” Britt tracks him down (against Hank’s advice) and beats the living hell out of him. Britt is arrested and, due to the extreme nature of his crime, is in real trouble. But in his mind, it was all worth it to get to Gavin. From behind bars, he has to listen to Hank admit that Gavin isn’t the right guy — and that he knows this because Katie told him about her mistake weeks before. Betrayed, Britt angrily sends Hank away.
Both Hank and Britt made assumptions about someone that later proved to be wrong. The difference between the two is that Hank had three years before he found out how wrong he was. Britt learns almost immediately. Yet even with the differences in time, neither likely gains any comfort from their realizations.
Lingering thoughts about “Sins of the Past”:
- Man, Britt took Winston away from Katie in just about the coldest way possible. “I can’t cut him in half, Katie.”
- Really cool transitions between the past and present scenes, especially near the end of the episode when they happened more rapidly.
- I wonder if Hank is offered a chance to return to the police department by the season’s end since he never actually drove Whitman off the road.
- By the way, if I didn’t make it clear, Whitman was brought back in for questioning in the present to set up Reynolds. With Reynolds thinking the panties would eventually lead to him, he destroys them and is caught on tape doing so, thus proving he was the rapist all along. Again, very telegraphed, but I also liked how Hank was forced to admit that Whitman did a stand-up thing by helping keep a monster off the streets, even though Hank knows Whitman is still a lesser monster in his own right.
- “Yeah, I was a troubled youth.” – Britt
- “So she blogs? Do you tweet?” – Mark
- “Why you looking all crazy eyed?” – Mark
- “Speak not.” – Mark
Some stats and info about Terriers, “Sins of the Past”
TV SHOW – Terriers
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 1, Episode 11
AIRED ON – November 17th, 2010
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FX
GENRE – Drama, Comedy, Crime Dramas
CREATED BY – Ted Griffin
CAST – Donal Logue, Michael Raymond-James, Laura Allen, Kimberly Quinn, Jamie Denbo, Rockmond Dunbar
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.