Waking The Dead : What Happened and Why in
Skin

Who Was That?   |   Episode Summary  |   Talk About it in the Forum

I am pretty confident that this what happened and why won't go off track because the episode doesn't have a track. What track could carry neo-Nazis, AIDS, homophobia, catholicism, ultra conservative politicians, British jihad, Romeo and Juliet and all the other stuff lumped into this episode. Gory opening scene - Joe Luke looking postitively disgusting calls D.S. Peter Boyd. Oh yeah, less gory, a guy burns to death trapped in some building.

Dr. Eve Lockhart and D.I. Spencer Jordan investigate the remains of a corpse that has been lodged into some air ducts. It's been there a long time, but no one noticed it because sometimes rotting flesh doesn't smell. Along with it, Eve finds a piece of cloth with a swatztika sewn on it.

Boyd is busy with Joe Luke. Let him stay busy with him. I'll pretty much ignore it for now.

Poor Spence, he tries to assume some leadership of the team while Boyd is on a mental holiday and nothing comes of it. Boyd returns to the office to protect his territory. Eve explains that the body is mummified because of the warm air. According to his bone fractures it seems as if the man were beaten and then thrown down an air shaft. Their initial assumption is that the man is a skinhead. Grace Foley notes, "violent culture, violent death." You would think bynow that they would stop making conclusion without any real evidence, but then each episode would only be 15 minutes. The big clue that keeps the case moving is that there is an imprint of a key embedded into his body. Actually they have the key as well, but the imprint makes for good tv. Eve gets the serial number of the key, D.C. Stella Goodman traces it to a housing complex and they're off.

Somewhere in the south east side of London, two teens, Selim and Hassan are defacing posters for the Democratic Nationalist party. A man, Terry comes out to confront them calling them Ali Baba. Hassan replies: "Your country is run by gays and women." Clearly, this isn't a gathering of intellectual giants.

Spence and Boyd put the key into a lock for an apartment or flat and open it. It probably isn't legal, just because you have a key does not mean you have a right of entry. But this is the cold case squad, they have enough to worry about without having to think about what may or may not be legal. There are traces of a debate between Spence and Boyd. Spence wins the debate because he is standing in front of the door and he has the key. Although it is hard to believe that Boyd would be the one urging caution.

A woman inside demands to know what they are doing. They say the key was found on man who has been dead for 20 years. She says it must be George Andrews. Not the usual way you notify someone of a death but whatever.

George was a friend who lived with the woman, Marie Waters, and her husband, now ex-husband, Jim Brown for a short time. The last time George was seen was New Year's Eve 1990. It was the same day Marie found out she was pregnant.

Marie's daughter, Natalie has a new tattoo on her back shoulder saying Daddy's Girl. That's nice, until you realize her dad is a repulsive bigot. Right off you can tell she isn't really like daddy in that she does not share his hatred of Asians and Middle Easterners and no doubt much of the world.

Boyd and Spence go to Brown's hangout spot. The two of them seem to relish forcing the issue of Brown's racism. They question him about George Andrews and he denies knowing him. They don't really believe that he didn't know the man who was sharing his house. They arrest him for obstruction. Criminals are such oddballs. Why did Brown deny even knowing George? What did he think - that they were questioning everyone in London and were at his place because he showed up so early in the alphabet? He could not have even thought that since they would have hit his accomplice Armstrong first. Clearly the cops must have had some information connecting Geore to Brown. If we give Brown the biggest benefit of the doubt then we can say given the separate connections he had with George, then the best strategy is to play dumb and let the police reveal what they know.

Natalie meets up with Selim and Hassan to find that they are still defacing posters. She is annoyed by this because apparently Selim promised her he would stay out of it. At first he's defiant, but moments later makes it up to her with a kiss. The young couple think they are alone, but Jim's buddy Terry is spying on them.

Brown claims that Rashid Said threatened George. Rashid owns the business across from Brown's and is Selim's father. Even though it was not true, Said believed George set fire to his house, with his wife and child inside. Theoretically, this gives him motive to want to kill George.

Eve finds bits of decayed nothing inside George's mummified mouth and reconstitues it to create the remnants of a photograph which had been torn into pieces. The photograph is of the man who we saw at the very beginning of the episode trapped in the fire. In the picture he is shirtless. It is something of an intimate pose. Later we will find out that the man in the photograph is Charlie Ayanike and he died in the St. George's fire on January 1, 1990

Grace is concerned that Boyd did not get enough information out of Marie Waters. Grace thinks it odd that Marie told them the specific date that George disappeared. The bizarre conversation finally wraps up with Boyd saying Grace should bring Marie in for more questions.

Boyd tells Spence to collect Brown's dna, Spence tells Stella to do it. While in the interview room with Stella, Brown puts his hands where they should never go. Stella elbows him, but not hard enough if you ask me. Brown takes his shirt off and challenges her to hit him in his solar plexus. Stella punches him in the nose drawing blood. Spence and Boyd return to the room. Spence subdues Brown but Brown announces that he is infected with AIDS. Stella rushes to the lab to tend to her bloody hand. Boyd tells Stella what she did was completely unacceptable. Just one more thing to make this entire episode unbearable.

Martin Armstrong is not only a political candidate but Brown's attorney. Armstrong makes noises about reasonable force. Crazy Boyd acts as if Armstrong has any kind of point. Stella was clearly acting in self defense. She was in physical jeopardy and needed to regain control of the situation. Is Boyd upset because she had a reason for her anger while he believes that angry outbursts should never be predictable?

Back to the trying to figure out who killed George. The team speculate that since the man in the photograph is black, that the picture was forced down George's throat as some form of punishment. They are still clinging to their initial assumption that George was a white supremacist.

Jim finds out about Natalie and Selim and true to his nature slaps his daughter around to make his point. Too bad Stella was not allowed to beat him enough to send him to the hospital. Then he would not have been able to beat a defenseless teenaged girl.

They interview Rashid at the office. He says the first time he ever saw George, George attacked him. It made for a great way for George to introduce himself to Brown and crew. You might even think George planned it that way. You might think it, but it will take the squad a while to piece it together.

Grace gets her interview with Marie. The big thing that comes from it, is that George and all of Brown's gang have tattoos of a phoenix and flames. Even though they have lots of tattoos, these shared phoenix symbol is a way for them to bond over a fire.

Grace also identifes the man in the picture as Charlie. Don't be hard on her, she doesn't get the flashbacks like we do. We also learn that Charlie was wheelchair bound.

Boyd and Spence pay a visit on Charlie's brother, Father Raymond Ayanike. Father Ayanike denies knowing George. Everyone does. It turns out Charlie was HIV positive. His brother denies that he was gay because that would be a sin. Father Ayanike is concerned that the fire that killed his brother was never investigated. Boyd wonders if Father Ayanike exacted his own revenge and asks for a dna sample. While standing at Charlie's gravesite, Boyd has the forensic presence of mind to collect a few pebbles that adorn the grave. Earlier Eve had found some pebbles in the soles of George's shoes. I wonder if they'll match.

Armstrong drops in to see Marie and makes some cryptic statements. Later we learn that she was the alibi witness who got Armstrong and her husband Jim out from under suspicion for the fire that killed Charlie. Marie gets most upset when Armstrong mentions Natalie. The obvious part is that Marie lied to proetect the men, but there's still some mystery with Natalie that is never explained.

Stella and Eve, separately, yet simultaneously reach the conclusion that George's real name is Samuel Cohen. They also assume that he is Jewish. This completely and utterly baffles the team. Stella found that George or Sam and Charlie had been arrested together in a gay pride march. They at first speculate that profound grief may have brought on a radical personality change in George. Eventually, they wind their way around to the possibility that George sought these people out to exact revenge. This idea is dismissed because George is the dead one and Brown and his gang are all fine. Grace goes as far to say that due to some profound need to belong, George sought out the skinheads and adopted their personalities.

As if that scene with the cold case crew was not enough to want to make you drive a nine inch nail through your own head, we get a prolonged flashback with the neo nazis sitting around watching a looped videotape of Charlie burning in the fire. They cheer and celebrate as he chokes down his final breath. George stands in the back in the room, at first he just watches, but within moments joins in on the gang's display of victory.

Boyd goes to see Charlie's brother again and confronts him about knowing Sam. Raymond says he never liked or trusted Sam so he preferred to forget that he existed. Raymond is upset that Charlie never repented as he was dying from AIDS. He blames Sam for this and consequently for Charlie burning in hell.

Boyd pouts and exclaims he cannot see any difference between Jim Brown and Father Ayanike. He calls them both ignorant bigots. He's also still being a huge jerk to Stella.

Someone plants a bomb at DNP headquarters which explodes while Armstong is delivering a televised speech. The next we see is Selim on a matyr video claiming credit for the explosion and speaking of a British jihad. Earlier, Natalie and Selim had a heart to heart. She wanted to run away to get away from it all. He thought the elections and war were important and wanted to be around to participate. We don't get to see how this conversation is resolved so it looks as if Selim's political leanings won out over love.

No so fast; Selim is being held captive by Brown and Armstrong. For a moment we cannot be sure if he is a captured bomber or an enslaved victim. He's a victim. It was Brown's idea to force Selim to make the martyr video. They are also the ones who planted the bomb, which as Eve discovered, was designed to do as little real damage as possible. "All flash, no crash."

Spence and Grace are still struggling with trying to make sense of Selim being the bomber. Grace says he looks too nervous in the video. He has no record of any other activity even remotely similar. He can't be a suicide bomber or matyr if he were no where near the scene of the bombing. Fortunately, before their heads explode Boyd comes in and declares that Armstrong is a suspect. Spence is outraged, claiming that Boyd is only doing this because he doesn't like Armstrong's politics.

Spence believes Father Ayanike killed George. This would mean that Ayanike waited a full year since the fire to hunt down and savagely beat George, tear up a picture of his dead brother and shove it down George's throat and then throw George's body down an air shaft. Spence feels that since Eve matched the pebbles from George's boots to his those from his lover's gravesite bolsters his theory that the priest is the killer but not that George wanted to visit the grave.

Grace in a rare case of observing something that actually exists, notices that the flames of the phoenix tattoos look like Cyrillian letters. They wonder why George's tattoo doesn't have the flame letters since only the other men in the group.

Boyd grills Ayanike on what he was doing on the anniversary of Charlie's death. He says he heard someone banging on the door, no one was at the door but he did find that someone had thrown the flowers on Charlie's grave on the ground. He attributed it to vandals. Boyd is upset that Ayanike would make such a twisted assumption because it neglects the idea that George would want to be at the grave on that night. Instead of being upset, Boyd should sign him up for the Cold Case Squad.

Rashid Said drops in to plead his son's case. He is joined by Natalie and Marie. Rashid makes you long for the old fashioned Joe Boyd moments when he asks if Boyd has a son. In the good ole days the person badgering Boyd would say that he couldn't know what it was like to have a missing child. Now we get could you imagine your son killing innocent people.

Natalie volunteers that she and Selim were going to run away together. It casts doubt on his motivation to bomb the DNP headquartrers. Boyd takes Natalie to the interview room where they are keeping her father. He promises to keep her safe from the batterer. Natalie says that she wants to press charges against him. It looks as if Jimmy miscalculated and thought Natalie would choose him over Selim. No worries, he still refuses to say where he is keeping Selim.

George/Sam had AIDS so Boyd speculates that perhaps he was bisexual, had an affair with Marie who then passed the disease onto her husband, Jim. For real, that's his first thought. Marie isn't infected so that's a non-starter.

Eve uses a computer program to separate the background sounds of Selim's matryr tape. It might have been a nice touch if Spence or Stella had done this since they have both been shown to be well versed with computers and it would have given them some police work to do. Anyway, Eve finds the sound of a small airplane engine and the pitch of the sound means it is near a landing strip.

They cross match airstrips within earshot of bakeries that would use almond oil. They luck out or we luck out because Stella and Spence dress up in their shoot 'em up outfits. They interrupt the gang just as they are stringing up and torturing Selim.

Boyd is convinced that George infected Brown and his friends with HIV when he gave them their phoenix tattoos. I don't know how it happened but he's right. I know how the infecting took place, I just don't know what caused Boyd's brain cells to arrive at that conclusion. Boyd says that George is no better than a mass murderer. Grace without missing a beat from her earlier psychological assessments manufactures another theory of George's behavior. I wonder if she even remembers any of her earlier thoughts of whether they evaporate from her head faster than cotton candy in a child's mouth.

Miraculously, Eve is now able to state with precision each act of torture carried out by Brown and the others to torture and kill George. Boyd confronts Brown with the information. He also plays a recording he made of Armstrong earlier saying that he would be willing to testify against Brown. Brown assumes this means about the hospice fire and killing George, it wasn't.

Brown confesses that George stole a videotape of the group killing Charlie. The tape is still missing. In exchage, Boyd tells him that George used his AIDS infected blood to taint the tatoo needles.

Marie knew that George went to hide at Father Ayanike's church and told Armstrong. Ayanike fills in the blank when he says that he saw George being dragged off by Brown and the others. He did nothing to help.

They find the videotape hidden at Charlie's gravesite. It turns out not to be the incriminating bit of drama they hoped to see. That is, not until Eve manages to pick out a grainy reflection of Armstrong watching the fire. They "correct" the image in that magical way that tv can improve a still image from an average camcorder tape that is almost two decades old and which was kept in a tin can covered by crushed glass but still subject to heat, cold, rain and humidity. It was enough to get Marie to recant her alibi statement. Armstrong withdrew from the election.

They were really reaching for poignant moments throughout the episode but failed miserably. There was a scene early on when Spence and Boyd went to neo-Nazi hangout while they were drinking tea. Brown offered Boyd a cup but pointedly did not offer Spence. Natalie handed the cup to her father who handed it to Boyd who handed it to Spence. The companion to that scene was towards the end when Brown was in custody. He was coughing presumably because his disease is wreaking havoc on his body,. Boyd offered him water but it was Spence who was holding the glass. If Brown wanted to quell his cough he would have to accept the glass from Spence. It sounds more interesting on paper. They also tried to tug at the heart strings with flashbacks between George and Charlie. It didn't really work because we didn't know enough about either one of them. The repeated scenes with Charlie burning to death were nothing short of disgusting, no poignancy there. And oh, just say no to all things Joe Luke Boyd.

The one moment that really worked was when Natalie found out that Selim had been found alive and she ran excitedly to tell his father. It was pleasantly understated.

There was one thing about the episode that had me completely puzzled. They said that Marie lost the baby she was carrying on the day George disappeared due to a beating by Jim.

They never really explained why they killed Charlie. Was it because he was black, or because he was black and gay or because he was gay, black and had AIDS or because he was just there. I don't doubt that people like that are willing to kill helpless strangers but it seems odd that it was their one and only big hurrah. Big question of the episode: How was George able to track down Charlie's killer's with such ease, when the cops remained wholly clueless?  I think I've thought about this as much as I care to do.  If you can fill in any of the blanks, post a message in the forum.