The True Test
Directed By: Alan Taylor
Story By: Noel Behn and Tom Fontana
Teleplay By: Noel Behn
Bayliss and Lewis investigate the death of a prep school student, which puts them in conflict with McPhee Broadman (Elijah Wood), an arrogant student Bayliss thinks is responsible for the murder. However, McPhee happens to be the son of Judge Susan Andahl. Pembleton finally passes his firearms exam.
This episode contains examples of:
- Foreshadowing:
- Kellerman and Pembleton both snark at Brodie for shooting the water cooler, footage of which will show up in the documentary Brodie shows them in a future episode.
- Dr. Cox and Kellerman hit it off, which becomes important later.
- Bayliss repeatedly toys with the idea that McPhee sexually assaulted his victims, with no real reason to believe it. According to Kyle Secor, this was deliberate foreshadowing of the later revelation that Bayliss was molested as a child.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Lewis and Bayliss do this to McPhee to get him to confess to manipulating Kemp into committing murder.
- Hates Rich People: Bayliss is surprisingly hostile to the school and the teachers and pupils from the start, given that he has always been one of the more stereotypically middle-class of the regulars. He explains to Frank that this is because the school rejected his cousin's application, he believes because his cousin's family were the wrong kind of rich, and that the disappointment and humiliation had a permanent negative effect on his personality.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Bayliss outright physically assaults McPhee during the interrogation, although the main purpose was to establish him as the "bad cop" so that Lewis could play "good cop" and flatter McPhee into confessing.
- Just Between You and Me: Lewis takes advantage of McPhee's arrogance to charm him into boasting about his own villainy in rather too much detail.
- Mama Bear: Even after Judge Andahl sees McPhee tell Lewis he wanted Kemp to kill her, she will still do whatever she can to keep him out of jail.
- Scholarship Student: Buchanan's status as a scholarship boy attracted McPhee's hostility and made him more vulnerable to the bullying.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: McPhee has managed to avoid prosecution over his crimes because he's the son of a judge.
- Shout-Out: In shooting the water cooler, Brodie says he's trying to invoke the movies of Andy Warhol.
- Smug Snake: McPhee, which is one of the reasons why Bayliss can't stand him.
- Technophobia: McPhee detests computers and arrogantly refuses to learn anything about them. This ends up as the root cause of his defeat, when he got his minions to erase Buchanan's hard drive without considering the possibility that there were back-ups.
- Terminology Title: Also serves as a Call-Back - Pembleton had said before how the true test of his coming back to Homicide was not the firearms test, but the box.
- Uncle Tomfoolery: Lewis coaxes admissions out of McPhee by pretending to be a submissive black man who admires him, even after McPhee racially insults him to his face.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Pembleton gets so nervous about his exam, he throws up, though we only hear it.
