Question #6: What were the exact circumstances behind the shooting of Francis Boyle?

This week we pose a question about an event from Deeks’ early days as a detective in the LAPD. The answer might tell us exactly how much darkness he inherited from his father.

What We Know

In the final scene of Season 7’s “Internal Affairs,” viewers learned that Marty Deeks killed his former partner to protect a young prostitute and lied about it to the people who care about him most. To say this came as a shock to the fandom is a bit of an understatement.

We know quite a bit about Deeks’ ex-partner Francis Boyle, starting with the backstory of Deeks’ relationship with the man. He worked with Boyle as a rookie detective. On their first day together, Boyle got a suspect to talk by using a pot of scalding hot coffee. When Deeks confronted him, Boyle put his gun in Deeks’ mouth. Deeks reported him, spurring him onto a new career path in undercover work and supplying us with the reason for his lack of popularity among many LAPD detectives Deeks has since encountered as NCIS Liaison.

Boyle liked to get high and beat up prostitutes. He was found in a Hollywood motel shot with his own gun. In “Active Measures,” Deeks tells Kensi that people assumed that whatever poor girl he was “whaling on” got ahold of his gun and killed him.

One of those prostitutes was 100-pound, 17-year-old Tiffany Williams, whom Deeks had befriended. In fact, Deeks has always shown an inclination to look out for prostitutes, whose positions in society would make them easy prey for violent men and would likely trigger Deeks’ protective nature with reminders of his mom’s victimization. Tiffany tells Callen and Sam that he was “good to me and the other girls” and “very kind.”

Tiffany reveals (or claims?) that Detective John Quinn, the crooked Internal Affairs detective from “The Debt,” had tried to get Tiffany to set Boyle up in a sting operation that went bad, that Boyle “beat the hell out of” her and threatened to kill her, and that she escaped and ran away. Since then, Deeks had been wiring her $400 monthly payments. Deeks explains to Kensi that “She was a good person who got stuck in a bad spot, and I helped her out… Kensi, trust me, she didn’t kill anybody.”

In addition, IA Detective Ellen Whiting tells Deeks they found his DNA in the motel room where Boyle was killed. Deeks responds that it’s because he stayed there when his apartment was fumigated. When Whiting threatens Deeks with being sent to County lock-up, he offers to plead guilty to “self-defense manslaughter.”

We can also infer from Deeks’ comments to Kensi in “Unspoken” that he felt he had killed Boyle “for the right reasons.” Granted, this opaque conversation never mentions Boyle by name, but it appears to be clear foreshadowing about the IA investigation that weighed heavily on Deeks through the early part of the Season 7:

Kensi: I just don’t understand why Sam would protect some guy that may have killed three people. I don’t.
Deeks: I do… Because they were partners, and to be completely honest, I would do the same thing for you.
Kensi: Not if I murdered someone.
Deeks: I mean, if you did it for the right reasons, yeah, yeah, I think I would.

In his conversation with Hetty at the end of “Internal Affairs,” we learn that Deeks killed Boyle and that Hetty has known for some time and has taken heroic measures to protect her favorite detective. He tells her he killed Boyle because, “He was gonna kill Tiffany.”Later on, in “Under Siege” while the team hunts for a kidnapped Kensi, Whiting is shot by one of the many moles. Deeks confesses to her as she lies bleeding on the ground. He tells her, “I killed Boyle. You were right, OK? You were right all along. He was a dirty cop and I shot him with his own gun because he was gonna try to kill that girl… I’m not a bad guy. I just did a very bad thing for a very good reason.”

What We Don’t

In one sentence, we don’t know if Deeks is a murderer. But when have I ever been able to keep things to one sentence? So let me expound on that… We don’t know the exact circumstances of Boyle’s death. It could be anything from 100% self-defense to 100% calculated, cold-blooded murder. The show hasn’t told us.

In “Internal Affairs,” we hear several conversations about what happened, but it’s unclear how much of what is said can be trusted. While it seems most likely that Deeks killed Boyle, it’s not impossible that Tiffany did, and Deeks is just continuing to protect her, even in his conversation with Hetty. Still, he is so drained, so shaken at the end of that episode that it’s hard to believe he didn’t do it.

Assuming Deeks did shoot Boyle, we really have no idea how it happened. When we first interviewed Eric Christian Olsen, he was surprised by the very idea that the act could have been premeditated. He said, “It can’t be in cold blood. It has to be in some form of self-defense. There’s no version of Deeks that just goes in there and hunts this guy.”

ECO may have thought Deeks to be only guilty of a cover-up, yet before “Internal Affairs” aired, he alluded to the ambiguous nature of the ending in an interview with E! News, where he compared the story to a podcast called Serial about a suspect who may or may not have actually committed murder (Eric thinks he did). He also described the Deeks of this episode this way: “There’s obviously things that you share with the people that you love, and then there are things that are so dark and so deep that you can’t even share them with yourself. I think that’s what Deeks is dealing with right now.” If Deeks had intervened just as Boyle attempted to harm Tiffany, would he sound so ashamed of his actions? Would a cover-up of self-defense warrant so much sadness from him in that final scene?

And while I’d agree with ECO that Deeks wouldn’t have murdered Boyle in a premeditated way, I think there’s plenty of room for him to have shot Boyle more in anger than self-defense, perhaps walking in and seeing him “whaling on” her, or arriving to see Tiffany hurt in the aftermath. We know he’s triggered by seeing women in danger, and knowing that (blonde) Tiffany had been beat up by an abusive man like Boyle would have taken him right back to his origin story moment of shooting his dad in self-defense. There’s a ton of gray area here between Deeks interceding to save Tiffany’s life in the moment, and in a moment of rage, acting to protect her and all the other girls like her from being hurt in the future. I keep coming back to this:

Kensi: Not if I murdered someone.
Deeks: I mean, if you did it for the right reasons, yeah, yeah, I think I would.

Counselor Deeks knows the difference between “murder” and “self-defense manslaughter,” so the writer’s use of “murder” here feels purposeful to me. I also find the wording of his confession to Whiting particularly intriguing: he was gonna try to kill that girl. Not “he was trying” but he was “going to try.” Sure, this is splitting hairs, but it sounds like it could be the difference between Deeks interceding in an ongoing attack and Deeks preventing Boyle from even getting the chance to go off and try to kill Tiffany. Preventing violence rather than stopping it in progress would seem to make a big difference in the eyes of the law. Now we should never put too much stock in such minutiae, but to me, the fact that this confession came well after the events of “Internal Affairs” somehow makes it feel like the writers had adequate time to figure out the exact circumstances and have Deeks address them accurately in the moment with Whiting.

There’s also the way he tells Whiting he did “a very bad thing” in reference to killing Boyle. When he uses this description, it doesn’t sound like he’s saying he did a very bad thing by covering up the killing. It sounds like the killing itself is what he considers “very bad.” And if it had been in actual defense of Tiffany as she was being attacked, would Deeks really describe it that way?

We don’t want to see Deeks as guilty of cold-blooded murder, but it feels like the door has been left wide open. His hesitation when he tells Hetty why he killed Boyle introduced doubt in my mind, just as did his “Unspoken” comments to Kensi about murdering someone for the “right reasons” and his “Under Siege” confession about preventing violence rather than stopping it. Plus there’s the fact that he was ready to confess to a lesser charge- what was his strategy there? Or was it his guilty conscience talking?

Why It’s Important

Eric may be convinced of Deeks’ relative innocence, but many fans were not after “Internal Affairs” aired. The fandom was in such a kerfuffle that I wrote a piece on the “emotional aftermath” that many of us experienced at learning that Deeks had killed someone. If you weren’t around the fandom when this episode originally aired, take a look at that or the review comments to get a feel for the collective angst this episode produced.

Many long-time Deeks fans assumed he had killed Boyle in a less than self-defense situation, and they questioned their faith and trust in him. Some even abandoned him and the show as a result. It was a Big Deal. It goes straight to the center of who Marty Deeks is, and to what extent his traumatic childhood scarred him. We know it’s impacted him in many ways, but was he capable of first- or second-degree murder as a result? To put it another way, we know Deeks has a dark side, but exactly how dark does that side go? No single question we’ve asked will answer that better than this one.

No matter the answer, it would make for compelling television given that the source of Deeks’ darkness is his own father. And somehow that father is also the source of his goodness insofar as he motivated Deeks to try to be as different from him as he could. Deeks’ drive to protect people, particularly women, particularly women being abused, came straight from that moment when 11-year-old Marty protected his mom from his dad.

Either way, a “Deeks, M” that addressed this question could likely find a way to pull in flashbacks to his childhood, to that defining moment in time. Teasers for “Internal Affairs” mentioned that we would see flashbacks there, so they may have already filmed either the childhood scenes or scenes showing what actually happened with Boyle. Either or both (so long as they were well shot) could add tremendously to our understanding of this character.

So whether the showrunners merely confirm that it was self-defense and explore the origins of Deeks’ drive to protect, or go in the opposite direction and show that he was capable of worse, we’ll be fascinated, and likely moved, to learn more about him. Deeks has always been the most human, the most fallible, the most vulnerable, of all the show’s characters. And that’s why he’s also the most endearing, the most interesting, and the most lovable. Even if he’s a murderer.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the Comments below.