Hot, hot, hotter than hot. And dry. But humid. Saps the energy out of you when you go outside. Long live A/C.
Both The Closer and Rizzoli and Isles started with the disappearance of a young child. In both episodes, the parents of the missing child were divorced, and their relationships weren’t amicable. Also, in both cases, the missing child or the parents were known to a member of the police department. However, from that very similar starting point, the shows went in completely different directions.
In the case of The Closer, the missing boy disappeared from a day camp that was attended by Tao’s son Kevin. Tao was picking his son up when the disappearance was first noticed, so he got involved and the case became a homicide soon thereafter. As Provenza noted later in the episode, “I know my way around divorce. There’s bad, there’s ugly, and then there’s this.” The ex-wife has a new boyfriend and she took the ex-husband for almost everything he owned, so there is a lot of bitterness and finger-pointing when the boy is found dead in a nearby swimming pool.
It was interesting to see things from Tao’s perspective, and from his son’s. Everyone in the department is an “uncle” to Kevin. He sits around in the observation room and sees how Brenda handles the “notification,” which starts with an interrogation. Tao keeps sending him off to do homework. When Mrs. Tao arrives later, she is livid that her husband involved him in the investigation. “This is really better than letting him get his driver’s license?” she says. Kevin is 16 and Tao thinks the boy should be concentrating on SATs and homework instead of learning to drive. At the end, Kevin goes on a rant. “You think I’ll drive off and never come back. You can’t hold onto me forever. You just can’t.” Tao hugs his son and says, “Yes, I can. I’ll be holding on to you for the res of your life.”
The resolution to the case, predicated on the fact that the boy’s bicycle was neatly parked on its kickstand, was a real shocker.
In the Rizzoli and Isles case, the story went off in the direction of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard. The clue about the lighthouse seemed a little strained to me. The missing child was the daughter of Rozzoli’s former partner, so it was close to home. A more upbeat resolution, though the episode wasn’t without tragedy.
This week’s Haven was one of the funniest ever. A phial of antimatter ended up stored in a safety deposit box next to a Higgs field disruptor, which means that heavy metals end up lighter than air and the bank just floats away. It’s first reported as a bank robbery, which Sheriff Carter thinks is just super—a real crime that doesn’t require an I.Q. of a gazillion to solve. However, he ends up inside the floating bank (after plummeting 50 feet from his car into a lake), attempting to separate the two incompatible devices so they won’t need to call NASA every time they want to make a deposit. “The bank might be unstable,” he’s advised as it lurches this way and that. “Noted. Unstable bank. But what bank isn’t?” he mutters. Lots of good pratfalls and sight gags, including the bank plummeting to earth once he succeeds. Almost everything returns to normal, except his Jeep ends up orbiting next to the Hubble space telescope.
One of the recurring themes on Covert Affairs this week is the difficulty associated with keeping secrets from family. This week, Annie is followed by her sister, who seems suddenly curious about how Annie is spending her days. Then Annie finds out that her form languages prof was a spy and had, in fact, recommended her to the CIA. Annie gets the unwelcome job of telling the spy’s wife that he had been lying to her for the past 20 years. The prof/spy also had a microdot containing valuable information that had to be found. Imagine looking for something the size of a period hidden among the belongings of an avid book collector. By the end of the adventure, Annie has decided to tell her sister the truth, even though Auggie warned her that after he told his brother they didn’t speak for six months. Season finale next week.
Torchwood took a very interesting twist this week.
The tea party is represented by Ellis Hartley Monroe, played by Mare Winningham. She’s at the head of a campaign whose slogan is “Dead is Dead.” They believe that everyone who should have died since the miracle should be treated as if they really were dead. By persisting, she argues, as if they had a choice in the matter, they are draining resources from living, healthy citizens. They shouldn’t have equal rights. They should be removed, isolated and contained to prevent the spread of disease. Abandoned hospitals are turned into “plague ships” to hide the sick and the elderly. For a while her faction shows signs of growing. She’s stealing Oswald Dane’s platform, until he comes up with a counter-move. He plunges into one of the plague ships like Jesus among the lepers. He picks up a child and hoists it into the air (conveniently visible to the cameras outside). He’s one of them, you see. He should be dead. He will be their spokesperson to make sure they get what they need. Food and security, primarily. Just like that, he has the spotlight again, much to Jilly Kitzinger’s delight. She can’t stand Oswald (she can’t bear to look at “the clever bastard’s” hands, knowing what they did to his victim) but she has a job to do and Oswald’s bravado performance has it back on track again. The video goes viral. He’s the voice of the people again.
Poor Ellis Hartley Monroe, though. Whoever these mysterious overlords are, they decided to get her off the airwaves. They apologize as her car is loaded into a crusher at a junkyard, but her strategy was revealing their hand a little too soon. Her car ends up like the Fury at the end of Christine, but she’s inside and she can’t die. Camera zooms in on her eye. What a way to spend the rest of eternity.
Meanwhile, all roads seem to be leading to Los Angeles. The Torchwood gang is already there, though Gwen lies to Rhys back in Wales, saying that it’s cold and dark and dismal when she is, in fact, walking on the beach on a bright sunny day. Though they have a mission, real life doesn’t come to a halt. Esther’s sister Sarah (there’s probably some Biblical symbolism there, but it eludes me) is melting down and the only way she knows to help is to call CPS. Don’t know what she was thinking they’d do other than take the kids into protective custody. But she’s distracted and it draws the attention of the people who are looking for Torchwood. Gwen, too, is always handling calls from Rhys, mostly about her father, who is ill in hospital and, by the end, is bound for an “overflow camp,” which sounds ominous.
Along the way there’s a good adventure involving the theft of a Phi-Corps computer that requires them to replace it with a clone and start a fire to hide the theft. They also have to figure out how to get by the biometric locks. Their solution is benign. The bad guy isn’t above removing hands and eyeballs. Of course, the bad guys show up at the worst possible moment and Rex has to climb 33 flights of stairs, ripping open his chest again. He arrives to rescue Gwen and Jack just as the bad guy is about to say who the really bad guys are, and he fills the guy full of lead. He can’t kill him, of course, but he shoots him in the throat, effectively silencing him.
Hard to say where the series will go next, but I’m enjoying it.
