L&O: episode 7
Oct. 19th, 2024 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyThis one has to do with sexual assault so, trigger warning.
Most or all of these episodes have been based on real Toronto crimes, some of which I know a fair bit about, so I'd assume that most people would, as I'm not a particular Crime Knower or anything like that. Only this one so far has had a disclaimer that it's a work of fiction at the beginning, which should have given me a tip as to who it was about. After the usual confusing open where we meet our entire cast without context, it started with a dead woman in a luggage case on a bus. And like. We're not a particularly crime city, I swear, but this could be several real cases and gave me my first jolt of "Oh no they might make an episode about someone I know one of these days."
It turns out that yes, this episode is about someone I have met. Fortunately, I didn't know him well enough to be one of his victims, but we've met and had conversations and such. He didn't murder anyone, by the way, either in real life or in this story.
Yeah folks this one is about Jian Ghomeshi. I first met him through activism and he seemed like one of those rare media guys who actually had a genuine political stance, and he was kind and down to earth and very, very pretty. I enjoyed listening to his radio show. I didn't find out until years later what a bullet I'd dodged. I started hearing rumours that he was a sex pest years before women started coming forward with allegations. I don't remember who I first heard it from—I live in Toronto, after all, so I know people who work in entertainment—but by the time it hit the news, I knew enough to not be surprised, and I'd been warned never to be alone with the guy.
Ghomeshi is very litigious, hence the disclaimer at the beginning of a story which is about a radio personality having nonconsensual BDSM sex with literally every young woman he works with. When one winds up dead, he's the prime suspect, except his alibi is basically that he was raping another woman at the time. That just about checks out. Anyway, turns out it was the production assistant, who did it under orders from the executive producer. His pattern of abuse was kept quiet for years because so many people's careers depended on his career.
In the end, all three assholes get arrested. Because we don't see the Law part, only the Order part, it's unclear whether the expy here hires Marie Henein to defend him and Navigator to contest the story in the media, so it has a much happier ending than it went IRL. Still, I guess it's a little cathartic.
The whole thing is in poor taste. I mean, the whole show—presumably the whole franchise—is in poor taste but. Yeah. I don't feel especially great about this one in particular. It uses the format to paint a version of the story where there wasn't actually a catastrophic failure in the criminal justice system that allowed a sexual predator to get off scot-free. That said, if I didn't know about the real story, it was one of the better-written ones.
Plot: *** (not a bad plot actually, by the low bar that this show has set so far)
Character: * (seven episodes in, we have a name for Bateman—Frankie)
Toronto: *** (this case is probably top 5 in terms of Toronto crimes and pretty specific to our media ecosystem. Plus the victim lives in Kensington Market, and her roommate, the first suspect, has a plausible motive in that she wasn't paying her share of the rent and it's hard to find an affordable place. The other locations are plausible places for the characters to live. We don't get any particularly cool locations, though, and it loses a point for an address that I was pretty sure couldn't exist and I Google Mapped it and nope, it doesn't exist.)
Murder count: 12 (16% of all murders in the city)
Most or all of these episodes have been based on real Toronto crimes, some of which I know a fair bit about, so I'd assume that most people would, as I'm not a particular Crime Knower or anything like that. Only this one so far has had a disclaimer that it's a work of fiction at the beginning, which should have given me a tip as to who it was about. After the usual confusing open where we meet our entire cast without context, it started with a dead woman in a luggage case on a bus. And like. We're not a particularly crime city, I swear, but this could be several real cases and gave me my first jolt of "Oh no they might make an episode about someone I know one of these days."
It turns out that yes, this episode is about someone I have met. Fortunately, I didn't know him well enough to be one of his victims, but we've met and had conversations and such. He didn't murder anyone, by the way, either in real life or in this story.
Yeah folks this one is about Jian Ghomeshi. I first met him through activism and he seemed like one of those rare media guys who actually had a genuine political stance, and he was kind and down to earth and very, very pretty. I enjoyed listening to his radio show. I didn't find out until years later what a bullet I'd dodged. I started hearing rumours that he was a sex pest years before women started coming forward with allegations. I don't remember who I first heard it from—I live in Toronto, after all, so I know people who work in entertainment—but by the time it hit the news, I knew enough to not be surprised, and I'd been warned never to be alone with the guy.
Ghomeshi is very litigious, hence the disclaimer at the beginning of a story which is about a radio personality having nonconsensual BDSM sex with literally every young woman he works with. When one winds up dead, he's the prime suspect, except his alibi is basically that he was raping another woman at the time. That just about checks out. Anyway, turns out it was the production assistant, who did it under orders from the executive producer. His pattern of abuse was kept quiet for years because so many people's careers depended on his career.
In the end, all three assholes get arrested. Because we don't see the Law part, only the Order part, it's unclear whether the expy here hires Marie Henein to defend him and Navigator to contest the story in the media, so it has a much happier ending than it went IRL. Still, I guess it's a little cathartic.
The whole thing is in poor taste. I mean, the whole show—presumably the whole franchise—is in poor taste but. Yeah. I don't feel especially great about this one in particular. It uses the format to paint a version of the story where there wasn't actually a catastrophic failure in the criminal justice system that allowed a sexual predator to get off scot-free. That said, if I didn't know about the real story, it was one of the better-written ones.
Plot: *** (not a bad plot actually, by the low bar that this show has set so far)
Character: * (seven episodes in, we have a name for Bateman—Frankie)
Toronto: *** (this case is probably top 5 in terms of Toronto crimes and pretty specific to our media ecosystem. Plus the victim lives in Kensington Market, and her roommate, the first suspect, has a plausible motive in that she wasn't paying her share of the rent and it's hard to find an affordable place. The other locations are plausible places for the characters to live. We don't get any particularly cool locations, though, and it loses a point for an address that I was pretty sure couldn't exist and I Google Mapped it and nope, it doesn't exist.)
Murder count: 12 (16% of all murders in the city)
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:09 pm (UTC)But 3M and under... I assume there has been massive growth over a similar time, so, yeah, small.
We are often called a large small town though, so I may have my scale distorted.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:16 pm (UTC)