L&O: episode 10
Oct. 24th, 2024 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyExtruded L&O product. I hope you weren't expecting a grand finale!
This one begins with two teenage girls and Willa, a harried defence attorney single mom, who gets shot to death in the opening in one of the fakest looking deaths I've ever seen. After ruling out various motives—a pissed-off client, a work drama, an affair with a neighbour—they zoom in on another neighbour—Susan, the mom of the other teenage girl—as the suspect. Susan is an absolute monster. She manipulated her boyfriend into killing his mom when they were teenagers; he took the entire fall, but she did the killing and was only sentenced to five years. She got plastic surgery and started a new life with her daughter. Willa found out so presumably Susan, who's really Ruth, killed her to cover it up.
That's not why Susan's a monster, btw. It's because she arranges her bookshelf by colour.
But! Twist! It's not Susan who does the killing, or the dad who immediately takes the fall for it—it's the daughter, who didn't want to uproot again.
I dunno, it's kind of giving Karla Homolka vibes, but none of the murders in question have the cruelty of those murders. It feels like it was based on a bunch of different cases, to the point where it's generic. It doesn't even make internal sense—a defence lawyer is a strange choice to pursue vengeance against a killer who's done her time.
The geography is a little fucky too. I had to Google Map it. Quite a lot of the timing in this episode doesn't really account for traffic, and granted I am extremely tired but. We're told the victim and her neighbours live in Lawrence Park, and their street address is in fact there, but the kids are clearly walking around downtown when they get their fake IDs and when they go to the bar. They're cutting school and Penny, the killer, says that they have to be back for class in 40 minutes. This is, in good traffic, a 27 minute drive from their high school (let's say they took an Uber instead of transit, which would take an hour), but doesn't account for how they got there in the first place, given that lunch is only an hour.
There's also some janky camerawork, which goes well with the janky acting, I suppose. No consistency of character either—you'd think, with a 9-year-old, Bateman would have some emotional reaction to the involvement of the two teenagers. But nah, she's a robot in this; Graff, with his mysterious past, gets all the emotional beats.
Oh, by the way, I have a seething hatred for stories where the last phone call between a mom and daughter is the daughter sniping at the mom and then the mom dies and the kid gets to feel guilty about it forever. This happens all the time, I'm sure, but I find it really manipulative.
Plot: * (Nonsensical)
Characters: * (We find out that Graff's father was accused of a terrible crime, though not what that crime was. He is afraid that he caught the criminal gene or some such, and given that this is an episode about a daughter becoming a killer because her mom was, I predict we're about half a season away from busting out the skull calipers.)
Toronto: 0 (The geography makes no sense.)
Murder count for the season: 17, representing 23% of all murders in Toronto.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my Law & Order Toronto recaps. Just a little reminder that by and large Canadian-made TV is still awful despite the size of Toronto's film and TV production industry. There is no reason why it needs to suck as hard as it does—it must be a conscious aesthetic choice.
This one begins with two teenage girls and Willa, a harried defence attorney single mom, who gets shot to death in the opening in one of the fakest looking deaths I've ever seen. After ruling out various motives—a pissed-off client, a work drama, an affair with a neighbour—they zoom in on another neighbour—Susan, the mom of the other teenage girl—as the suspect. Susan is an absolute monster. She manipulated her boyfriend into killing his mom when they were teenagers; he took the entire fall, but she did the killing and was only sentenced to five years. She got plastic surgery and started a new life with her daughter. Willa found out so presumably Susan, who's really Ruth, killed her to cover it up.
That's not why Susan's a monster, btw. It's because she arranges her bookshelf by colour.
But! Twist! It's not Susan who does the killing, or the dad who immediately takes the fall for it—it's the daughter, who didn't want to uproot again.
I dunno, it's kind of giving Karla Homolka vibes, but none of the murders in question have the cruelty of those murders. It feels like it was based on a bunch of different cases, to the point where it's generic. It doesn't even make internal sense—a defence lawyer is a strange choice to pursue vengeance against a killer who's done her time.
The geography is a little fucky too. I had to Google Map it. Quite a lot of the timing in this episode doesn't really account for traffic, and granted I am extremely tired but. We're told the victim and her neighbours live in Lawrence Park, and their street address is in fact there, but the kids are clearly walking around downtown when they get their fake IDs and when they go to the bar. They're cutting school and Penny, the killer, says that they have to be back for class in 40 minutes. This is, in good traffic, a 27 minute drive from their high school (let's say they took an Uber instead of transit, which would take an hour), but doesn't account for how they got there in the first place, given that lunch is only an hour.
There's also some janky camerawork, which goes well with the janky acting, I suppose. No consistency of character either—you'd think, with a 9-year-old, Bateman would have some emotional reaction to the involvement of the two teenagers. But nah, she's a robot in this; Graff, with his mysterious past, gets all the emotional beats.
Oh, by the way, I have a seething hatred for stories where the last phone call between a mom and daughter is the daughter sniping at the mom and then the mom dies and the kid gets to feel guilty about it forever. This happens all the time, I'm sure, but I find it really manipulative.
Plot: * (Nonsensical)
Characters: * (We find out that Graff's father was accused of a terrible crime, though not what that crime was. He is afraid that he caught the criminal gene or some such, and given that this is an episode about a daughter becoming a killer because her mom was, I predict we're about half a season away from busting out the skull calipers.)
Toronto: 0 (The geography makes no sense.)
Murder count for the season: 17, representing 23% of all murders in Toronto.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my Law & Order Toronto recaps. Just a little reminder that by and large Canadian-made TV is still awful despite the size of Toronto's film and TV production industry. There is no reason why it needs to suck as hard as it does—it must be a conscious aesthetic choice.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 12:39 pm (UTC)Re: the phone thing, I think it's not surprising bc it is a good way to set up the scene transition & establish the relationship between the characters but, yeah, it's pretty lazy. I prefer if it's something like Six Feet Under did in the first episode, where it's kind of just the average bickering you see between family members. Obviously the last thing you said to someone is never all you wish you could have said to them; no need to twist the knife excessively.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-26 12:56 pm (UTC)I think my issue with this in particular is that nothing they are doing seems connected to anything else. It's just random people doing random things, and there are a lot of them, so I can't figure out who anyone is or anyone's motivations or even names.