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 04:22 pm (UTC)[Note: in the context of discussing destroying books I’m going to reference specific childraising books. If you aren’t already familiar with these authors, I’d advise not Googling; the physical punishments that they advocate for tiny babies are heartbreaking and horrific, and have led to the deaths of children.]
I’ve destroyed some books in my life, because they contained content that already harmed people (childrearing books by Pearl or Ezzo), and the content would harm children again if someone naively bought them and trusted it. So I buy those books when I see them second-hand and then destroy them (tear into pieces and put into paper recycling) to ensure they never return to circulation. These are mass-produced books and the content still exists, but at least that specific copy won’t lead to a helpless child being neglected and/or abused again.
But it’s not that I see books as disposable or meaningless; the destruction is *because* I value books so highly. I know they can easily change minds and lives, so I’m scared when certain books exist to teach deeply dangerous misinformation.
The irony, of course, is that book-burning religious/ideological folks are coming from the same place of “this content is dangerous and needs to stop existing”. It’s just that their perceptions of “this is harmful” aren’t coming from “we have many proven cases of malnutrition, brain damage, and other harms resulting from this”; they’re coming from places like “fantasy leads to Satan” and “being gay is against God”. But I’m sure their worry about children being harmed by certain books is no less real to them than my worry for children being harmed by certain other books.
(I’m not equivocating that proven harms based on science and hypothetical harms based on delusional thinking have the same impact in reality. I’m just saying that made-up things feel like real threats to people who believe them, and while it lacks a rational basis, their fear is as sincere as mine.)