L&O season 2: Episode 1
Apr. 21st, 2025 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyBy no one's request, I have downloaded Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent season 2 so that I can watch it so you don't have to.
This one is bad. Like, I normally like my trash TV but it's possible for a pop culture product to be actively harmful and the season opener, "White Squirrel City," is definitely that. It's also an incredible microcosm of our cultural moment.
Which is to say, a few years ago the cops cleared a tent encampment at Bickford Park. Residents were violently displaced, their possessions confiscated, and either forced to go elsewhere, minus their belongings, or shoved into insufficient temporary shelter. This is a major cause of death for homeless people.* Then, to film the copaganda show, they set up a fake tent encampment in the same place where the city had evicted real ones.
So it's one of those situations where even if it had been Great Art, the price of creation would have been outweighed by the moral violation. That said, it's also bad art.
Here is an article from the excellent Grind magazine about all of the things wrong in this episode. The author says it better than I could, and also points out its most egregious flaws, leaving me to nitpick and mock the minor ones.
Okay so the main story is that there's a tent encampment in Montrose Park. The mayor of White Squirrel City (named after the albino squirrels, which, yes, are a real thing here) is an older man named Mick who is either Tent Dad for everyone or a perv who draws young women in the park, depending on who you're talking to. He has a shitty day, first yelled at by a younger resident, then by a wealthy man whose 7-year-old son has found a syringe in the park, and then he's set upon by three teenage girls who beat and stab him to death. The first two are almost immediately ruled out as suspects, leading the cops to track down the girls one by one.
The plot is based on the murder of Kenneth Lee, and as in that story, the girls have all met online. One is a nice Muslim girl from Scarborough who works at her mother's restaurant, one is the daughter of a Turkish dissident in North York, and the third, Ava, at first appears to be the middle-class daughter of a stuntwoman. The Turkish girl confesses to having stabbed Mick to death, but had thought she was attacking him with a prop knife. Which doesn't really explain the swarming and beating but okay.
It turns out that the stuntwoman had lured the other two girls online because they were lonely and vulnerable, then dressed up as her daughter to do the murder, because Mick was her ex and Ava was their daughter. He had recently approached Ava at a café and introduced himself, so she felt threatened. She claimed he'd been abusive, though the medical records show that she was the abuser, not him.
There were things about this that were kind of interesting. We never find out, for example, whether Mick was abusive or the stuntwoman was just really manipulative, and I like that they didn't try to make the victim a self-evidently good person. There's a cool portrayal of a lesbian filmmaker who is a good ally to the people in the encampment, and there's an Inuk woman who delivers a pretty decent monologue about how the homeless are just regular people with the bad luck to have tragedy befall them. (That said, her tattoo is referred to as kakiniit, but it's a single facial tattoo so it'd be tunniit.)
That's all about it that I have to say that's good, though. Mostly it's very unbelievable to me that cops would give a shit about this murder, that a special unit would be put on it, that the cops would treat any of the witnesses respectfully, that the witnesses would talk to the cops, that there would be a bed open in a shelter for the Inuk character to go to when she felt unsafe, and that the shelter was as empty and clean as it appeared.
It also demonized newcomers. Both the Muslim kid and the Turkish refugee were depicted somewhat sympathetically, in that their motives were related to trauma and a need for belonging, and they were manipulated by a white woman. But I am pretty sure that Lee, an Asian man, was not murdered by immigrant kids, and by race-swapping the victim and perpetrator, it feeds in to anti-immigrant narratives in an irresponsible way.
But most important, it just erased all of the systemic issues and made the issue of homelessness about individual tragedy. Not a single bit of context was provided—not the routine violence enacted by the cops on encampment residents, not the housing crisis, not the horrors of the shelter system, not the entrenchment of cooling centres and food banks as permanent institutions rather than temporary fixes. It felt gross and exploitative of a real man's death and the cruelties suffered by many others.
Also they cleared people from a homeless encampment and then set up a fake encampment and for that alone the show should have been forever-cancelled.
* There is a whole discussion in this episode about "homeless" vs. "unhoused." I have heard arguments for the latter; that said, I cannot abide euphemism and I'd rather we ensure housing for all than bicker over political correctness.
This one is bad. Like, I normally like my trash TV but it's possible for a pop culture product to be actively harmful and the season opener, "White Squirrel City," is definitely that. It's also an incredible microcosm of our cultural moment.
Which is to say, a few years ago the cops cleared a tent encampment at Bickford Park. Residents were violently displaced, their possessions confiscated, and either forced to go elsewhere, minus their belongings, or shoved into insufficient temporary shelter. This is a major cause of death for homeless people.* Then, to film the copaganda show, they set up a fake tent encampment in the same place where the city had evicted real ones.
So it's one of those situations where even if it had been Great Art, the price of creation would have been outweighed by the moral violation. That said, it's also bad art.
Here is an article from the excellent Grind magazine about all of the things wrong in this episode. The author says it better than I could, and also points out its most egregious flaws, leaving me to nitpick and mock the minor ones.
Okay so the main story is that there's a tent encampment in Montrose Park. The mayor of White Squirrel City (named after the albino squirrels, which, yes, are a real thing here) is an older man named Mick who is either Tent Dad for everyone or a perv who draws young women in the park, depending on who you're talking to. He has a shitty day, first yelled at by a younger resident, then by a wealthy man whose 7-year-old son has found a syringe in the park, and then he's set upon by three teenage girls who beat and stab him to death. The first two are almost immediately ruled out as suspects, leading the cops to track down the girls one by one.
The plot is based on the murder of Kenneth Lee, and as in that story, the girls have all met online. One is a nice Muslim girl from Scarborough who works at her mother's restaurant, one is the daughter of a Turkish dissident in North York, and the third, Ava, at first appears to be the middle-class daughter of a stuntwoman. The Turkish girl confesses to having stabbed Mick to death, but had thought she was attacking him with a prop knife. Which doesn't really explain the swarming and beating but okay.
It turns out that the stuntwoman had lured the other two girls online because they were lonely and vulnerable, then dressed up as her daughter to do the murder, because Mick was her ex and Ava was their daughter. He had recently approached Ava at a café and introduced himself, so she felt threatened. She claimed he'd been abusive, though the medical records show that she was the abuser, not him.
There were things about this that were kind of interesting. We never find out, for example, whether Mick was abusive or the stuntwoman was just really manipulative, and I like that they didn't try to make the victim a self-evidently good person. There's a cool portrayal of a lesbian filmmaker who is a good ally to the people in the encampment, and there's an Inuk woman who delivers a pretty decent monologue about how the homeless are just regular people with the bad luck to have tragedy befall them. (That said, her tattoo is referred to as kakiniit, but it's a single facial tattoo so it'd be tunniit.)
That's all about it that I have to say that's good, though. Mostly it's very unbelievable to me that cops would give a shit about this murder, that a special unit would be put on it, that the cops would treat any of the witnesses respectfully, that the witnesses would talk to the cops, that there would be a bed open in a shelter for the Inuk character to go to when she felt unsafe, and that the shelter was as empty and clean as it appeared.
It also demonized newcomers. Both the Muslim kid and the Turkish refugee were depicted somewhat sympathetically, in that their motives were related to trauma and a need for belonging, and they were manipulated by a white woman. But I am pretty sure that Lee, an Asian man, was not murdered by immigrant kids, and by race-swapping the victim and perpetrator, it feeds in to anti-immigrant narratives in an irresponsible way.
But most important, it just erased all of the systemic issues and made the issue of homelessness about individual tragedy. Not a single bit of context was provided—not the routine violence enacted by the cops on encampment residents, not the housing crisis, not the horrors of the shelter system, not the entrenchment of cooling centres and food banks as permanent institutions rather than temporary fixes. It felt gross and exploitative of a real man's death and the cruelties suffered by many others.
Also they cleared people from a homeless encampment and then set up a fake encampment and for that alone the show should have been forever-cancelled.
Plot: *
Characters: ** (we learn that the ME has a homeless, mentally ill brother, and we learn that one of the prosecutors was an immigrant from Jamaica)
Toronto: ***** (all of the locations made sense as far as I could tell. Both the white squirrels and naming an encampment after them are real things. $2.8 million across from Montrose Park is realistic.)
Murder count for the season: Stats will be challenging as these episodes are airing in 2025 but were filmed, presumably, in 2024. Plus the year is ongoing. So I am going to go with the 2025 murder rate and adjust as we go. As of today, there have been 10 homicides this year, so the unfortunate Mick represents 1/10 of all murders in Toronto.
* There is a whole discussion in this episode about "homeless" vs. "unhoused." I have heard arguments for the latter; that said, I cannot abide euphemism and I'd rather we ensure housing for all than bicker over political correctness.
