L&O season 2: Episode 4
Apr. 25th, 2025 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyShocker of shockers, this one was actually...good? Like not good-good but good for a Law & Order spinoff. It almost reached the level of mid, as the kids say.
It's based on the Harrison family murders, which is a case I know nothing about because it happened in Mississauga. Mississauga, famously, is not Toronto. I guess close enough for TV though. It starts off with the coked-up trophy wife of a rich guy old enough to be her dad. She gets clubbed on the head with an ashtray, then asphyxiated, after a night out with her new business pals and an argument with the rich guy. The opener breaks from the usual format in that we don't get a montage of people who'll be important later saying cryptic things, and we find out who the murderer is right away.
The rich guy has two kids, a failson who did the actual murder, and a daughter who looks like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. At first, trophy wife's death looks like an accident, and Bishop, a police superintendent, even turns up to suggest that Graff and Bateman accept that it is. But they notice discrepancies, including the fact that she was wearing heels to the club, somehow walked upstairs to have an argument with her husband in them, then went back down the stairs, still wearing them, to trip and fall. This is one of the first times Bateman's been smart, so that is cool. They figure out the son right away but the motive is fuzzy. Further investigation, though, reveals that there have been two other deaths in the same house: the first wife, who drowned in the pool after a martini bender, and an assistant who died of a heart attack. The investigator on those earlier cases was Bishop, who had worked on the first case with their boss, Holness.
Re-examining the old cases points to the daughter as the mastermind, who switches up her various murder methods to kill anyone who gets too close to her father. Holness is angsty that she missed clues, but confronts Bishop, who admits that he overlooked evidence because it was inconvenient for him career-wise. The daughter is arrested for the trophy wife's murder and the other two cases are re-opened as homicides.
NGL, I am way more interested in stories about police cover-ups and quasi-incestuous weirdo families than I am in stories about how dangerous downtown Toronto is, or stories that demonize marginalized populations. This was fucked up and fun to watch and even though technically it's a Mississauga story, it got some good Toronto bits in. While I highly doubt the trophy wife's restaurant venture was really going to be profitable, we did get an Ossington bar that looked semi-plausible (at least in the later season; I thought it was club district in the opening), and we got a super cool blink-and-you'd-miss it explanation for how the cops overlooked three deaths in one house.
That reason is that the street where the murders happen is called Hoggs Hollow (the title of the episode). But! When the first murder happened, the street was named Ryerson, and was changed in 2022. So it didn't ping for Holness that it was the same house, but did for Bishop, since he was physically present at each of the crime scenes. The reason why I liked this plot point, for non-Canadians, is that Egerton Ryerson was the architect of the residential school system. There are a ton of places (including streets and schools) named after him, but after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021—children who had died of disease, torture, and murder at the concentration camp—anything named after him had to at least consider changing their name. Most famously, the university named after him changed its name to Toronto Metropolitan University and replaced the statue of him that activists toppled with a sculpture inspired by the Dish With One Spoon wampum covenant.
Anyway, it was a cool twist structurally, but also extremely Toronto.
It's based on the Harrison family murders, which is a case I know nothing about because it happened in Mississauga. Mississauga, famously, is not Toronto. I guess close enough for TV though. It starts off with the coked-up trophy wife of a rich guy old enough to be her dad. She gets clubbed on the head with an ashtray, then asphyxiated, after a night out with her new business pals and an argument with the rich guy. The opener breaks from the usual format in that we don't get a montage of people who'll be important later saying cryptic things, and we find out who the murderer is right away.
The rich guy has two kids, a failson who did the actual murder, and a daughter who looks like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. At first, trophy wife's death looks like an accident, and Bishop, a police superintendent, even turns up to suggest that Graff and Bateman accept that it is. But they notice discrepancies, including the fact that she was wearing heels to the club, somehow walked upstairs to have an argument with her husband in them, then went back down the stairs, still wearing them, to trip and fall. This is one of the first times Bateman's been smart, so that is cool. They figure out the son right away but the motive is fuzzy. Further investigation, though, reveals that there have been two other deaths in the same house: the first wife, who drowned in the pool after a martini bender, and an assistant who died of a heart attack. The investigator on those earlier cases was Bishop, who had worked on the first case with their boss, Holness.
Re-examining the old cases points to the daughter as the mastermind, who switches up her various murder methods to kill anyone who gets too close to her father. Holness is angsty that she missed clues, but confronts Bishop, who admits that he overlooked evidence because it was inconvenient for him career-wise. The daughter is arrested for the trophy wife's murder and the other two cases are re-opened as homicides.
NGL, I am way more interested in stories about police cover-ups and quasi-incestuous weirdo families than I am in stories about how dangerous downtown Toronto is, or stories that demonize marginalized populations. This was fucked up and fun to watch and even though technically it's a Mississauga story, it got some good Toronto bits in. While I highly doubt the trophy wife's restaurant venture was really going to be profitable, we did get an Ossington bar that looked semi-plausible (at least in the later season; I thought it was club district in the opening), and we got a super cool blink-and-you'd-miss it explanation for how the cops overlooked three deaths in one house.
That reason is that the street where the murders happen is called Hoggs Hollow (the title of the episode). But! When the first murder happened, the street was named Ryerson, and was changed in 2022. So it didn't ping for Holness that it was the same house, but did for Bishop, since he was physically present at each of the crime scenes. The reason why I liked this plot point, for non-Canadians, is that Egerton Ryerson was the architect of the residential school system. There are a ton of places (including streets and schools) named after him, but after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021—children who had died of disease, torture, and murder at the concentration camp—anything named after him had to at least consider changing their name. Most famously, the university named after him changed its name to Toronto Metropolitan University and replaced the statue of him that activists toppled with a sculpture inspired by the Dish With One Spoon wampum covenant.
Anyway, it was a cool twist structurally, but also extremely Toronto.
Plot: **** (I saw the daughter's involvement coming a mile away, but the real mystery was how the cops missed it, which was actually interesting)
Characters: *** (Holness backstory! Also Bateman got to be the one who notices things, and Graff had at least one moment of just being weird and off-putting)
Toronto: **** (One for Ossington having some of the best little bars, three for the Ryerson name-change twist, and it would actually be five except that the OG case was in Mississauga, which is not Toronto)
Murder count: I'm going to count this as one murder even though there were three murders in the story, since they happened in the past. We're still at 10 murders this year, meaning that 40% of all murders are committed by the WORST OFFENDERS in TORONTO'S WAR ON CRIME.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-26 05:46 am (UTC)I keep wondering if they’re going to do one inspired by the Sherman murders, though maybe that’s dodgier because it’s still officially an open case. (Also they like the cops on L&O to look semi-competent, but the cops bungled the shit out of that case in real life.)
no subject
Date: 2025-04-26 11:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-26 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-26 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-26 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-28 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-28 09:24 pm (UTC)