L&O season 2: Episode 5
Apr. 27th, 2025 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI am putting this entire thing under a cut. The episode has to do with the Filipino community, and by absolute coincidence, last night 11 Filipino people, including at least one child, were murdered in a horrific van attack in Vancouver. This episode aired a few weeks ago and has nothing to do with that but if you read anything about the murder and are worried about being re-traumatized, you might want to skip it.
This is a pretty bog-standard L&O extruded product, so generic that I can't even tell what real case it's based on. A Filipino couple who own an import-export business are murdered while their failson, who is lying about his upcoming graduation from university, hides in a closet. You can pretty much tell where this is going.
Not really much to say here. The Ghosts, a father-and-son gang that the failson tries to frame, are kind of fun—they work in an aquarium store and are charmingly self-aware and upfront about being violent gangsters. The kid's motive is immigrant parents who push him too hard and only demonstrate love when he fakes academic success. But! It turned out they loved him all along, and he killed them for nothing.
The only interesting twist is that we finally got to see the inside of a courtroom! Alas, it was not very accurate to how court cases actually are, and no defence attorney, especially one as competent as this one was supposed to be, would have allowed Forrester to berate the defendant until he broke like that. But hey, at least we got a teeny bit of Law in our Order!
Otherwise, this misses making a joke about ChatGPT, which suggests that it was just recycled from the parent show.
Plot: * (Mostly annoying because it's clear what's happening from the opener, and you're just waiting for the cops to catch up.)
Characters: ** (We learn that Bateman was a hockey goon as a kid, which is admittedly funny. Graff gets an extended bit about Iggy Pop and Milli Vanilli that is not not fun.)
Toronto: * (This could be anywhere. We have the business in Chinatown, which is fine, but then most of the young people seem to be from Scarborough, and there's no real sense of place in any of the scenes. Also, I have a hard time believing that a Latino kid and a Black kid from Scarborough are playing hockey. Hockey is expensive and it's still mainly a white sport. The owner of the club is implied to be doing it as some kind of social work thing but you still need equipment.)
Murder count: The body count this season is 6, while the real-life murder count in Toronto remains at 10. So the show is covering 60% of all murders in Toronto.
This is a pretty bog-standard L&O extruded product, so generic that I can't even tell what real case it's based on. A Filipino couple who own an import-export business are murdered while their failson, who is lying about his upcoming graduation from university, hides in a closet. You can pretty much tell where this is going.
Not really much to say here. The Ghosts, a father-and-son gang that the failson tries to frame, are kind of fun—they work in an aquarium store and are charmingly self-aware and upfront about being violent gangsters. The kid's motive is immigrant parents who push him too hard and only demonstrate love when he fakes academic success. But! It turned out they loved him all along, and he killed them for nothing.
The only interesting twist is that we finally got to see the inside of a courtroom! Alas, it was not very accurate to how court cases actually are, and no defence attorney, especially one as competent as this one was supposed to be, would have allowed Forrester to berate the defendant until he broke like that. But hey, at least we got a teeny bit of Law in our Order!
Otherwise, this misses making a joke about ChatGPT, which suggests that it was just recycled from the parent show.
Plot: * (Mostly annoying because it's clear what's happening from the opener, and you're just waiting for the cops to catch up.)
Characters: ** (We learn that Bateman was a hockey goon as a kid, which is admittedly funny. Graff gets an extended bit about Iggy Pop and Milli Vanilli that is not not fun.)
Toronto: * (This could be anywhere. We have the business in Chinatown, which is fine, but then most of the young people seem to be from Scarborough, and there's no real sense of place in any of the scenes. Also, I have a hard time believing that a Latino kid and a Black kid from Scarborough are playing hockey. Hockey is expensive and it's still mainly a white sport. The owner of the club is implied to be doing it as some kind of social work thing but you still need equipment.)
Murder count: The body count this season is 6, while the real-life murder count in Toronto remains at 10. So the show is covering 60% of all murders in Toronto.
