L&O season 2: Episode 8
May. 2nd, 2025 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyOh no! This was yet another good episode. If they keep this up I'm going to have to stop hate-watching and watch-watch it.
This one is about a tech CEO getting gunned down in a parking lot, along with a food delivery driver. The cops at the scene conclude that the latter was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but...
Nope the driver was the target. The tech CEO was doing a hackathon type thing and no one expected him to be in the car. The driver, on the other hand, had a long and convoluted story. He had come to Canada as an international student to study at ThinkBridge, a predatory diploma mill targeting foreigners. After realizing that he'd been scammed, he went to the Toronto Star planning to expose the woman who founded it. Instead, she offered him a job as a recruiter, and he recruited yet another young person to move from India. After realizing that he had cashed in his entire family's fortune for nothing, the kid dies by suicide, and his father arrived to take revenge.
Right up until the end, this was a solid episode. I like the conceit of giving you the murderer right up front and having the motive be the mystery; it means that they don't have to do some convoluted thing to make the murderer the last person you'd guess. I also felt that the depiction of credit mills like Conestoga was quite accurate—up until the Liberals caught the anti-immigration brainworms from the Tories and cracked down on student visas, these things were everywhere, and I know young people who have fallen victim to them. The depiction of life for an international student—overcrowded, illegal housing, multiple jobs, etc.—also rang true. Bateman has a good bit about how international students don't get attention or sympathy because Canadians blame them for the housing shortage and stealing jobs.
The only part I take issue with is at the end, when the detectives go to arrest Dinesh. The confrontation is on the Humber Bridge, which they quickly clear, but Dinesh is still armed and poses an active threat to the cops. I don't believe that the cops would allow the conversation to happen. For comparison, Ejaz Choudry, a 62-year-old father of four with schizophrenia, was shot dead by cops 11 seconds after they arrived for a wellness check on a non-emergency call. Choudry was was armed with a small pocket knife. So I don't think the kind of intelligent de-escalation that we see here is a very likely scenario. Even if we want to believe that Graff and Bateman are super awesome smart elite cops, they're surrounded by regular cops who've come to arrest/shoot Dinesh.
Plot: ****1/2 (This would have been a perfect 5 if they'd killed the suspect rather than arrested him)
Characters: *** (We get so much information about Graff! His mom is dead. His father is "complicated." He has a half-brother who he never talks to and it's his fault for never talking to him. That's three whole bits of information.)
Toronto: *** (This is pretty accurate Toronto, if some of the locations feel a little vague. I'm not quite sure where the degree mill is, or the student housing. However, the Bridal Path home looks good enough, if small for the Bridal Path. The Humber Bridge as portrayed is in fact the Humber Bridge and it is every bit as beautiful as in that shot.)
Murder count: 10. The murder rate on the show has almost caught up to the real life murder rate at 91%.
This one is about a tech CEO getting gunned down in a parking lot, along with a food delivery driver. The cops at the scene conclude that the latter was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but...
Nope the driver was the target. The tech CEO was doing a hackathon type thing and no one expected him to be in the car. The driver, on the other hand, had a long and convoluted story. He had come to Canada as an international student to study at ThinkBridge, a predatory diploma mill targeting foreigners. After realizing that he'd been scammed, he went to the Toronto Star planning to expose the woman who founded it. Instead, she offered him a job as a recruiter, and he recruited yet another young person to move from India. After realizing that he had cashed in his entire family's fortune for nothing, the kid dies by suicide, and his father arrived to take revenge.
Right up until the end, this was a solid episode. I like the conceit of giving you the murderer right up front and having the motive be the mystery; it means that they don't have to do some convoluted thing to make the murderer the last person you'd guess. I also felt that the depiction of credit mills like Conestoga was quite accurate—up until the Liberals caught the anti-immigration brainworms from the Tories and cracked down on student visas, these things were everywhere, and I know young people who have fallen victim to them. The depiction of life for an international student—overcrowded, illegal housing, multiple jobs, etc.—also rang true. Bateman has a good bit about how international students don't get attention or sympathy because Canadians blame them for the housing shortage and stealing jobs.
The only part I take issue with is at the end, when the detectives go to arrest Dinesh. The confrontation is on the Humber Bridge, which they quickly clear, but Dinesh is still armed and poses an active threat to the cops. I don't believe that the cops would allow the conversation to happen. For comparison, Ejaz Choudry, a 62-year-old father of four with schizophrenia, was shot dead by cops 11 seconds after they arrived for a wellness check on a non-emergency call. Choudry was was armed with a small pocket knife. So I don't think the kind of intelligent de-escalation that we see here is a very likely scenario. Even if we want to believe that Graff and Bateman are super awesome smart elite cops, they're surrounded by regular cops who've come to arrest/shoot Dinesh.
Plot: ****1/2 (This would have been a perfect 5 if they'd killed the suspect rather than arrested him)
Characters: *** (We get so much information about Graff! His mom is dead. His father is "complicated." He has a half-brother who he never talks to and it's his fault for never talking to him. That's three whole bits of information.)
Toronto: *** (This is pretty accurate Toronto, if some of the locations feel a little vague. I'm not quite sure where the degree mill is, or the student housing. However, the Bridal Path home looks good enough, if small for the Bridal Path. The Humber Bridge as portrayed is in fact the Humber Bridge and it is every bit as beautiful as in that shot.)
Murder count: 10. The murder rate on the show has almost caught up to the real life murder rate at 91%.
