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L&O season 2: Episode 10
The finale was...good, actually? Again, grading on a curve. It is still a bad show. But it's one of those bad shows where you get the sense that there is someone in the writers' room doing their best and sneaking all kinds of fun content in (see also: Archie singing IWW songs in Riverdale).
I had to check Reddit to see which case this was based on—it takes most of the episode to get to it. A seemingly unremarkable middle-aged travel agent drops dead in his driveway while his wife is out for a jog. It looks like a heart attack, but a cop in 44 Division suggests to Holness that she might want to get "her best" on it. Unfortunately the best that Toronto Police Services—sorry, TPD on the show for some reason—have are Graff and Bateman.
There are a whole bunch of strange things in the early scenes of this episode that make me go "Hmm?" but are quite clever once you realize who this guy, Gord, is. First, there's a bunch of references to polygraphs in the cold open, and I don't think even TPS is so backwards as to allow polygraphs as evidence. Then, the man is a travel agent. Are travel agents still a thing? Third, he has a secret Blackberry, and while I appreciate the attempt to jam in as much Canadian content as possible, no one has a Blackberry anymore. But then it's revealed that Gord died of novichok because he was a CSIS agent, and the weird anachronisms suddenly make sense.
The victim was surveilling a Russian guy, who was the supplier for the novichok, but after tracking down the Russian guy's daughter, they question him and while he was the one who brought the poison into the country, he did so to deliver it to Gord or testing, a month before the murder. Once they trace the custody chain, though, there's a discrepancy between the amount he says he delivered and the amount transferred to a lab in Ottawa, meaning the murder was an inside job. This leads them to investigate what's happening at CSIS in one of those delightful feuds between different institutions of the carceral state, but if that wasn't enough plot twist for you, it turns out that the Assistant Director of the Toronto branch of CSIS (do we have that?) is none other than Miles Graff, Det. Graff's half-brother!
That is ridiculous and I'm here for it. They don't talk, as we learned in previous episodes. The reason is that Henry Graff's mother died and he suspects their father of having a hand in it, but Miles loves his father and thinks he had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, it turns out that the CSIS Director, Tom, was covering up Gord's repeated sexual assaults of a junior agent, Alice. This is not based on a Toronto-specific story but it is a really fucked up story. Tom didn't have Gord killed, though; Alice killed him because she'd complained repeatedly and no one cared or did anything to stop him. Miles manages to manipulate the situation so that Alice pleads to manslaughter, Tom resigns, and Miles takes his place as Director.
Plot: **** (This was a good plot! I liked it. It was not quite as good as episode 8 but still an interesting story that actually has something interesting to say about institutional coverups and how CSIS is awful. I tend to never root for cops unless they end up fighting some worse institution, which they do here.)
Characters: ***** (We learn so much about Graff, you guys! Not just the mysterious half-brother who's a spy thing, which is cool, but also that he is a fan of Irish playwright Brendan Behan, enough that he catches a fairly obscure clue from Alice. We also get to hear him sing, which I wish we didn't.)
Toronto: *** (As I've said, this isn't really a Toronto story. The cemetery is even in Aurora, which is very much Not Toronto. There is a good gag about Paris—Ontario, not France—which I quite enjoyed. It gets most of its stars for heavily featuring the Royal York Hotel and even dropping a piece of information I didn't know irt to the aforementioned Irish playwright, who was kicked out of said hotel and jailed for following the ginger ale's advice to "drink Canada dry." However it loses a point for referring to the "Toronto Police Department," which does not exist.)
Murder count: 13. The real murder count in Toronto remains at 11, meaning that as this season of Law & Order closes, the show is significantly more violent than real life Toronto.
And that's a wrap. I guess I'll have to find some good show to watch now.
I had to check Reddit to see which case this was based on—it takes most of the episode to get to it. A seemingly unremarkable middle-aged travel agent drops dead in his driveway while his wife is out for a jog. It looks like a heart attack, but a cop in 44 Division suggests to Holness that she might want to get "her best" on it. Unfortunately the best that Toronto Police Services—sorry, TPD on the show for some reason—have are Graff and Bateman.
There are a whole bunch of strange things in the early scenes of this episode that make me go "Hmm?" but are quite clever once you realize who this guy, Gord, is. First, there's a bunch of references to polygraphs in the cold open, and I don't think even TPS is so backwards as to allow polygraphs as evidence. Then, the man is a travel agent. Are travel agents still a thing? Third, he has a secret Blackberry, and while I appreciate the attempt to jam in as much Canadian content as possible, no one has a Blackberry anymore. But then it's revealed that Gord died of novichok because he was a CSIS agent, and the weird anachronisms suddenly make sense.
The victim was surveilling a Russian guy, who was the supplier for the novichok, but after tracking down the Russian guy's daughter, they question him and while he was the one who brought the poison into the country, he did so to deliver it to Gord or testing, a month before the murder. Once they trace the custody chain, though, there's a discrepancy between the amount he says he delivered and the amount transferred to a lab in Ottawa, meaning the murder was an inside job. This leads them to investigate what's happening at CSIS in one of those delightful feuds between different institutions of the carceral state, but if that wasn't enough plot twist for you, it turns out that the Assistant Director of the Toronto branch of CSIS (do we have that?) is none other than Miles Graff, Det. Graff's half-brother!
That is ridiculous and I'm here for it. They don't talk, as we learned in previous episodes. The reason is that Henry Graff's mother died and he suspects their father of having a hand in it, but Miles loves his father and thinks he had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, it turns out that the CSIS Director, Tom, was covering up Gord's repeated sexual assaults of a junior agent, Alice. This is not based on a Toronto-specific story but it is a really fucked up story. Tom didn't have Gord killed, though; Alice killed him because she'd complained repeatedly and no one cared or did anything to stop him. Miles manages to manipulate the situation so that Alice pleads to manslaughter, Tom resigns, and Miles takes his place as Director.
Plot: **** (This was a good plot! I liked it. It was not quite as good as episode 8 but still an interesting story that actually has something interesting to say about institutional coverups and how CSIS is awful. I tend to never root for cops unless they end up fighting some worse institution, which they do here.)
Characters: ***** (We learn so much about Graff, you guys! Not just the mysterious half-brother who's a spy thing, which is cool, but also that he is a fan of Irish playwright Brendan Behan, enough that he catches a fairly obscure clue from Alice. We also get to hear him sing, which I wish we didn't.)
Toronto: *** (As I've said, this isn't really a Toronto story. The cemetery is even in Aurora, which is very much Not Toronto. There is a good gag about Paris—Ontario, not France—which I quite enjoyed. It gets most of its stars for heavily featuring the Royal York Hotel and even dropping a piece of information I didn't know irt to the aforementioned Irish playwright, who was kicked out of said hotel and jailed for following the ginger ale's advice to "drink Canada dry." However it loses a point for referring to the "Toronto Police Department," which does not exist.)
Murder count: 13. The real murder count in Toronto remains at 11, meaning that as this season of Law & Order closes, the show is significantly more violent than real life Toronto.
And that's a wrap. I guess I'll have to find some good show to watch now.
no subject
Is the show not allowed to refer to the police service by its actual name as part of its thin veneer of filing off the serial numbers? Or . . . what?
no subject