TVSquad

*Sorry for the delayed review. I was visiting my adorable 5-week-old niece in Utah and my in-laws don't have TiVo (I know, I know. But what can you do? They're family!).

(S02E08) Wow. What a change of pace from the last few episodes. I was wondering whether The Closer was turning into a comedy... until this episode. Warning: Spoilers in the next paragraph.

This time, the body of a woman and little girl are found in the Los Angeles harbor. They're impossible to identify without dental records, but a plane ticket in the girl's coin purse leads Brenda directly to their killer. Usually the case takes us through a myriad of suspects and red herrings, but this time we get our perp right off the bat. We just don't know it until the very end.

Brenda has some amazing intuition. Even she doesn't know why she's holding onto the husband/father of the victims, who turns out to be a spectacular liar! Her first meeting with him, she lures him to the police station under false pretenses. Brenda stalls with the guy... asking him questions about his family as she awaits word on the identity of the dead woman and child. While digging for family history, she sends messages out to her team like, "Det. Daniels has a storage facility and she tells me, whenever she needs to find something, she has to take the entire day to sort through it all." That meant she wanted Daniels to get a warrant to search the husband's storage locker. She sent similar messages to Lt. Tau and the tech, Buzz. That was pretty much the only humor in this episode.

This script was absolutely brilliant. I kept going back and forth on the husband: He's guilty! No he's not! When we found out that he had another Japanese woman and child living in his home (they moved in two months after his wife and daughter fled the country), I gasped and proclaimed that he was guilty. But, then he had a pathetic story about being lonely and drinking and finding this woman online. She said that he saved her from an abusive husband back in Japan. Then, we found out that he had a first wife who was a dead ringer for his second wife and current girlfriend! She disappeared six years ago? Again, I'm convinced he's totally guilty! But, then he had another pathetic story about how devastated he was when she left and how he's been trying to recreate his first marriage. It was all plausible.

It took a while for Brenda to crack him. I was doubting her and so was her team. She kept hammering the guy but couldn't catch him in a lie. I was feeling terrible for him-- how could she torture this poor man who had been through so much and obviously had a fettish for Japanese women? Finally, Brenda corners the husband with the boxes they found in his storage space: he tied them up with the same cord and knots he used to tie up his wife and daughter.

This episode also ended in an unusual way. Brenda was complaining to Fritz about how the husband got off with concurrent sentences for manslaughter and Fritz pointed out something obvious that Brenda had overlooked. She could send him to the chair by putting him on trial for the murder of his first wife. Where was she? Just like his other wife and child, he probably killed her in the place where they got married (that thought actually entered my head for a fleeting moment when Daniels and Gabriel talked about the first wedding at the arboretum, but I quickly dismissed it). I loved the final scene of this episode where we see Brenda bend over a pond and then suddenly we're looking up through the water at Brenda and the camera sinks down to a body.

This was a very good, very chilling episode. It was written and acted in a way that, even though all the signs pointed us directly at the killer, we doubted his guilt. At least, I did.

Bravo!