Sound Off: I Just Want MY Cop Show

The other night, I walked by a TV that was turned to one of the many CHICAGO shows. I sat for a few minutes watching Chicago P.D. and was completely bored. I was looking for something to draw me in but none of the partner-centric banter or action drew me in. This is when something dawned on me: there is no one size fits all procedural drama.

If you're not interested in the characters from the get-go, you will be asleep faster than the first Law and Order victim is dead. These shows have to be character driven. I love the playful banter of McGarrett and Danno on Hawaii 5-0 and the love between Booth and Bones makes every investigation more enticing.

Cop Fridays 3: It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Bones

Image from Pintrest

     It's time for another installment of Cop Fridays! This time we take a look at the rapidly approaching series finale of my most beloved cop show, Bones. Aside from COPS and American Idol, the 12-season running Bones may be one of the longest-running shows FOX has ever had the pleasure of airing.

      I'm going to get sentimental for a moment and explain why the show is so emotionally enmeshed in my viewing past. The show premiered in the Fall of 2005. I was a college freshman looking for new friendships and television shows. All you had to say was that David Boreanez "Angel from BUFFY" was playing a hunky FBI agent, and I was hooked. I invited my close friends over for a viewing party of the first episode. We all cheered when Emily Deschanel's Dr. Temperance Brennan grabbed a gun and shot a suspect in the leg to prevent him from getting away. It was illegal, it was wrong, and it was awesome! Remember, she is the forensic scientist - hence the name Bones- and she should not have done that at all for various ethical and legal reasons.

The show became a bonding experience over subsequent seasons, I had regular Bones dates with a group of friends. We held out hope that one day Brennan and said hunky partner,  FBI agent Seely Booth, would get together. It took years... She was with child before the audience discovered they were fooling around. From that moment in the 6th season finale, Booth and Bones seemed inseparable. With two kids, several kidnappings, and trips to faraway places like Peru and London for cases, it seemed like they could handle everything. They even tried giving up their crime solving at the end of season 10, quitting their jobs in an attempt to give their family a normal life (it didn't last).

     This week, it all stopped making sense. Brennan's ex-convict father Max (the incomparable Ryan O'Neal) died at the end of last Tuesday's episode. In another psychotic revenge plot, Max protected his grandkids from an attack at home. [Sounds like just another day at the F.B.I, right?] He came through surgery for a gunshot wound, passing suddenly as he talked with Bones. After that moment, Bones lost it. The father she spent years not knowing (due to her parents faking their deaths and going on the lam, leaving Bones and her brother to grow up in foster care), was gone and died doing what he could to protect his family.

      What would someone do after suffering a tragic loss? She would be the subject of this week's episode "The Grief in the Girl." Bones flipped out, becoming distant from her husband, telling him that he should go to Canada to work a case, and it's really not important if he makes it to the memorial. She catches up with an ex-boyfriend (sorry, I forgot you existed, FBI Agent Sully). She works the case from D.C. She writes a eulogy. She is at best, her pre-Booth robotic self. She is at best, completely falling apart in her own Bones way. I really can't understand why she is/was so into Sully. By the time she reaches the memorial, Bones is finally ready to open up to Booth like most normal people do when they lose a parent. Bones justifies her time with Sully, saying that relationship prepared her for a relationship with Booth. That's cool, but I thought his coming to town just for her dad's funeral and putting in a several-day hang was odd and inappropriate. It seemed bizarre that he left the FBI, skipped town and ghosted Bones, and then wanted to be there in her hour of need. He has a girlfriend he might want to marry back at home. For the record, their relationship was not a Buffy/Angel after Joyce's death situation. It was also odd that Bones would abandon her evolved emotional arc and become so distant from her husband. I have not been this upset over and episode since  Dr. Hodgins got confined to a wheelchair, and before that, when Dr. Sweets unexpectedly died.  While I'm willing to give this episode a pass, I hope this is a justified  plot device that will help the characters move on as we go to the last episode.

I was okay with Bones through this weekend. Then, I got upset again. David Boreanez appeared on The Huffington Post's Build Series this Monday. It was a delightful interview, until he teased there might be several  more deaths in the last few episodes. I went right back into a glass case of emotion. and I cannot keep doing this again. Usually Bones is known for keeping death to the corpses in the lab. Do we as an audience need the schadenfreude of the writers killing multiple characters to help ua walk away from a show? Absolutely not, no bones about it.

*Updated 2/28
See the amazing Forbes recap of the episode here.
See the first COP Fridays post here.
See the second COP Fridays post here.

Hawaii 5-0: A Carte Blance Police Force

     TV cops have a long standing reputation of closing cases in 45 minutes (except for the O.J. case). How they go about it can sometimes be a stretch, and you know they have to cut some corners to do it. If today's media attention toward police screw-ups in any indication  If the judge is on the golf course, someone better contact his caddy to get that warrant, right? After a while I believe there's a fine line between defending justice and infringing on the rights of others. Maybe there's something powerful that draws the audience to situations like that. We love the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game, and nothing is more satisfying than capturing someone who really did something bad. But what if that person is supposed to be preserving the law?

     Some of my favorite moments in cop dramas have been about breaking the law. There's a memorable part of the Blue Bloods pilot where Det. Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) flushes a perp's face in a toilet to get information, which definitely falls under police brutality. Blue Bloods has long addressed issues of police conduct (and misconduct) and Police Commissioner Reagan (Tom Selleck) always supports his officers and policies until given reason to believe they are harmful to the public. There was at least one episode of Bones where Dr. Brennan (Emily Deschanel) an anthropologist partnered to an FBI agent, shot a perp. This happened in the pilot episode for chrissake! Her husband Booth (David Boranez) has shot multiple people over the years, and he shot a clown on top of an ice cream truck, which landed him in therapy. The first episode of Jennifer Lopez's Shades of Blue has J-Lo's Harley covering up her partner's shooting of an unarmed man that was playing single-shooter video games. Clearly, TV cops need some more regulation.

Image from Pintrest

    There is a much more corrupt group of cops on TV! What happens when you have a free-for-all police task force that is presided over by the Governor of the state? Then you have the Hawaii 5-0 and all hell breaks loose. These people are cops, but they have the worst luck when it comes to dating and getting people kidnapped. This police squad of misfits operates on their own with no oversight, and they have broken numerous laws to close cases. I also wonder how legal their desktop comoputer is. It's a computer screen the size of a desk that can search databases and find licenses in a matter of seconds.

     In this current season, Chi McBride's Lt.Grover, desperate to prove his old partner's guilt in murdering his wife, kidnaps his friend and holds him at gunpoint and threatens the guy's new girlfriend until he confesses. Don't sweat the small stuff, right? Grace Park's Kono married a reformed Japanese mob (Yakuza) kingpin at the end of last season, and by their honeymoon he is kidnapped, murdered innocent people in his escape, and is now in prison.  Last month, her cousin Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) has a shootout with his deceased wife's brother. Chin gets a little wild and shoots the guy through a window of an abandoned building and he falls a few stories and lands on a car. Important to note, he is missing when the come to check on the body, so it's only an attempted murder. Was this a concerning turn of events for anyone else? Not so much. They were much more worried about Danno and Commander Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin) going to some partner training. When they arrived at the training session, they found out it was a couples' retreat and their witty banter really shown through as Danno suffered through a broken ankle in a three-legged race exercise. I'm not going to blame her, but even McGarrett's girlfriend Catherine saw 5-0 was a toxic environment. Catherine returned for Kono's wedding and just as McGarrett was about to propose, she packed her bags and left for a humanitarian mission (or maybe not, as we discovered last week that she is on a  classified mission in Nepal).
   
     Elsewhere, the FBI took aside Danno (Scott Caan) to investigate what happened to a half-million dollars his brother had in his possession before he was murdered. Somehow his mother got access to the money and the FBI thinks Danny knowingly helped his brother hide the stolen money as an accessory. If this is the FBI's in-road, they need to think again about their priorities. People near to the 5-0 are getting murdered left and right. Plus the group makes their own rules of what constitutes torture for their perps in the windowless interrogation room.  If anyone remembers, the first Governor of Hawaii who created the 5-0 (Jean Smart) got murdered and 5-0 leader McGarrett was framed for it, because who wouldn't believe the leader of a no-rules task force would eliminate the one person standing in his way. Now McGarrett is a pretty decent guy, but let's not forget his mother, renowned criminal Doris (and long thought to be dead) got away with tons of bad stuff because Steve failed to bring her to jail,  and she is still out there and is a hired assassin.

     Now with the FBI on their heels, the 5-0 is going to need to accept responsibility for their errors in judgment and reckless behavior. Inspector Abby Dunn,  (Julie Benz) a recent visitor to 5-0 from San Francisco has come to observe how the group works so she can start her own task force. So naturally with more eyes watching, the group should be making a good impression. But since she has been here, several bad things have happened (See Chin-Ho and the brother-in-law shooting). So imagine my surprise when Abby lied about a trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago, and then she turned up on the other side of Danno's police interrogation. Now, we found out she is an FBI plant to help disband 5-0. No why would anyone want to disband the 5-0 (aside from the above mentioned misconduct)? Of course, the lead investigator's brother was murdered and he has investigated 5-0 last season, so that's all we need in terms of a motive for this show. The reason I find this plot so amusing is that on the beloved 90's alien drama Roswell, Benz also played an FBI agent. Pretending to be the school guidance counselor, agent Topolsky got a little to close to the aliens and she died in a mysterious fire. Hopefully the same fate does not await her in Hawaii.

The X-Files Reboot: I Want to Believe But What Are We Believing? (SPOILERS!)

A.K.A.- Our Kid Is Out There

     To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to think of the new miniseries style season (number 10) of The X-Files. It took me watching this to realize how much Fox put into BONES, which picked up where X-Files left off in a way, but with a fuller story arc. They took it one step further- they fell in love, admitted it, had kids, got married, tried to leave the FBI behind, and came crawling back to solve crime (Booth and Bones, not Mulder and Scully).

      In its essence, I liked the new season, which ended last Monday. Still it lacked a district style of storytelling, almost like they had a group of writers throw some ideas at the wall, and then they used all of the ideas, and went home and realized they had to tie the initial story back together. Let it be known, I like the monster of the week concept of storytelling with a longer issue/villain at work (See Buffy, Charmed etc..), but it’s tough to do in a month+ of episodes. The overall (and barely legitimate) story tying things together is that first Scully and then Mulder realize they might have made a big mistake in giving up their son, William. Little William could have had a normal life with them (as normal as a kid of alien hunting FBI agents can do), but they were worried for his safety and they gave him up. He is a teenager now and they desperately need him to fill the hole in their hearts and (SPOILER ALERT!!) to save Mulder from dying of a weird apocalyptic disease.  Also, from the last scene setup, it is clear something else (another season or a third X-Files movie) is in the works with their son making his first real appearance since birth.

     Season 1’s opening episode My Struggle: Part 1 was truly Fox Mulder's (David Duchovny) story. The last 14 years have not been kind to him. It looks like he has struggled with drinking and got thrown out of any respect in the FBI, and he still lurks in a basement office.  He and ex-partner (in more ways than one) Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have not seen each other in a while, and they have not lived happily ever after as a couple like one might hope. Scully is doing what she does best, running a hospital lab. Joel McHale’s TV pundit Tad O'Malley brings a case to them: a possible government conspiracy and a woman who claims she was abducted by aliens.

     In today’s society, government cover-ups seem less like the idea of a sci-fi story and more like an everyday practice. What could it be this time?  This one's a doozy. People may have been abducted by UFOs (real alien technology borrowed by the government) and unwillingly become part of secret experiment s that gives them alien DNA. Now that we’re all caught up, Mulder and Scully get back to working for Agent Skinner and trying to make sense of this seemingly bogus threat. As Tad points out; the world has changed. All of our seemingly private conversations are listened to, everything is hacked, and biological warfare threatens the very existence of civilization.

EP 2: Founder’s Mutation

     A series of events lands the duo in trouble with the department of defense for investigating a creepy clinic where pregnant teen girls seek haven. It turns out their babies are being stolen from girls' wombs and experimented on by a doctor (Goldman, a.k.a "The Founder") who did the very same experiments on his own kids' genetics, keeping his daughter locked up for years in a facility and his wife convinced she's crazy.  This girl has Alex Mack style powers. She's just about the same age as William. Goldman's son ends up locating his daughter and they use their super powers to kill their dad and escape. Ah, the joys of parenting...

EP3: Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster

     A dead boy is found in the woods. Maybe he was killed by a bear, a wolf, a vampire... or a were-monster?  Yes, there's a difference. This is one of the odder episodes and it veered way off course from even the alien mythology. Mulder and Scully meet the monster and Mulder gets his whole story: "Guy" was bitten by a human, changing his lizard-like appearance human for certain hours until he turns back into a flesh-eating monster. The only legitimate thing about this episode was Mulder getting some renewed faith in his wacky theories. This is barely a plot point. This episode was really frivolous. 

EP4: Home Again

     Scully's mom is ill and she rushes to be by her side. Mulder handles most of the investigating for the case, a murder of a city official bent on getting the homeless out of a particular area of town. "Trahman", a street artist made a creation of garbage and it came to life, murdering the city official and others. This is heavy on metaphor here- what you build may come back and destroy everything. Scully's mom was heavy on straight talk. She calls of for Scully's long-lost brother William, and tells Mulder, "I have a son named William. You do too." before her final breath. 

EP 5: Babylon

Mulder in "Babylon"- from Fox

     Mulder and Scully meet a pair of partners at the FBI (Still not Booth and Bones, although I see huge crossover potential) while trying to connect to an unconscious surviving bomber to find the rest of his crew.  Agent Miller is just like Mulder, diving into conspiracy theories, and Agent Einstein is a female doctor working with the FBI to bring logic and reasoning to the team. It's basically a blast from the past here. Scully and Miller team up, with Arabic expert Miller communicating and Scully checking the bomber for brain wave functioning.

     Mulder reluctantly gets Dr. Einstein to go with his plan, where she administers him a psychotropic drug and he dream walks into the bomber's subconscious. The reality of the situation is that Mulder thinks he takes 'shrooms and ends up having a fake trip (or was it somehow real?) in Texas, dancing in a honky tonk to the best of Billy Ray Cyrus. This scene was very amusing and I loved it, but it really did eat away at some valuable minutes of the show. Mulder gets in big trouble with Agent Skinner, but his trippy dream led him to the answer : a hotel name in Arabic and some much needed to closure to the bomber's mom that he was coerced into joining the group. Mulder may have seen God in his dreams, depending on how you interpret the white clouds and trippy sense of peace he found. Maybe he became more of Scully's believer, one of faith versus one of aliens and conspiracies.

EP6: My Struggle (Part 2) 

     Episode 6 is Scully's struggle. Gillian Anderson carries most of the episode, with Mulder kidnapped by the "Smoking Man" (who is his birth father, and still alive after all these years?!). Mulder is pretty beaten and bruised and according to his phone, somewhere in South Carolina. Agent Miller goes off to rescue him while Agent Einstein helps Scully try to make sense of the rapid illnesses taking control of the population. Deadly outbreaks of disease start spreading and Tad O'Malley finally has the courage to go on TV and announce all of his crazy theories about aliens and government cover-ups because everyone is probably dying. Everyone except Scully. Why? She was given alien D.N.A. when she was abducted years ago (in Season 6). Agent Reyes started helping the Cigarette Smoking Man  (his proper name) almost 14 years ago with this terrible plan to wipe all the crappy people off the earth, leaving only people with alien D.N.A. alive. Why? No reason, he's just evil.... How did people get alien D.N.A? Abductions like Scully. How did they get sick, vaccinations (score one for Jennie McCarthy here).
   
     CSM asks Mulder is he wants some alien D.N.A. to survive, and he says no. Mulder is rescued by Agent Miller and they drive back to D.C. Scully chases them through the beltway, which is stopped dead with traffic because so many people are ill. Scully has a plan, we'll find William, their long-lost son, who will have her same resistant alien D.N.A., and give some to his dad, Mulder. Then a space ship appears overhead and shines its lights on them. END SCENE....

THE END
     This is how they're leaving it... for now. All of these silly monsters and telekinetic kids and dancing to Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, and then a possible alien invasion and cute kids playing Mulder and Skully junior.  Now the pair want to go find their son, and Mulder is half-dead. Way to go Scully..... This brings an end to my rant. I can't believe where this trajectory landed. I'm also happy to report the advent of cell phones makes things so much easier in these police/emergency drama/ evil creature shows now. #TruthIsOutThere

Forever Series Finally Comes to DVD

    I have a soft spot for vampire shows (Vampire Diaries), and at that vampires solving crime is my jam (Angel, Moonlight). I just discovered ABC's sleeper hit, (my opinion, but maybe not the critics' feeling) Forever, is coming to DVD. The show's protagonist  Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Guffudd) is old (approximately 150-ish and looking good for his age).  All 22 episodes of doctor/detective tension (Bones, X-Files, and Castle as inspiration) and a the delightful Irish accent of the guy who rescued Rose from the freezing water in Titanic (and battled Sarah Michelle Gellar as twins on the CW show Ringer). My last happy thought on this is I get to see Judd Hirsch again, as he plays Henry's adopted son in a decidedly friendlier-than-that-guy-Taxi way.

A Note About Daisy and Sweets

Daisy and Dr. Lance "Sweets" from Bones have been a cute, albeit creepy couple on the show. Seeing their painful breakup and decision not to reconcile at the beginning of this season was tough on top of Booth telling Bones he was not going to wait for her to get over her issues any longer.

So once again, Sweets and Daisy find themselves together and struggling to find something in common besides each other. Whatever could it be? Dogs, Indian food, and travel were all fails of a common interest. But, SAVED BY THE BELL was clearly the thing that will bond them together? Although its odd, I think it was a sweet connection. Although I don't agree at all in their thought that Jessie and screech were meant to be together. Jessie and Slater had a perfect love...too bad she decided to go to college across the country.

A Note About the Lynchpin of the Group

Bones Is Back!

I'm so glad. Here's the most shocking moments of the episode:

5. Daisy running around in her underwear to thwart guerrillas.

4. Lance looking like Jason Mraz.

3. Wendell working on a bus.

2. Angela announcing she's pregnant.

1. The lab is gone.