Summary
Murder in a Small Town gets back on track with “Prized Possessions”, an episode that properly integrates the character dynamics with the case of the week.
This is a bit more like it, I’d say. Murder in a Small Town has had an interesting run thus far, but Episode 4, “Prized Possessions”, is probably its most balanced instalment yet. There’s a murder, eventually, but the case is properly interwoven with Karl and Cassandra’s relationship and Gibson’s small-town politics. As I’ve mentioned before, this is where the show works best.
The premiere previously came closest to this balance, while Episode 2 was a bit of a step down from there and Episode 3 felt like a transplant from a completely different show. “Prized Possessions” isn’t just a return to that early form but actually shows a real path forward that I’m keen on exploring.
The secret, I think, is having Cassandra be more directly involved in the case. The episode’s A-plot revolves around a woman whose husband, Charlie, has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind pints of blood in his home office but no other clues. The woman, Emma, is a long-time friend of Cassandra who was out for dinner with her at the time of Charlie’s disappearance. Cassandra is effectively Emma’s alibi, but she also functions as a kind of translator between Karl and Gibson’s obscure social dynamics.
It’s obvious from a six-months-earlier cold open that Emma is hiding something, and Cassandra helps Karl to piece it together not just from forensic details but from clues in her behaviour; a strange demeanour when they met six months previously and the night before, suggestions that their marriage wasn’t as happy as it seemed, and so on, and so forth. Emma seems like a suspect, at least initially, and the episode is obviously framing her that way intentionally, but Cassandra’s involvement forces Karl to consider other possibilities and widen his search.
As it turns out, Charlie wasn’t murdered – he faked his own death to abscond with his mistress, funded by embezzled funds from Emma’s brother’s investment firm. He was trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman who, according to her own brother, Blake, was obsessed with perfection and order. It was a situation he couldn’t escape from, hence the outside-the-box solution.
There hasn’t actually been a murder in this small town until Blake stumbles on Charlie trying to steal a thumb drive. The mistress stabs Blake in a scuffle, and Charlie is forced to reluctantly smother him with a pillow. For a guy who was trying to escape a controlling relationship, he seems to have questionable taste. He went from a perfectionist straight to a psychotic.
Karl is able to figure all this out and apprehend Charlie thanks to Cassandra’s insight and, of course, the hard work of his team, who’re beginning to feel more fleshed out and vital every episode. Edwina gets a fair bit of focus here and is clearly one of Karl’s most useful employees – he’s even starting to notice, too.
Because Cassandra is so deeply involved in the case, Karl’s personal life doesn’t feel like it has to be contained in a completely separate portion of Murder in a Small Town Episode 4. Now that he and Cassandra are official – even though they still have a hard time being public about it, and seemed to have forgotten entirely throughout most of Episode 3 – attention turns mainly to his relationship with his daughter, Holly.
Holly is dealing with some things. She feels Karl abandoned their family and moved away without a word and is hiding in his work to avoid having to deal with that; this is, at least in part, true. But she also assumes that he left them for Cassandra, which isn’t accurate. Karl clarifies that, while also taking responsibility for not dealing with his problems head-on and putting his daughter first.
I guess I was wrong in my assumption that Holly wouldn’t be a regular cast member. It seems like she’s is staying, since she has been thrown out of her school for smoking weed. Since she’s sticking around Karl introduces her to Cassandra, though I don’t imagine their relationship will be totally smooth (teenage girls aren’t known for being reasonable, after all.) But we’ll see.
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