Summary
Murder in a Small Town once again misunderstands its own appeal in Episode 6, and features another case that is too silly by half.
I know I’m always getting on Murder in a Small Town’s case for fundamentally misunderstanding its own appeal and occasionally having episodes that feel like transplants from a different show, but I feel pretty validated by Episode 6, “The Madness Method”, because it both fundamentally misunderstands the show’s appeal and feels like a transplant from a different show at the same time.
Look, I know there had to be some repercussions to Cassandra getting kidnapped in the previous episode. It was obvious from the ending that she hadn’t taken the whole ordeal especially well, and since Karl was responsible, in a roundabout way, it stands to reason she’d take it out on him. And I’d even go so far as to say I understand where she’s coming from. Gibsons is supposed to be a sleepy no-account town in the middle of nowhere, and since Karl turned up, there’s been a murder every week. He’s bad news.
But none of this is the point. There are a hundred – nay, a hundred thousand – procedurals about a small-town cop solving crimes. The appeal of this one is that it’s about a small-town cop and his pretty local girlfriend solving crimes, which is why Episode 4 was the best one. The dynamic is crucial. I knew it was a mistake to get Cassandra kidnapped so early since I knew it’d result in precisely this outcome – she breaks up with Karl because the stress of his professional life is too much to deal with.
You can tell this is bothering me because I’m three paragraphs in and I haven’t even mentioned the case of the week or the guest star yet. But that’s dumb too! Still, since we have some semblance of professional obligation around here, let’s go over it anyway.
Shane Sloan is a sociopath, or so we’re led to believe. We have no idea who this guy is and he’s not local, but he’s on the run after murdering a politician named Murray Zuckerman and is due to arrive in Gibsons any moment, ostensibly in pursuit of his therapist, Elizabeth Lewis, played by Paula Patton in a scenery-chewing cameo.
I’m always happy to see Paula Patton, obviously, but the fact that it takes most of the episode for anyone to work out that she’s the real villain here is absolutely preposterous. She’s sat on her phone sending text messages to Shane the entire time! Whenever Karl tries to poke holes in her story, or looks for a little bit more validation about her claims, she whips out her phone and suddenly Shane has provided it, with nobody thinking this is weird.
Kristin Kreuk in Murder in a Small Town | Image via Fox
I will confess to assuming the worst. I figured we were doing the classic femme fatale thing, and the twist was going to be that Shane was just doing what Elizabeth wanted him to do because she’s Paula Patton. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, at least.
As it turns out, Elizabeth is a lifelong master manipulator who has been ruining people’s lives by talking them into heinous crimes for ages. It’s a control thing. You can see it, too, since she constantly psychoanalyzes everyone she meets, including Cassandra, who she bumps into giving a statement, immediately diagnoses with PTSD – probably accurately, to be fair – and recommends therapy to.
The whole deal with Murray is that Elizabeth had a relationship with him that got about as serious as she was capable of getting, but when he got his wife pregnant and decided to break things off, she “activated” Shane to kill him. Petty, really, but you know how people are. I think all this would work better if Paula wasn’t playing it up to the nines since we’re supposed to buy into the idea that she’s genuinely very smart and good at this, but I had her pegged as a nutter the second she walked through the precinct’s door.
None of this has anything to do with Cassandra, but it does result in a shootout in the station when Shane turns up to liberate Elizabeth and assassinate Karl, the latter for reasons I’m not entirely sure I understand, which Cassandra thinks proves her point. Karl’s life is dangerous, and it isn’t very accommodating for a woman who now has PTSD.
This is why Cassandra decides to break things off with Karl in Murder in a Small Town Episode 6, just two episodes before the end of Season 1, and you have to wonder why the writers chose to pull the trigger on the breakup now. Is Karl going to magically reassure Cassandra back into a relationship in just two episodes? Or will the season end with them apart, even though it’s supposed to be predicated on them being together? Neither of those outcomes sounds especially satisfying, so I hope they come up with something else. But what?
I’ll be there to find out since I, like Karl, am curious about what trauma Cassandra was running away from when she left Sacramento, which has to matter or she wouldn’t have mentioned it. But I persist that this is a really weird show with no idea what kind of show it truly wants to be, and unfortunately when you have an airtime rival like High Potential that knows exactly what kind of show it wants to be, that might spell trouble.
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