Summary
Murder in a Small Town returns for Season 2 with more murders and more small-town politics, so it’s performing as advertised, even if Episode 1 suggests it might be trying to have its cake and eat it, too.
How many murders have to happen in a small town before it stops being a noteworthy enough occurrence for a show title? I’m just asking, since from the time Karl Alberg arrived in Gibsons, there has been a murder near enough every week, a trend that continues apace in Episode 1 of Season 2. It’s almost like he’s the common denominator, and that Murder in a Small Town describes not a rare tragedy but a seemingly everyday occurrence.
This is better for us, obviously, since there wouldn’t be a show otherwise. But I’ve always maintained that this show works better as a small-town relationship drama with a whodunit in the background than it does as a straight-up crime drama. “Acts of Murder” doesn’t burden us with Karl and Cassandra’s on-again-off-again relationship, which they committed to working on in the first season finale, but it does keep them siloed in their own little subplots, with Karl still doing the policework and Cassandra now busying herself with local politics.
The victim this time around is Garrett, an altogether unsavoury drunk type who’s abusive to his wife, uses his boat for mysterious but probably uncouth extracurricular activities, and keeps questionable company. When he lunges at his wife, Denise, in an aggressive stupor, she hits him over the head, knocking him unconscious. Believing he’s dead, Denise’s sister, Marita, who never liked Garrett in the first place, helps her stuff him in the trunk of the car and cover the crime up, secure in the knowledge that Garrett’s fate will be blamed on his social circle.
As luck would have it, the police, though particularly new cop Laila Jackson, are already looking for Garrett after he threatened an associate’s family. This leads them quickly to the car, abandoned in the woods, but Garrett – dun, dun, dun – isn’t in the trunk. Instead, he’s on his boat, having been rendered extra crispy by a fire. The blow to the head didn’t kill him, and neither did several stab wounds after that. He died of smoke inhalation, bound in his own vessel.
This exonerates the sisters of murder, even though Karl suspects them immediately. But Garrett had a laundry list of potential enemies connected to his mistress, Susan, for whom he was laundering money. Garrett’s affair with Susan was the source of Marita’s profound hatred for him and also the proximate cause of his death, since when he started skimming that laundered dough to fund his gambling habit, she enlisted a crook named Renny to dispose of him. Karl eventually figures all this out after the sisters are almost killed by a biker gang while trying to abscond with Garrett’s money to buy themselves a new life. How small is this town, again?
Murder in a Small Town Season 2, Episode 2 is almost a show of two halves; Karl deals with the murders, and Cassandra with the small-town stuff. It feels like a way for the show to kind of have its cake and eat it. The relationship drama and local politics benefit from intimacy, from every character knowing and having some sort of history with everyone else, but the weekly crimes have to pretend this isn’t the case, or we’d literally run out of people to kill off.
The big problem in Cassandra’s world is a planned art centre development that the mayor, who clearly has a barely concealed issue with Cassandra, would like to nix. To accomplish this, she decides to lean on Karl. The police department is struggling; it’s underfunded and understaffed, and Karl would like to expand its jurisdiction, but doing so would require more hires. The mayor can make that happen. But she’s only willing to do so if Karl uses his position as Cassandra’s significant other to influence her decisions as a councilwoman. That’s an incredibly bold strategy, but this tends to be how powerful people get down. In such a small town, the lowly mayor is the big cheese. The thing is, in this small town, someone’s liable to kill her.
The premiere ends with Cassandra and Karl reiterating that their relationship remains the most important thing, almost as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink message to the audience that it’s going to be put through the wringer in due course.
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