Summary
Murder in a Small Town Season 2 continues to hold Karl and Cassandra’s relationship in stasis in Episode 4. Despite a decent case of the week, the show is much less interesting as a straight-up procedural than a small-town character drama.
Most people, I suspect, watch Murder in a Small Town for the murders. They’ll love Episode 4 of Season 2, which is all murder, shunting almost every other personal subplot to the margins, especially everything involving Karl and Cassandra, which is weird since the previous episode ended with them finally arriving at loggerheads over their conflicting responsibilities. I’ll grant you that this is a weird complaint, but I found “One Last Song” to be a bit too much murder.
On the one hand, it’s nice to see a case stretch out across an entire episode and keep deploying decent red herrings all the way through. I also appreciated how it shunts Sid to the forefront, especially given all those lingering issues with his daughter. But on the other hand, this show is really quite a mediocre procedural without Karl and Cassandra’s relationship grounding it. And, once again, the “small town” part of the title feels a bit underserved, given the victims always tend to be complete outsiders.
This week’s outsider is Gracie, a pop star formerly of some renown who is spending some R&R time in Gibsons with her manager, bodyguard, and publicist. She’s renting a house from Cassandra’s highly-strung friend Phyllis, which just so happens to be right next door to an incredibly annoying woman who complains about everything. She has been trying to reach out to her ex and former musical partner, Jade. Oh, and she also seems to have inadvertently brought her stalker along. That’s quite a cocktail of potential murder suspects when Gracie is inevitably found dead, impaled on a tree branch outside.
There’s a chance that Gracie’s death could have been an accident, but I think we know better than that, don’t we? Pretty soon, there are two prime suspects – Jade, and the stalker, Jeremy. Anyone who has ever seen a procedural before knows this means that neither of them did it, which kind of narrows the suspect pool a little, but there’s decently satisfying sleuthing in the middle. Of particular note is the fact that Sid’s wayward daughter was a fan of Gracie’s and is taking her death particularly hard. Despite Cassandra’s connection to Phyllis, this is really the only angle that feels like it’s genuinely building on the developing character subplots. Cassandra and Karl get almost nothing to do, at least not together.
The real culprit in Murder in a Small Town Season 2, Episode 4 turns out to be Gracie’s manager, Parker, but it isn’t a particularly interesting reveal for the reasons above. It does allow Sid to bond with his kid a little more, though, especially after buttering her up with the idea that she was instrumental in the case. Teenage girls aren’t famous for being reasonable, but the secret to parenting is a lot of tactical lying and exaggeration, and this is really just a form of that. I like Sid, so I appreciate these scenes, minor though they might be.
Karl and Cassandra’s issues, I’m just less convinced by. I do wonder how long the season is going to drag out this idea that they’re too busy to see each other and their jobs are getting in the way – that has been true since Season 1! Something needs to happen between them to give their relationship a significant nudge in one direction or the other. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Cassandra being taken hostage again, but something along those lines would be nice, I think.
My thoughts about Murder in a Small Town in a nutshell are, I think, that the heart of it lives not in murder but in Cassandra’s familiar relationship with Phyllis. These two really do seem like two people who know each other, and it’s nice to have a reminder of how Cassandra’s town council efforts have real stakes and consequences. It helps us to understand why she’s so passionate about that work – even though it may well imperil her relationship with Karl. I hope the show doesn’t forget this as the cases become a bit wilder.
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