Summary
It’s not a coincidence that “Strangers Among Us” is the best episode of Murder in a Small Town Season 2 thus far, since it’s the first one not to revolve around a murder. Funny, that.
Every week, I make a joke about how many murders can happen in a small town before they stop being noteworthy, so I feel fairly vindicated by “Strangers Among Us”, which is the first episode of Murder in a Small Town Season 2 to lean more heavily into the small-town aspect and forgo murder altogether. Perhaps not coincidentally, Episode 5 is the best yet, the most intimate-feeling, emotionally complex, and thematically relevant case that Karl has been asked to deal with. Amazing what can happen when you don’t kill someone off every week.
Some of the typical problems persist. Karl and Cassandra’s relationship only exists in one or two small scenes, and their respective storylines have little to do with each other. But we are beginning to see the overlap creeping in; stuff like Karl’s department being underfunded, the knock-on effects of small-town policing, the too-intimate social hierarchies in high school and beyond, and the systemic indifference that tends to characterise settings like Gibsons. Everything felt a bit more connected here, at least it did to me, even though the main subjects of the case of the week are, as ever, complete strangers, including a much-talked-about cameo from Teen Wolf’s Tyler Posey.
Posey plays Ryan Coogan, a party-boy who arrives in town to visit his friend, Jack Coutts, who is the victim of this week’s almost-murder. I might as well tell you up front that Ryan has ulterior motives. He shot Coutts during a disagreement they were having about Ryan being responsible for the death of Jack’s daughter years prior, and is lurking around the hospital in the hopes of finishing Jack off before he can wake up and tell anyone. It was an accident, to be fair, and Ryan’s heart isn’t in killing his friend off, but he’s one of those dudes for whom self-preservation is his guiding impulse. Luckily, he’s caught before he can smother Jack with his hospital pillow.
I’m leading with this since it’s by far the least important aspect of “Strangers Among Us”, however much Posey’s cameo has been talked about. What’s much more interesting is the side story that crops up when a young boy named Elliot, who has been bounced around the foster system his whole life and is being badly bullied at school, stumbles over Jack on the roadside before his hospitalisation. He also happens to stumble on the gun next to him, which he ill-advisedly decides to keep and take to school.
Elliot isn’t thinking straight here. He hasn’t actively decided to use the gun to shoot his tormentor, although I’m sure it has crossed his mind, but he also hasn’t considered the influence he’s having on his 13-year-old foster brother, Greg, who is much more inclined to defend himself – and indeed Elliot – than Elliot seems to be. You can see the disastrous form this is going to take way before it happens, but I still think it really works in execution. Greg stealing the gun, following Elliot’s bully home, and then trying to scare him with it leads to a stand-off that terrifies everyone, not least the cops, led by Sid and Laila, who have to respond to it and talk him down safely.
In this storyline, Murder in a Small Town Season 2, Episode 5 proves that you don’t strictly need a murder to up the stakes in this show. It’s sometimes enough to have the threat of death hovering over things, or even, in some cases, the spectre of it, which is where Cassandra is keeping herself busy. An unexpected invite from the mayor to attend a meeting of the Gibsons Safety Society to address railings in dangerous areas gives her another curious clue about Lauren Park, the woman whose long-ago death and roadside memorial were introduced in the third episode.
Luckily, this also provides a way to keep Holly, Karl’s daughter, tethered to the plot, since she’s working on a project about roadside memorials. The presence of enchanter’s nightshade, a plant famously associated with revenge since it derives its genus name, Circaea, from the character Circe, the enchantress from Homer’s Odyssey who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs for abusing her hospitality, raises some red flags. It’s a weird flower to leave at memorials for what were apparently accidents, especially 25 years apart. There’s clearly a case here, one winding its way through the history of Gibsons in a way that Karl’s murder-fest so often doesn’t. It should be interesting to follow along as we go.
Cassandra might as well keep herself busy, since it isn’t like Karl is paying a great deal of attention to her at the moment. They only really get together at the very end of the episode, and they lightly bicker about Cassandra having hung up one of Karl’s private paintings (he’s so moody; I don’t know how she copes). They’ve reached the “I love you” stage of the relationship, which is nice, but something tells me it probably isn’t going to last.
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