Summary
Boston Blue feels a bit more fractious in “Suffer the Children”, which is a good mode for it. The disagreements help to underpin the cases, and the conflict — however minor — makes the character drama more engaging.
You see how much difference a bit of disagreement makes? For all its strengths as a procedural, this is the one area where Boston Blue has consistently lacked, and for the first time in Episode 5, “Suffer the Children”, things feel a bit more pleasingly fractious. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of back-slapping cosy understanding by the end, but it feels a touch more earned. Danny and Sean don’t decide they can live together after all, they just agree that one of them should move out. Lena doesn’t solve Boston’s most famous art heist case. And Sarah is right about her suspicions that the case of the week’s seemingly well-meaning parents were protecting a ticking time bomb – in being right, she and Mae both have to swallow a harsher outcome. Even the family dinner is a little testy.
This stuff really does make a difference. The theme of parents being responsible for their children, and not always in the way that suits, is effectively woven through all of the episode’s different subplots, which gives the entire outing a bit more coherence. I’d argue it comes through better in Sarah’s story, which is about trying to determine whether the parents of a teenage psycho were equally culpable for his violent crimes, but you can see it everywhere if you’re looking for it.
Mae isn’t exactly in total opposition to Sarah here, but she does demand that she prove it. It isn’t enough to have a theory. The parents of Kyle claimed to be responsible, to have given him lessons in gun safety and kept firearms under lock and key. Does that mean they knowingly armed a killer, or that they did everything they could to teach their child how to handle a firearm appropriately, within his legal rights? It’s an interesting – and sadly relevant – question for the show to be asking.
I thought Boston Blue Episode 5 was going to contrive some kind of easy answer here. But the parents were culpable. They knew their son was off his meds and that he shouldn’t have been anywhere near a firearm. They fell into a pattern of denial to protect him, which was presumably well-intentioned initially but quickly became indefensible. They’re charged with involuntary manslaughter alongside him. Suffer the children indeed.
Danny and Sean don’t have anything quite this complicated going on, but they are having issues. They’re both living together, for one thing, which Sean is really struggling with, since Danny’s nice gestures – like making his bed and wanting to talk about his day in detail – are making him feel crowded. He doesn’t want to insist that his dad, who just uprooted his entire life to spend more time with him, move out of the apartment, but both of them know it would be for the best.
Sean’s case – which he works with Jonah, as usual – about an elderly man with dementia needing to reconnect with his son helps him to process some of his feelings, and Jonah’s offer of Sean moving in with him and leaving Danny to languish in the current apartment provides a potential solution. Again, I was expecting Sean to realise that his dad means well and decide to stay and watch Marvel movies with him indefinitely, but instead he learns to be honest and communicate, and they both decide to go their separate ways. Again, it works.
In the A-plot, Danny and Lena work a case that might be connected to a locally famous unsolved heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This is a real case from 1990 in which 13 priceless pieces of art were pilfered. Every now and again, someone crops up with claims of being connected to it – they’re usually nutters, but “Suffer the Children” imagines a more direct connection that brings Danny and Lena close to the original culprit.
Of course, there’s a family component here too, with the supposed witness’s own family having gotten him killed to keep the secret buried and the paintings missing. Lena is inclined to solve this age-old case not just because it’s a local legend but because she had a passion for art herself, something she didn’t ultimately pursue because she assumed that, since nobody on her mother’s side of the family is artistic, it was inherited from her biological father, who abandoned her.
This feels like a more organic way for Lena to talk about her complicated feelings involving her family background, but I also like that Boston Blue Episode 5 doesn’t provide the lay-up of allowing her to solve the original heist. That little pang of disappointment feels right, and is what the show needs to be doing a lot more of to feel more grounded and involving. But this, at least to me, felt like the first real step in the right direction.
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