Summary
Murder in a Small Town Season 2 reaches a high point in “The Fall of Holman”, a penultimate episode that sets up some interesting angles for the upcoming finale.
Unpopular opinion though it might be, I think Mayor Christie Holman has been my favourite character in Murder in a Small Town Season 2. By “favourite” I don’t mean “most likeable”, obviously, since she’s far from that. But she has at least been a consistently complex and surprising figure in a show that can sometimes traffic in broad archetypes, and for that reason alone, I can see why, in Episode 9, “The Fall of Holman”, someone tries to kill her.
Cassandra is a suspect, of course, but that doesn’t last very long. She has her own subplot to worry about in this, the penultimate episode of the season, which is weird to think about since it has finally started getting good. It also doesn’t seem like there’s enough going on to build a finale around, though I can suspect what it may focus on based on these events. But more on that in a minute.
Holman, it turns out, was corrupt, but not irredeemably so. The documents delivered to Cassandra in the previous episode proved she had shuffled some money around through her own family development company. It was for the benefit of Gibsons, but it was also unethical, so Cassandra plans on making it public. She confronts Christie about it, and she asks her to hang fire for 24 hours first. Later, she publicly resigns to focus on her charity work, meaning that Cassandra has no reason to sully her good name. But then she’s battered over the head by an unknown assailant, so it all has to come to light anyway.
Christie survives the attack, but to be fair, who attacked her and why isn’t particularly interesting. It was her son-in-law, Robert, and the age-old justification was greed and entitlement. It is what it is. But since we’ve been building on Christie’s family life and political career for a while, her being attacked is interesting in how it allows us to explore those relationships more, especially the one she has with Brett.
The source of Brett’s issues is identified here in Murder in a Small Town Season 2, Episode 9. His father, with whom he was extremely close, had died in a car crash, and he had developed a kind of lingering resentment for his mother over her survival. He was angry and felt unwanted, and many of Christie’s decisions, including her pushing to send him to a military school to instil some discipline, reiterated that idea. He didn’t want to kill her, but he did want to destroy her political career, which is why he provided Cassandra with the kompromat. There are easier ways to get your mother to spend time with you, but whatever works. It does seem like Christie’s near-death experience has helped their relationship, though, so I don’t expect we’ll be hearing much from either of them in the finale.
I strongly suspect that climactic episode will revolve around Cassandra and Warren, the man who was solely responsible for her departing Sacramento in disgrace. Warren is a flagrant weirdo. He and Cassandra were once friends, but he wanted more. When she rebuffed him, he tried to kill himself, telling everyone it was because she led him on and then let him down. It was a lie, but it ruined her reputation and created a lot of guilt, which is why Cassandra moved to Gibsons.
But now Warren has followed her there. He’s creepy in “The Fall of Holman”, but not outright criminal, though you can tell he’s pretty close to the bone. Todd is on hand to protect her, but I do suspect that’ll come back to bite him, since if anything were to happen to Warren, he’d be a prime suspect. Perhaps Karl would, too, especially since he reveals late in the episode that he already knew about him. After Cassandra had mentioned her time in Sacramento, he had looked into it without telling her, which she considers to be a pretty gross invasion of privacy. She has a point.
Things aren’t looking good for Laila, either. The officer-involved shooting seems to have bothered her, and that’s significantly worsened when Vanessa breaks up with her, at least in part because of how uncomfortable she feels over the fact that she has taken someone’s life. This isn’t a vindictive gesture, but Laila, already emotionally vulnerable, struggles to process it. As a result, she gets extremely drunk, ruining her three months of sobriety, and tries to drive herself home. Vanessa intervenes and takes her car keys, but this feels as if it’s building towards something that is likely to be addressed in the finale. Time will tell.
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