Summary
Boston Blue has some effective suspense and strong character work in “St. Patrick’s Day”, a solid episode only led down by some wedged-in subplots.
There’s always a bit of an eerie quality to real-life parades and celebrations being targeted, so Boston Blue is treading quite a thin line in Episode 12, “St. Patrick’s Day”. It does a pretty good job of things, though. The threat ends up coming from the cartel, which gives it an especially personal contour for Danny, and Linda’s fate looms heavily over the episode for him and Sean. All this stuff works fairly well, and more to the point, ties in quite nicely to the show’s overarching themes of grief, family, and faith.
It also redirects focus away from the Silvers, which is welcome, and helps Boston Blue to feel more like a Blue Bloods spin-off instead of its own, separate thing. And, needless to say, a threat against the St. Patrick’s Day parade, a couple of shoot-outs, and an effort to save a kid all have the requisite amount of drama to keep the procedural elements ticking along nicely enough.
The weaker side of the plot is Sean and Jonah’s stuff, which has a silly vibe to it that stands in a bit of a contrast to the more considered emotional drama backdropping everything and the much more real stakes of the A-plot. The parade helps to keep things fairly concentrated in terms of focus, and there’s obviously a cross-cultural element to big St. Paddy’s Day stalwarts having to navigate the looser, party-hard approach to the holiday, but the patrol story still feels a little off and is definitely the weaker half.
In a post-Boston Marathon bombing world, the idea of a massed group of people attracting acts of atrocity is always prevalent, so Boston Blue is right to use that lingering fear to build drama. In that context, a Mexican cartel threat seems less uncomfortably prescient than, say, a major terror attack, or even a lone nutcase. Narrowing their target down to a single person is another way to soften the angle without dulling it completely, and it also gives space for the personal elements to emerge. As soon as Danny recognised the cartel and shared how he was connected to them through Linda’s death, it was obvious that it was going to be the focal point.
Lena’s response to this news is nice. You can really feel their partnership evolving in Boston Blue Episode 12. It was solid enough anyway – sometimes a bit too solid, in terms of how little they disagree and how quickly those disagreements are skirted past when they do – but Danny opening up about Linda is a pretty major step. Lena feels appropriately secondary to Danny in terms of focus here, but she isn’t neglected entirely, since her new man is working the case, and for some reason, Danny pushes her about clarifying what exactly their relationship status is.
As with the Sean and Jonah stuff, I’m not sure how well this works, at least when it’s wedged in between everything else. It’s not that I don’t care about Lena’s love life, but her commitment issues are fairly old hat, and this doesn’t seem like the time to go over it. The whole thing feels a bit too much like Lena needing something to do beyond supporting Danny on the case, but it’s fine in a procedural to have certain characters hog focus in certain episodes.
It all comes together pretty damn well, though, and definitely feels like a cut above last week’s very standard outing. The parade-set sequences are great, which makes for a very strong climactic set-piece with legitimate tension, and even the character-driven stuff has a nice payoff in one of the usual big dinner scenes that has been nicely reworked as a St. Patrick’s Day celebration for Danny and Sean’s benefit. This kind of found family, home-away-from-home stuff is Boston Blue’s bread and butter, so it’s a nice way of bringing everything together before the show goes off on hiatus for a couple of weeks.
