Summary
Boston Blue puts a cameo to good use in “Beautiful Broken Things”, which features a strong A-plot but some iffy side stories.
I’ve said this before, but it’s easy to forget sometimes that Boston Blue is a Blue Bloods spin-off, and some of the ways in which it endeavours to remind you aren’t always the smoothest. But Episode 13, “Beautiful Broken Things”, plays up the connection really well, wheeling out Len Cariou’s Henry for a cameo that is actually meaningful on several levels, including Danny’s official transition from the NYPD to Boston PD. It’s a nice way to reintroduce the show after it disappeared for a brief hiatus.
Things elsewhere are a bit of a mixed bag. The A-plot is fine, a character-focused side story is underwhelming thanks to the fact that we already knew about its big reveal, and Jonah and Sean are once again sidelined in what basically amounts to a comic relief subplot, with a bust going viral, labelling one of the two of them “Hot Cop”. Both pretend not to care about who the hot cop actually is; both, obviously, do.
Henry’s arrival coincides with Edwin being shot, seemingly in a random crossfire. This story works pretty well, and Edwin is becoming my favourite character. I don’t love the religious focus, personally, but the plot, as well as giving Edwin more to do, also serves a secondary purpose of bringing Mae’s older sister, Jill, into the fold. Even that is designed to allow Mae to discover the truth about her mother’s death. As we know, her mother committed suicide, which Edwin has always obscured, allowing Mae to believe she died in an accident. It was a well-intentioned gesture designed to protect her that kind of metastasised into a serious untruth he could never quite find a way to address.
This is fine, but we already knew the truth, and the fact that Mae’s discovery and processing of it occur in the margins of an episode that also unavoidably pulls focus to Henry isn’t a great choice. It could have used a bit more room to breathe, dramatically speaking, but it was nice to see Mae’s interactions with Jill, who always knew the secret since she was the one to discover their mother’s body. Mae claims to need time to process the discovery, but she seems to have done so even by the end of the episode, despite her recent run of deeply personal storylines, including finally tying a bow around Ben’s murder.
Anyway, Henry. As well as keeping Mae company for a while as Edwin recovers, he also gets to see Sean in uniform – and kindly pretends to be interested in the whole “Hot Cop” thing. But I do enjoy his facility for dispensing truly sage wisdom at a moment’s notice. Never accept criticism from someone you wouldn’t ask for advice? That’s a belter. Proper old man wisdom.
Henry has an ulterior motive in Boston Blue Episode 13, though, which is to help smooth Danny’s transition to Boston PD, which means officially retiring from the NYPD and handing in his badge. In a very nice gesture that literally brings Danny to tears, Henry bribed a pal in the Boston PD HQ with a 25-year-old bottle of scotch to ensure that Danny was assigned the badge of a guy who just so happened to have had a long career with the exact same badge number as Danny’s back in New York. So, he might have to swap badges, but his number will remain the same. It’s a thoughtful move, and symbolically effective in smoothing over that transition from one show to another in a meaningful way.
Danny’s official induction into Boston PD will also require a stint in uniform, which will definitely form the basis for a coming episode and will probably be pretty funny. I don’t think this is a great show, granted, but I do think it’s a pretty serviceable procedural capable of the odd great episode. That might be one of them. If not, this one was at least pretty sweet.
