Summary
Sheriff Country delivers another banger in “Compromised”, raising the stakes massively and shaking up the status quo with a late twist.
I know I compare Boston Blue and Sheriff Country a lot, perhaps even a little unfairly, but their respective trajectories have been interesting to follow. They debuted on the same week, on the same channel, and they’re both spin-offs of existing franchises. As one improves, often so does the other. It has been a fun game of one-upmanship, and with the latest adventures of Danny and Lena being very good, Edgewater’s contingent had its work cut out. But Episode 19, “Compromised”, proves that Sheriff Country is pretty much clear of every other procedural airing right now.
There’s everything here – emotional sentiment, effective character development, real stakes, and proper twists and turns, including a late one that fundamentally upsets the key dynamics at play. With Wes still in jail after being arrested by Mickey, Mickey still under investigation by the DEA on suspicion of corruption, and Skye taking the latest developments very badly, the end-of-season feeling is becoming very pronounced.
Truthfully, I didn’t expect Skye, of all people, to be the primary focus of the fallout, especially since the show has often had her disappear for long stretches since it doesn’t always know what to do with her. But it ends up being very effective. The opening of “Compromised” finds her spiralling. On the cusp of receiving her nine-month sobriety chip, which was supposed to be given to her by Wes, she’s missing AA meetings, acting out of character, and trying to bury herself in work for Miranda, who it quickly turns out might have been the Big Bad all along. Her only allies are her sponsor, Hazel, and Miranda’s son, Rick, though the latter is eventually revealed not to be as on side as Skye thought.
Anyway, about Miranda. With suspicious timing, she throws a big press conference announcing that she’s shifting the Fraley business model from lumber to legal cannabis, and as soon as the sheriffs get wind of her operations, it becomes very clear that she’s the mastermind behind Emerald Eden. This isn’t the most shocking twist in the world, since Mickey’s personal issues with Miranda have clearly been building towards something like it, but the implications are nonetheless pretty significant, since she may well have personally authorised every murder that has occurred thus far.
Problematically for Mickey, when she confronts Miranda about this, Skye takes her side. There’s a risk that this could seem too “teen-like” as far as decision-making goes, but Sheriff Country does a decent job of establishing Skye’s headspace in Episode 19, and it has been working on the Miranda relationship for weeks. We’ll return to this later, though, since there’s another development that makes it make more sense for good measure.
In the meantime, we might as well discuss Mickey’s love life, since this also turns out to be very important. Despite his boss scrutinising her every move, Alec is pretty adamant about not letting his relationship with Mickey fizzle out. She’s happy to reciprocate his affections, especially since she manages to smooth things over with Boone – although she does acknowledge that she has had some feelings of her own towards him, so we’re still heading in that direction, shippers – and he seems like a very useful ally. He’s with Mickey when she gets home and discovers that Skye seems to have succumbed to her addiction and taken an overdose, though there are some suspicious circumstances that suggest things might not be entirely as they seem.
For one thing, Skye’s lips had turned purple. She OD’d on fentanyl, which she wasn’t typically inclined to use, and the scene looked very staged. With a bit of prodding, Mickey and Alec realise that she was drugged unknowingly in the spiked smoothie provided to her by… Rick. Jealous over her relationship with his mother, and suspicious that Skye was trying to compile evidence against her to give to Mickey – Wes confirms that Skye was only pretending to switch sides, and really knew that Miranda was up to something – Rick had attempted to take Skye off the board for good.
When Mickey confronts Miranda about this, it’s clear that she had no knowledge of it, even though Boone and a returning Cassie turn up a bunch of evidence confirming that McGuire was already dead before the police got there, meaning that someone killed him ahead of time and staged his death to look like suicide-by-cop. Miranda probably organised that, but the Rick thing throws her. She still won’t give him up, but it’s clear that he was acting on his own, or at least without Miranda’s say-so.
This turns out to be true and then some. Rick had taken matters into his own hands, but he does have an ally in the form of Alec, who, it turns out, is the hitman Miranda has been using to facilitate her shady business deals. It was Alec who covered up Brandon’s murder from way back in the premiere, which it seems Rick was guilty of. And now he’s having to cover up the mess Rick has made with Skye. But the only way to do that is to finish the job himself, so Mickey’s new boyfriend is now planning to kill her daughter. She just can’t catch a break!
Since Rick is a liability, though, Alec also shoots him dead. As a loyal employee of Miranda, I’m not sure how that’ll go down, but I also don’t think Alec will admit it. Since he’s so good at staging murder scenes, he’ll probably come up with a creative solution that I doubt will benefit any of the good guys. But so close to the end of the season, I’m not sure how Mickey is going to get out of it unscathed.
