The Closer: Domestic Disturbances
September 3, 2008 by Elma Rahman
Filed under Television, Uncategorized
Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) found her pre-wedded bliss disrupted in this week’s episode, Split Ends, after a sudden visit from her parents, Clay and Billie Ray. As Johnson and Agent Howard (John Tenney) struggle to rearrange their schedules in order to spend time with her parents, Johnson is hit with an all-too-different type of domestic disturbance, when she is called in to investigate a murder on the Hollywood set of the television show, Trauma Unit. They find the brutally beaten body of the show’s hairstylist, Rachel Hughes, stuffed in a storage box located under one of the trucks. As the detectives target the main suspect, Rachel’s violent husband, Ryan Hughes, they uncover Rachel’s fear-ridden attempts to escape Ryan’s abuse, including secret addresses, restraining orders, and her involvement with a local women’s shelter. In the hopes of finding Rachel’s killer, Johnson and her crew desperately seek to discover Rachel’s new and very well hidden address.
Tensions continue to mount at the office, as Commander Taylor (Robert Gossett) and Asst. Police Chief Will Pope (J.K. Simmons) urge Johnson to quickly close this Hollywood case after discovering that Ricardo Ramos, still questioning the department’s supposed preference for high profile cases, will be writing a two-piece article on the L.A.P.D.’s handling of homicide prioritization. Johnson, dumbfounded at the thought of arresting Hughes without the full confession she is so used to getting from her suspects, refuses to give in to higher ups and continues her investigation.
To complicate matters and send Johnson into an even further sweets-feeding frenzy (although in one scene this week, there was a blatant product plug when Johnson unwrapped a SoyJoy® bar, the healthier alternative to her usual sugar-coated and chocolate-drenched treats), Johnson feels the heat of her parents’ pressure for her to finally take the plunge and marry Howard after their prolonged engagement. After finding Rachel’s hideaway and zeroing in on additional murder suspects, including Trauma Unit actress, Kelly Rivers, a domestic violence victim whom Rachel was trying to help, Johnson and her team capture the killer after a brutal showdown.
Perhaps empowered by Rachel Hughes’ bold fight for freedom just before her death, Johnson stops noshing on chocolate long enough to tell her parents that she will be the one to decide her wedding date when she is ready. Perhaps questioning whether wedded bliss is really all that blissful, this week’s episode certainly managed to uncover all the trappings that sometimes accompany the institution of marriage, including meddlesome in-laws-to-be and, even worse, mental and physical abuse inflicted by those who promised to love.
Mondays at 9/8c, TNT
Photograph courtesy of TNT
I just finished watching this episode–I came here from a search for ‘The Closer’ + SoyJoy–and I really enjoyed it, except that for some reason Sedgwick’s body language seemed to indicate that Brenda didn’t think Ryan really did it, from the start. Even with the joke about being a better actor than they thought, that early indicator made me start thinking about how else things could have happened.
By the time they started revealing things, it felt like a dead giveaway a la ‘Murder, She Wrote’ but it was a fun episode. Clay’s apparent jealousy and mistrust of Provenza was hilarious, and Fritz’s turning the tables on Brenda in the epilogue was delicious! I am getting really sick of the character, whether onscreen or off, of Ricardo Ramos. She already had enough characters getting in the way of her doing her job, I didn’t feel that one more was necessary.