Life: For the Birds

As of this week, the dynamic detective duo of Charlie Crews and Dani Reese is no more…at least temporarily. At their latest crime scene—which consists of a guy who was poisoned and impaled on a broken broom handle in his office similar to how Dirty Harry takes out the baddie at the end of The Dead Pool—Tidwell tells Reese about an opportunity to be loaned out to the FBI for a few weeks on a special assignment. Reese, still trying to climb the department ranks, accepts. So she won’t be around for a few weeks to keep Charlie on a leash. Of course the real reason for this plot development is that Sarah Shahi is pregnant. Hopefully the showrunners will handle it better than the Moonlighting team did when Cybil Shepherd got pregnant.

The dead guy is a pigeon-loving investment banker who specializes in derivatives, a financial term that no one really understands. Charlie calls Ted to ask him to explain it, but Charlie still can’t understand it…and I can’t blame him. Ted also tells him that the bottom fell out of the derivative market, so this guy should have been on skid row. Except he lived in a nice apartment and liked to plop down $6,000 a night on pricey hookers. He was clearly making his income somewhere else.

Charlie needs to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and with Reese gone, Charlie turns to a Bluetooth tech support worker in India. The problem is she won’t stay on the phone with him indefinitely, so Charlie requests his old partner Bobby to fill in for Reese. Through some good old-fashioned police work, Charlie and Bobby realize that a woman in the investment banker’s office took him out. But who was she and what was her motive?

Charlie finds out that the victim had a date set up on the night of his death with his favorite hooker, Alexa, who happened to love pigeons as much as the dead guy. But why would Alexa kill her meal ticket? That questioning gets Charlie thinking: maybe Alexa wasn’t a professional hooker that killed the investment banker but a professional hit woman! I didn’t quite get the logic leap there, but then again I’m not as creative as Charlie.

Charlie knows the pigeon thing is too much of a coincidence, so he investigates and finds out that this Alexa person was trained in pigeon breeding and caring by the premiere pigeon expert guy in L.A. So maybe she used the pigeons to get close to the victim. Charlie reasons that one of the victim’s pigeons actually belonged to Alexa, so he follows it and it leads him to a dreamy little blue house with an equally dreamy blonde on the porch. Bingo.

Charlie goes up to her and politely asks her to come down to the station with him so that they can ascertain as to whether or not she is an assassin. The woman—who calls herself Carla (maybe the Life writers were watching Burn Notice when they wrote this episode)—is surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing. “Carla” can’t be identified as Alexa by witnesses at the station, but Charlie doesn’t give up. He knows she did it, even if he doesn’t know why. How he gets her and what the motive turns out to be are two more brilliant examples of how talented the writing staff is on Life.

Meanwhile, Amanda, the head of Mickey Rayborn’s security firm, tricks poor gullible Ted into letting her into Charlie’s house so she can try to find evidence proving he killed Rayborn. She takes pictures of his conspiracy wall. Not good. I have a feeling this woman is going to be a considerable fly in the ointment and monkey in the wrench for Charlie. Speaking of monkeys in the wrench, the FBI starts asking Reese all kinds of questions about Charlie, Rayborn, and her father. Is everyone out to screw Charlie over? The conspiracy continues to build.

This is a typically great episode that allows for Charlie to interact more with Tidwell, and it’s a nice change of pace to see Bobby play a bigger part in the proceedings. I’m glad the writers have kept that character around and chose not to make him part of the conspiracy, just a dim but amiable, solid cop.

Season 2, Episode 16: Hit Me Baby” (originally aired February 25, 2009)

For another view on this episode, read Betty Crocker Meets La Femme Nikita by Elma Rahman here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal