The Closer: Taking the Cake

Ah, how nice to see this week’s episode start off with a little pre-wedded bliss as we join Brenda and Fritz standing outside in a romantic setting near their oceanside hotel.  But the helicopters flying overhead are far more enticing to Brenda who wonders if the helicopters are an indication of nearby crime.  After watching her mother and Claire bicker about how to decorate her wedding suite so that it has the proper flow, the workaholic Johnson cannot stay cooped up in her hotel suite for long and sniffs out a murder from a mile away.  She shows up unexpectedly to this week’s crime scene, a shooting and robbery at an escort agency.  Amidst the chaos on the scene, she finds her detectives in between a bevy of escorts and is annoyed with Provenza for not having called her about the new case, as he had promised to do earlier.  Inside, Johnson only counts four bullet casings, and the security video playback reveals that there is a casing missing.

Johnson does a little role playing herself when she poses as a lawyer and an IRS agent to force information from an escort and her lawyer.  It pays off when she is able to find out the escorts carried drugs used to appease clients, and links the social security of an escort that had been shot in the robbery, Kelly, to several names.  Kelly had been using different names to work at several agencies, which is a common practice for escorts.  They visit her in the hospital where she puts on the struggling wife being an escort to make ends meet routine that Johnson doesn’t buy for a second.  Her husband, Vince, also becomes a suspect when they discover that he was an Iraqi war veteran who would have access to the same type of gun used in the robbery.  After obtaining a warrant to search Kelly and Vince’s apartment, they find Kelly and Vince are far from the struggling couple after finding cocaine and a huge stash of one hundred dollar bills behind a drywall.  But after talking to Vince, Johnson is convinced that Kelly planned the robbery.  They can’t get Kelly to break until Johnson is able to create a little movie magic after learning a photo trick from her wedding photographer.

As usual, Johnson and her detectives are able to use some outlandish scheme to catch their killer.  And while I would yawn and say these antics are getting a little old, apparently the show’s massive ratings tell a different story.  Needless to say, I was even more surprised when Fritz showed up in one piece to his wedding after sneaking away from the hotel himself to stakeout El Jefe’s recent drug shipment.  At the reception, Johnson’s guests express their warm wishes to the newly married couple and play a game of catch with the bouquet.  Johnson grabs a huge piece of wedding cake and weepily tells Fritz she loves him.  She goes into her room, whips out what looks like a MoonPie, slathers the moonpie with the icing from her wedding cake, and pops it into her mouth, as she stares at herself in her wedding dress.  Brenda Johnson, I may hate your interrogation tactics and find them completely questionable, but I love your taste in wedding dessert.

Season 4, Episode 15: Double Blind (originally aired February 23, 2009)

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