Life: 5 Quarts

What happens when the guy whose job is to figure out what happened to dead guys becomes a dead guy? That’s what Charlie Crews and his temporary partner Jane Seever have to contend with this week when an L.A. coroner is found killed in the morgue. There’s a whole buffet line of suspects: the other coroners who all disliked him-one of whom filed multiple complaints against him-as well as a group of first-time offenders doing community service right outside the building. To compound the problem, all the cases the coroner was working are now in limbo until the murder is solved, putting extra pressure on Captain Tidwell (and therefore Charlie and everyone else who works for him).

Charlie and Seever decide that maybe that’s a clue. Maybe someone killed the coroner because they wanted to kill his investigations. But the only notable murder the coroner was investigating was that of a celebrity chef who was found dead in his kitchen. It appears that the chef was shot in the back of the head but no bullet was found. And because there was no exit wound, it would mean that somebody would have had to have dug the bullet out of the chef’s skull. Yikes. The chef doesn’t seem to have had any enemies, but he was associated with the county’s biggest bookie. The bookie would seem to be a likely suspect, but in actuality he is so distraught over the chef’s death that he’s practically suicidal. That guy must have really been a good cook.

Charlie finds a discrepancy between the front page photo of the dead chef and the crime scene photos: in the front page photo there is a clear puddle under his hand, but in the crime scene photos there is only blood. No puddle. So Charlie and Seever question the photographer, Kathy. Kathy claims she used her winning smile to charm the cops into letting her get that close to the dead chef’s body. I could buy that if Emily Deschanel were saying it, but I don’t buy it for this Kathy person…and neither does Charlie. But without giving away the details, Charlie learns that the chef actually wasn’t murdered, so Kathy goes off the suspect radar for a while.

From there, the investigation goes in typically unpredictable, wonderfully bizarre directions, including after-hours goth morgue shindigs and pregnancy hormones. This is what Life does like no other show on tv: take a familiar genre and somehow manage to consistently put a fresh, fun, entertaining spin on it.

Meanwhile, Ted has another meeting with his daughter that leads to two hilarious and heartfelt scenes that made me laugh out loud. And the rising suspicion that has been building separately between Charlie and Reese is resolved in a really satisfying way, demonstrating the power of trust between partners, something we all should aspire to. But Charlie finds out from former enemy now tentative ally Agent Bodner that Reese’s little FBI detail is not what it appears to be, and the end of the episode gives reason to believe that Reese might be heading for some serious trouble.

The one thing I miss in Life lately is Rachel. It seems like she has been gone for a long time now and I have no idea where she is or what she’s up to. I can’t believe it has been almost a full season for Life. I’m not ready for it to end, and I’m hoping against hope that it miraculously gets a third season. Seriously, it’s such a brilliant show, I can’t understand why nobody watches it. Please please watch the last remaining episodes of the season so we can try to spike ratings. If you get nothing out of them, I will give you my firstborn child.

Season 2, Episode 19: 5 Quarts (originally aired March 25, 2009)

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