Life: In Life as in life

There’s no rest for the wicked, as they say, so Charlie Crews and his temporary partner Jane Seever are working another murder case this week. They’re called to the scene by Howard, a hotshot campaign manager who came home early from a business trip in Vegas to find his wife missing. She’s not missing for long though, because Crews follows the wife’s cat until it leads him to her body, which is lying in a hot tub with four holes in it. And because of the hot temperature of the water, it’s almost impossible to determine when she was killed.

But the detectives’ first order of business is to clear the husband, because you always look at the husband first when the wife gets killed, even if the husband called the police himself because, well, love hurts. Going on the timetable of when she went missing, they clear the grieving husband. So now they have to ask who wanted the victim dead? As it turns out, a lot of people: the victim was running for senator and the major piece of legislation she was passionate about pushing through was Initiative 38, a complete California ban on handguns. So that’s it! Those lunatics at the NRA did it! Okay, maybe not the NRA, but definitely PNK, a big California gun company where all the employees like to be armed to the teeth as they stroll around the office.

Except the head honcho at PNK shows Charlie and Seever that they were beating Initiative 38 four votes to one. So if the bill wasn’t a threat, then there was no reason to kill the victim was there? The detectives are at a standstill in the investigation so they go back to visit Howard and try to get some more information. Then Howard drops a bomb…literally. Yeah, they show up at his house and find Howard standing in his empty house holding a ticking bomb that’s nicely presented in a box of tasteful flowers. If you hold the wires in the box just right, the bomb doesn’t tick. But Howard is numb from holding it there for who knows how long (just like poor Danny Glover in the classic toilet bomb scene from Lethal Weapon 2). Seever takes his place and Charlie keeps her calm until the bomb squad arrives and does their thing. The upside is that there was a clue with the bomb, a card that reads “Who’s the little one now?

Charlie and Seever go to the victim’s office and speak to her red-haired manager Ella, who quickly tells them that “little one” was the nickname of the victim’s younger sister. Turns out they had a ‘falling out’ as they say a little over a year ago and hadn’t spoken since because the younger sister was a raving degenerate fruitcake who did more drugs than Tony Montana and became a park ranger. Maybe she’s a colleague of Smokey the Bear! At any rate, she sounds like a likely suspect (maybe too likely a suspect, if you get my drift). The detectives drive out to the countryside to see her and are met by a reception of rifle fire. They manage to subdue the park ranger, who claims that someone came on the radio and told her that the person who killed her sister was coming to kill her. Yes, there are characters like that in Life and in life.

But even though she may be a little nutty, Charlie doesn’t buy it. He can tell that Little One clearly loved her sister and he suspects that the falling out was engineered. Suffice it to say that Charlie’s investigation takes him full circle, and I’ll leave you with the caveat that you should never trust a redhead because they’re all nuttier than a Snickers bar.

The B storyline consists of Charlie coming to Tidwell with his concerns about his partner Dani Reese being in trouble and not being with the real FBI. Charlie and Tidwell don’t have an easy relationship. Tidwell knows Charlie has off-the-books investigations and while he doesn’t stop him, Tidwell doesn’t condone what he’s doing. But they both clearly care about Reese and will stop at nothing to find her. They go to the FBI (or is it the “FBI?”), who won’t give them anything. So Charlie commissions Ted to hire Amanda from Rayborn’s private security firm to find Reese, who hasn’t been answering her phone. She and Ted track the phone down but find it abandoned in a field, along with Reese’s gun. This looks really bad, and Charlie immediately suspects Roman Nevikov. But we’ll have to tune in next week to get the answers.

In all probability only two episodes of Life remain and I’m going to try to enjoy them as best I can and not get depressed that America would rather watch some impossibly inane reality show with Ozzie Osbourne than a brilliantly inventive, fun show that elevates and subverts its genre.

Season 2, Episode 20: Initiative 38 (originally aired April 1, 2009)

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