annb-4

I liked this show when I saw it, but I didn't see it regularly. Watching it now in order from the beginning, I am appreciating the way Rush's character is slowly getting fleshed out over the episodes, including that facts like her having a very difficult childhood with her mother is something she starts to come to grips with, and especially that that information is there for viewers in episodes where she expresses more empathy for mothers that she did early on.

In this episode, we learn she has cats, and those cats have injuries. She's a single woman with cats, which shows her commitment to caring for wounded creatures, and which casts a light back to an episode where a serial rapist was targeting women with cats on the assumption that they were single.

The show also has done much more than I had realized to acknowledge racism and police corruption and brutality. In this episode and some others, the failure to solve a murder when it happened had long-term consequences on wrongly suspected or falsely convicted people and their families and community. The current detectives are not portrayed as flawless heroes, but as people trying to do things right, fix past wrongs. The cops who were shaking down the gay bar (among other things), the detective who failed to pursue a case properly while he was drinking, the observation of whose deaths matter and whose don't. When Rush gets a new partner, we see him coerce a false confession from a suspect, employing techniques still in use, and firmly convinced that the confession is real until shown otherwise.

Overall it feels like the show is a cohesive whole, rather than a crime-of-the-week episodic action series with no consistent ethos.

There are other infelicities in this episode, but the biggest failure to me was that we get no closure about Lenore, the dead sex worker. They had an actress playing Lenore because we have photos of her, living and dead, but we never see a scene with her ghost reacting to the fact that her killer was found. We don't see Detective Rush give her friend Trish the news. We get Trish for one scene, and never see her get the news, whether from Rush or from a newspaper headline. The episode treats her as the murderer does - a throwaway, and afterthought, never as important as the first murder victim. That's a shame.

Another reviewer doesn't think the Millais painting is very famous; perhaps, but as soon as I saw the body's pose, I thought of it.

Ah, well, Lenore. I'll end with the first lines of Poe's poem

Ah broken is the golden bowl! The spirit flown forever!

Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;