We had a stretch of fence between us and our neighbors replaced this week. It included a gate. When the workers were finishing up we went to survey the results. Fenced looked good, but the gate was installed backwards! The latch was on the inside and the little doo-hickey (it must have a name) that allows you to lock it by sliding it into a tab was on the street side. Okay if you want to keep people in your back yard, but otherwise kind of pointless. They came back yesterday and got it properly oriented, so now we can no longer imprison people.
The return of Lady Heather on CSI was less of a success than one might have hoped. She’s now a sex therapist, of course, and she and Sara have a bit of a history, but the whole thing about people pretending to be animals and then going massively overboard about it just seemed silly. The second storyline was better, but I think the idea of cyberbullying has been done and done better. Plus, the whole thing started with what seemed to me a coincidence. Doctor Robbins, the coroner, just happened to be riding with Nick when a guy just happened to think they might be cops (in their standard issue black SUV). The guy just happened to have looked through the window a few minutes after the girl committed suicide and Robbins’ presence meant that he could do an emergency C-section and deliver the baby. Do Robbins and Nick hang around normally? Not that I’ve ever seen.
The Mentalist was far better, and that was in large part due to the presence of Firefly’s Morena Baccarin as the main suspect, a professional matchmaker who is something of a match for Patrick. Smart and able to read people just about as well as him. She was even able to charm the stoic Agent Cho, which Patrick identified as no mean feat. Meanwhile, Grace shows what she’s made of by silencing a yappy dog with a single word and, later, silencing a guy who was hitting on her with another word: Engaged. Lots of good banter between Rigsby and Cho about dating services. “No I’ve never used one and yes you should,” Cho tells Rigsby. “Anything to stop you dating your coworkers.” Okay, so now he’s taken to dating witnesses, and I can’t think it’s a good sign that the young woman’s last name was “Harridan” (as seen in his notebook).
Rule #1 of the show is, of course, that anything Patrick and Lisbon say in the presence of a suspect is almost certainly a lie meant to trick the listener into exposing themselves. This time Patrick’s ruse almost didn’t work. She didn’t fall for the suicide letter but then took great pleasure in telling Patrick that his insight failed when he claimed she was in love with the poor stooge who was her alibi. As much as I liked the verbal duel between Patrick and Erica, I really liked the closing scene when Lisbon found and watched the interview tape he made for Erica. At first I thought he just might be talking about Lisbon, but then you realize he’s still talking about his dead wife. The camera didn’t even cut back to Lisbon for her reaction at that point. Nicely done.
A crossover episode of Law & Order: SVU to herald the return of Law & Order: LA next week, along with the return of Diane Neal as the disgraced DA trying to work her way back into her job again. What do you do when the DAs from two versions of the show go head-to-head? Well, Casey Novak had home field advantage, but she couldn’t beat Dekker too badly, so it came down to something of a tie, with a deal being hashed out instead of a jury decision one way or the other.
