The Closer Creator James Duff: "Half-Load"
The Closer
The desire to change our lives for the better, to give more meaning to our daily existence, is one of humanity's nobler urges. When we struggle to better ourselves, we can also improve our families, our neighborhoods, our cities and even our country. The impulse to help out at a community center, for example, or to reclaim teenagers lost to gangs, or the ambition to graduate from college, or to drive a nicer car or own a bigger home, or the desire to get married and have children, or to build churches and governments: all are activities that, in one way or another (spiritual or material), exemplify our confidence in civilization over chaos.
So if we are constantly driven to do better, why is it that we do not more constantly seem to succeed? We pick an ambitious target; we aim for it; we hit it. Yet things do not always appear to progress. Worse, no matter how hard we work, human beings still seem at the mercy of haphazard events, or an opaque process beyond any one individual's control. (Think last month's elections in Iran.)
But Brenda Leigh Johnson does not believe in random: chance is only a riddle to be answered by motive. So what happens when the murder is solved, the killer(s) arrested, and the proper confession obtained, but the rationale behind the death remains infuriatingly unreasonable?
In "Half-Load," a term used to describe a bullet that lacks the primer needed to reach its optimum velocity (and so falls short of its actual target), Deputy Chief Johnson's Major Crimes Division ends by confronting a slightly more existential mystery than usual: the elusive reason for a death that must, in some ways, seem forever senseless.
Or is there a way to find meaning where none exists?
Next week, Lts. Flynn and Provenza are on their worst behavior again, this time with Assistant Chief Pope as a most reluctant ally. Andrew Daly appears as Brenda's newest, and most curiously threatening, antagonist. Even if you don't watch the show regularly, tune in to see Mr. Daly's maddeningly funny detective. 'Til then
— James Duff