It's the end of our summer season and, regretfully, it's time to say good-bye. Coincidentally, our finale — a longer version of which will be available on-line and on iTunes after-air — seems mostly about going away. That's not only a clue to Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson's personal life, but also to solving the mysteries confronting Major Crimes.
I say mysteries because I like to remind people that The Closer is not merely about catching the criminal, but also getting the confession. This task ...
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Our next-to-last episode of the season presents Brenda and Fritz with the unexpected problem of providing constant supervision for their imperfectly behaved teenage niece, Charlie, while continuing to do their jobs. This problem, which will be almost too familiar for most of our audience, challenges our heroic couple in ways both small and enormous.
Exactly how much responsibility does one assign to a child? How should a kid be raised? What are ...
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It isn't easy to change the way people look at us. Our parents, for example, take years to recognize us as adults. Bosses often refuse to view us as capable of any other job than that for which they hired us in the first place. And inexperience, denial or willful ignorance often leads us to believe family members are perfectly all right when they are anything but. All these situations are at play in "Smells Like Murder."
Certainly, Sgt. Gabriel wants ...
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The dual nature of human personality has been too well examined, and by far more intelligent people than I, to discuss it at any length here except to say it serves as the theme of our new episode. Those who prefer puzzlers will hopefully find themselves trying to discover whether a father has half-way confessed to a murder in a desperate attempt to protect his mentally ill son, or whether he's gaming the system to get a lighter sentence. Bruce Davison brings to life one of our more unusual villains with the kind of affecting performance for which he is justly famous. The case also includes a schizophrenic witness, who might also be a suspect, the return of Brenda's mother, Willie Ray played by the always-brilliant Frances Sternhagen, and a new character who will test Fritz's desire to have children.
Let me go back a few years. When Kyra Sedgwick first started on The Closer, she had just finished an independent film entitled Lover Boy. It was a startling movie with an equally startling performance by a young girl named Sosie Bacon, Kyra and Kevin's daughter. Playing her mother's character as a young girl, Sosie's film acting debut was subtly wonderful, a bit of light in an extremely dark story dramatizing the inevitable (and ironic) consequence of being raised by overprotective parents.
After watching the film, I ...
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Elysium is that section of Hades reserved for the eternal rest of ancient Greek heroes. In the City of Angels, however, Elysian Park, perched near Dodger Stadium and the LAPD Academy, turns out to be the unceremonious burial ground for a man dragged behind a pick-up truck and then shot in the head.
Enter former robbery/homicide Detective Olin, played by the always-intriguing Tom Skerritt. Asked to return from a lonely retirement because of his familiarity with the victim, Det. Olin — or Joey O., as he's known to his former co-workers in Major Crimes — seems more intent on wrapping up an old case of his own than helping Brenda close hers. Ghosts of Those Who Got Away haunt the hallways of Parker Center and, as Deputy Chief Johnson's obsession with the elusive rapist/murderer Phillip Stroh returns to cloud her judgment, she finds some uncomfortable and eerie parallels between herself and the annoying, (but dogged) Joey O.
Though the word "elysium" came to represent the halcyon rest for the honorable dead, its original meaning was ...
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