October 17, 2006: Bedfellows
Somebody at NBC must have issued an order to punch up
Criminal Intent's openings, because two weeks in a row, they've come out swinging.
Last week's cops-and-fireman brawl was definitely a "what the?" moment, and this week's was equally shocking and twice as disturbing. For me, that wide-eyed little kid with spaghetti sauce (?) smeared all over his mouth evoked not one but two
Sixth Sense characters precocious-yet-creepy Haley Joel Osment (who these days doesn't even see mailboxes) and the couldn't-keep-a-meal-down Mischa Barton (who these days...on second thought, never mind).
Suffice it to say, the kid was disturbing enough, but when he led the cops into his parents' bedroom and they pulled back the sheet to reveal his mother curled up with the corpse of his way-dead father well, that's just feel-good TV right there.
From there out, they kept my interest by turning nearly every member of this twisted clan into a suspect (read: red herring). Was it the murdered history writer's wife, who had been cheating on him with some (gardening) tool? As Rip Torn (Get it? Rip, Torn) told Goren and Eames, she was a dirty, dirty tramp which made her way too obvious a choice.
For a little while, they had me believing it was the author's ne'er-do-well brother, proprietor of a dastardly Ponzi real-estate scheme. But he was kind of ruled out after being shot in the head (only a flesh wound), then stabbed in the stomach with a pair of scissors (getting deader), and, finally, bludgeoned to death with what appeared to be a polar-bear statue (J.J. Abrams wants royalties).
At one point, my suspicions even fell on little Haley Joel Barton. He did seem to
really hate those stinky shakes....
But, alas, it turned out to be Ponzi's wife, who apparently got the idea from Alfred Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train. OK, I'll admit it, that's one of Hitch's movies I haven't gotten around to seeing, but still, bravo,
CI writers. If you're not gonna rip your stories from the headlines every week, you might as well "borrow" from the Master of Suspense.
So overall, not my favorite
CI ever, but a solid one nonetheless. There's nothing worse than figuring out whodunit by the second commercial break, then suffering through 17 chastising political ads - that election can't come soon enough and this episode kept me guessing.
Now, I've got a Hitchcock movie to go rent....
