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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Lie to Me 2.11: Double Feature

Lie to Me was back on Monday evening with a fine resumption of its second season - Episode 2.11 - an hour that had two tip-top unrelated stories.

The main story had Lightman locking horns with good-looking young Martin Walker, whom Lightman and at first no one else is convinced is a sociopathic killer of attractive female college students.   Gillian at first "doesn't see it" - as she tells Lightman, to his frustration - and this is in large part because the situation is complicated by the fact that Walker is sleeping with Lightman's former mentor and lover, the smart and alluring Helen, who of course is blind to Walker's killer instincts, too.   Lightman, ever ready to go the extra mile to nab his liar, allows himself to be water boarded in order get the goods on Walker.

Walker is so good at his craft, before he's caught, that he even gets tough beautiful Torres to agree to go out with him.  She doesn't know much about the Walker case, because she and Loker are looking into a case of a teacher who claims he saw a UFO, thereby jeopardizing his position in the school.  It was good to see Howard Hesseman play the teacher, and even better to see Glenn Morshower (Aaron on 24, Landry's father on Friday Night Lights) play the Air Force colonel who tries get the teacher to agree that he saw something else.   Loker sees right through that, but in the end convinces the teacher to go with a bogus story to save the teacher's job.   The course of UFO-spotters never did go easy.

As I often feel at the end of a Lie to Me episode, I wish there was more time than an hour to tell and fill out the story.   Episode 2.11 had two such stories, which means it could have used at least three hours.

We'll have to be content with the new stories in subsequent hours this season and beyond.


5-min podcast review of Lie to Me


See also my reviews of
Lie to Me and Bill O'Reilly, Saddam Hussein, and Ben Reynolds in Lie to Me 2.6 and Lie to Me 2.7: The Redeeming of Loker and Lie to Me 2.8 in Afghanistan and Viva Lightman and Las Vegas in Lie to Me 2.9



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1 comment:

azjauthor said...

I thought this was a phenomenal episode. Like you, though, I always tend to feel that the main storyline on Lie to Me is rushed. This one, especially, I felt could have been drawn out over a two episode season premiere, with a big media push, because the psychopath character (Logan from Veronica Mars) certainly had the chops to pull it off. (Honestly, I'd have loved to have seen him best Lightman and show up periodically throughout the season.) I mean, when they can pull of a 2-episode serial killer storyline on Castle, they can pull it off on Lie to Me!

My one major problem with the episode was the reveal at the end. If Lightman had a GPS tracker on him, there's no way that the cops would have let him be waterboarded repeatedly. I realize they needed a body to nail him for murder (busting in while he was waterboarding Lightman would have only have provided evidence for two kidnapping and assault charges), but this was just a step too far.

Still, overall, one of the best Lie to Me episodes so far.

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