Criminal Minds: Evolution 17.7: Jill Gideon

Episode 17.7 of Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount Plus expanded the retrieval of earlier Criminal Minds players with the introduction of Jason Gideon's wife Jill.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Wow!  Jill's played by Felicity Huffman, and she not only was married to Jason -- killed nearly 10 years ago (off-camera) by an unsub -- but had some kind of important relationship to Rossi, who tells Emily he doesn't want Jill brought into the BAU's current investigation into the various Stars.  (As far as I can recall, she didn't actually appear in the first few seasons in which Jason was on the show.)

Of course, Emily ignores Rossi's plea -- she's back in charge of the BAU, so no one in the BAU can tell her what to do, including Rossi -- and we get some great scenes as Emily knocks on Jill's door, and is something less than warmly received.  Again, as in last week's episode, it was fun to hear Emily go over all the missing BAU members, when Jill asks her what's happening at the BAU.  Once again, I was most interested in what Emily had to say about Spencer, characterizing his absence as "on sabbatical".  That's certainly better than dead -- which we know isn't the case for Spencer -- or even left in a huff.

Moving on to other characters, I just want to also say that Tyler should be made a member of the BAU already. No need to keep him in the vestibule of being a consultant any more.

And as for the plot of this episode and its violence -- the specific kind of depraved violence featured in this episode -- I found it suitably revolting, as I usually do.  But that's not why I watch this fascinating series.

See also Criminal Minds: Evolution 17.1-17-.2 The Elusive Profile ... 17.3: "BAU Gate" ... 17.4: Progress ... 17.6: Gideon, Morgan, Hotch

And see also Criminal Minds: Evolution 16.1-16.4: Outstanding! ... 16.5: Assessment of What Could Have Happened at the End ... 16.6-16.8: Better Than Ever on Paramount Plus ... 16.9: Elias Voit and David Rossi ... 16.10: Gold Star

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Some reviews of episodes from earlier seasons:

Criminal Minds 8.12: Spencer's Burden

Criminal Minds 7.1: "The Is Calm and It's Doctor" ... Criminal Minds 7.3: Meets House and The Unit

Criminal Minds in Sixth Season Premiere ... Criminal Minds 6.2: The Meaning of J. J. Leaving ... Criminal Minds 6.3: Proust, Twain, Travanti ... Tyra on Criminal Minds 6.13 ...Criminal Minds 6. 17: Prentiss Farewell Part I ... Criminal Minds 6.18: Farewell Emily ... Criminal Minds 6.19: Fight Club Redux Plus ... Criminal Minds 6.20: Emily's Ghost ... Criminal Minds 6.21: The Tweeting Killer ... Criminal Minds 6.22: Psycho and a Half ... Criminal Minds 6.23: The Good Lie ... Criminal Minds Season 6 Finale

Criminal Minds 5.22 and the Dark Side of New New Media

 

American Crime 2.1-3: So Real It Hurts

Checking in with a review of American Crime, now three episodes in to its second season on ABC.   Like the first season, which drilled down on a brutal murder and its ugly repercussions not only in the criminal police system but on family relations, racial relations, and diverse elements of life in today's America, the second season holds back nothing as it delves into a rape in high school - the rape of a boy who wants to be on the basketball team by at least one of the guys on the team or who wants to be on the team, at a hazing party.

So in addition to the racial and family tensions which propelled the first season, we have the big business and sacrifice and sleaze of high school sports in this second season.  As in the first season, just about everyone is culpable of something, including the victim's mother, driven to get some sort of reckoning for her son, not just because she's seeking justice, but because she's driven by guilt over some earlier development in the family, as yet unknown.

Connor Jessup - last seen in Falling Skies - is doing a fine job as Taylor Blaine, the victim, who would just as soon forget what happened rather than see himself headlined in the social media, one of the biggest destructive forces in this story.  Taylor's mother is powerfully played by Lili Taylor, from the first season, but with a much bigger role.  Regina King, Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman, Elvis Nolasco, and Richard Cabral are also back from the first season, in completely different roles.

At this point, Regina King's Terri LaCroix has been the most stand-out, as the mother of one of team's co-captains - at the hazing party, but not necessarily part of the rape - at least, not as far as we know at this point. Terri and her husband and son are in the upper middle class - professional and executive - and her attempt to keep her son on the right path, her struggle as both the mother of a teenage boy and the mother of a teenage African-American boy with talent and intelligence and everything to lose, is a masterpiece of subtle, complex, heart-rending drama in itself.

As was the case in the first season, there's nothing else quite like American Crime on any kind of television.   As such it makes a much needed and unique contribution, and more than holds its own with anything on cable or even streaming TV.


See also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ... American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

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American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

American Crime ended is first season last night with its story of star-crossed lovers, Carter and Aubry, whose complicated love was too pure, too innocent, too compelling and beautiful to ever survive this gaggingly ugly and brutal world.   Carter dies from Russ's bullet  just as he's trying to call Aubry, no doubt to tell her he loves her, and Aubry's last thought before she dies of her own hand is maybe somehow Carter survived.

But we can the narrow indictment to something more specific than the world, and I don't mean just the hapless, tormented Russ, whom I'll get to in a minute.  It's the breathtaking cluelessness of the justice system - more destructive, in some ways, than mere corruption - which can't get anything right.  We've seen evil in police work on television before - The Shield would be an outstanding example - but never an exposition such as in American Crime of a system so rotten at every level.   The season ends without our knowing who did the initial killing, and certainly the authorities don't know.  They're good at nothing - not catching the criminals in the first place, not protecting the souls who come into their custody - except providing an effective training camp for further criminal acts.   I suppose this banal ineptitude afflicts most parts of our society, but it's especially grievous when it inhabits a system in which life and death is literally at stake.

Certainly the inanity prevails in the ease with which people can get guns in this country.  I knew the moment Barb bought the gun that its bullets would be used to kill Carter, though I thought she not Russ would pull the trigger.   But, in retrospect, Russ was always more broken than Barb, and it figures that his naive belief in the justice system (taking its word for it, to the end, that Carter killed his son) - unlike Barb, who was finally maybe glimpsing a deeper truth, and was pulling away from the system - would propel Russ to his act, pathetic for him, the ultimate voice of the deadly ignorant injustice for Carter and Aubry.

There are slender threads of hope, maybe Carter's sister and Aubry's mother hugging, now that Carter and Aubry can't, and perhaps realizing that they contributed to the deaths of Carter and Aubry, too. Maybe Hector, maybe Tony, but the odds are against them, as long as this sick system of justice continues.

America needs more shows like John Ridley's American Crime and its splendid acting (special kudos to Caitlin Gerard, Elvis Nolasco, Richard Cabral, Benito Martinez, Regina King, Timothy Hutton, and Felicity Huffman, but everyone was just brilliant) to strip the system bare, so we can see it for what it is.  The more I think about it,  American Crime is the best series on television in many a year. I'm glad there'll be more of it next season.

See also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing

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American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love

Amidst all the lies, half-truths, betrayals, incompetence, and just plain evil that populates so much of American Crime - and in the case of the evil, especially some of the authorities - the one relationship that increasingly rings true and reliable is Aubry and Carter.

And never more true than in episode 1.7.   Carter is increasingly pressured by his sister to quit Aubry. But he just can't seem to do it, even though, as we've just seen, her instincts aren't the best, to say the least, for keeping the two of them out of trouble.   But Carter tells his sister that Aubry saved him. And, in his recollection, we see that was literally the case.

Meanwhile, Aubry is getting similar pressure to leave Carter from everyone around her.   In her case, there's a motive that the police are dangling in front of her: if she testifies against Carter, that would be her ticket to freedom.   For a moment, in the hospital, it seemed that she might be turning against Carter, though I couldn't believe it.   And I was gratified with that last scene, in which her horror story of what was done to her turns out to have her brother as the perpetrator.

So Aubry and Carter are the improbable rock of Gibraltar in this story, holding firm, for now, against the cesspool tempest of deceit that is daily hurled against them.  The question is how long can they endure it.   Optimist that I always am, I'm hoping they can, to the end - but the forces arrayed against them are powerful, indeed.

Although it's still not clear who committed this American crime, it's very clear that the police don't have a creditable witness against Carter.   Hector's obviously a complete liar, and the detectives know it.   The question is whether they'll allow the prosecutors to go ahead and use it.   Chances are they will - which is part of what I meant earlier about the authorities being reprehensible.

Not reprehensible, and indeed superb, to switch gears here, is the acting in this series.  Caitlin Gerard as Aubry and Elvis Nolasco as Carter are just outstanding - and, in episode 1.7 especially, delivered Emmy-worthy performances.   Richard Cabral as Hector is excellent, as is Regina King as Aliyah Shadeed (born Doreen Nix, Carter's sister), and I haven't even mentioned the big names such as Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman, who are putting in what will counted as among the best performances of their careers.   The other related stories, such as Alonzo and his family, are also searing and well acted.

John Ridley's American Crime is television at its hard-hitting, truth-searching, very best.

See also: American Crime, American Fine

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American Crime: American Fine

I thought it high time I checked in with a review of American Crime, the new ABC-TV series directed by John Ridley, who produced 12 Years a Slave.   In a word, the series is excellent - original, deep, superbly acted and plotted.  Well, that's more than one word, but they're all deserved.

In a very general way, American Crime is much like True Detective, the investigation of brutal murder(s) taking up an entire season.   In the case of American Crime, we have a married couple, the husband found murdered and the wife badly beaten and apparently sexually attacked.   They're white, and the suspects, quickly identified and rounded up by police in the first episode, are African-American and Hispanic.  The unfolding story reveals schism in the relationships of both sets of parents of the victims - as well as each set of parents to the other - as well profound differences in the suspects and their lives.   By the end of the third episode, we're giving some suspicions that the suspects may not be the perpetrators of the crimes.

Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman as parents of the slain Matt are outstanding, and put in what will be counted as among the best performances of their careers.   Hutton always had a large range, ranging from the comical to the cool, but his behind-the-eight-ball father in American Crime, struggling to the do the right thing in the face of a caustic wife and pressures from the parents of his son's wife Gwen, is  especially noteworthy and just masterful.

On the other side of this narrative,  Benito Martinez - whom I first got to know on The Shield - puts in a great performance as Alonzo Gutierrez, the father of one of the people arrested, a boy whose only crime seems to have been giving a car to known gang members.   Seeing Alonzo get chewed up by the legal system,  striving to keep his son out its legal claws but mostly failing because he doesn't fully understand what's going on, is a sight to behold as well as instructive about how minorities are treated when they get pulled in the criminal system in this country, whether or not through any fault of their own.   Just to underscore this point, we get a searingly memorable scene in the third episode in which his daughter Jenny, totally innocent, is almost drawn into this sick system herself - that is, she's almost arrested, when she has been doing nothing wrong.

Also memorable is Caitlin Gerard as Aubrey, drug addict and girlfriend of one of the incarcerated suspects, not dumb, but abused by life, literally thrown in a scrapheap after passing out and being sexually abused, and doing whatever she can to hold on.   We've seen characters like this on many a police drama over the years, but none quite as effective in this role.

If the first three episodes are any indication, we can expect all kinds of twists and turns and heartbreaks and maybe a sigh or two of relief in the episodes ahead, and I'm looking forward them all.

a different kind of crime