Sunday, April 08, 2007

Lil Looks Back on an Old 'Case'

Sometimes I think that we expect a little too much reality from our favorite fictional TV shows and that can cost us the enjoyment of a pretty solid story. I went into tonight's episode of Cold Case feeling pretty sure that no police department in America would reopen a case from 1919 because all of the suspects, witnesses, and evidence would be gone. Nonetheless, I was still interested to see how the show would deal with such an old case, and it turns out the answer is -- effortlessly. Because I went in knowing I had to suspend a little bit of reality (something I think we're supposed to do with any show on a regular basis), I was able to sit back and just enjoy the story, and what an excellent story we had tonight. It's hard to sit at my computer in 2007 and imagine what it would feel like to have my husband speak for me, tell me what to do, and relegate me to a "domestic angel" without having a say in any of it. I can't imagine it because it's not in my nature, and thanks to women like Francis, it doesn't have to be. As the women's studies professor said, we take our right to vote for granted today because we can't begin to understand what our foremothers went through in order to secure it for us. Because of this, I found the entire theme fascinating and the story engaging. We had an accidental death tonight, so the fact that no one paid for Francis' death was easy to swallow. Her mother grabbed her arm, and when Francis pulled away, she lost her balance and fell over the railing to her death. But, it was her mother who never recovered as we heard in her poignant recording. Lots of clever story telling devices tonight: the record, diaries, letters, relatives, gossip columns and other devices allowed the detectives to fill in the blanks so we could see the story unfold. The flashbacks were beautiful with a dash of sepia and understated hues to take me right back to a foreign time. An excellent effort all around.


This episode wasn't content to rest on its strong case laurels, though. We also had a nice little helping of Lil's personal life (always a crowd pleaser, especially here at PTR). Some things never change, and for Lilly, those things involve her mother. Another broken relationship, another drunken binge, and Lil is left to clean up the pieces of her mother's life once again. Ellen's entire self worth is dependant on whether she has a man in her life. She has no sense of taking care of herself, and I think this is the driving force behind Lilly's strong streak of independence. She grew up watching her mother move from man to man, losing a little bit of herself with each break up and finding solace in the closest bottle of Vodka or whatever else was handy, and she decided that no man was going to define her. Thus, we have the fiercely single Lilly Rush of today who isn't quite sure what a real, lasting relationship should look like because her mother's tended to end the next morning. It's dysfunction junction, and it continues now as Ellen vows to clean herself up again (this time for good) so she can once again find a man. Where does this leave Lil? In an endless cycle of bailing her mother out of jail, filling her fridge with something other than alcohol, throwing out the various hidden bottles and feeling torn about the mother that she loves despite it all. Cold Case at its best ( and it looks like things are only going to get better). CC moves to 18-2-1 on the season.


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I found myself a little confused at the end of CC last night. Was what happened between Frances and her mother on the record they found? I just didn't get how they knew it was an accident. Meredith Baxter just played Deena's mom on What About Brian. She is so good at playing these messed-up Mom roles! It was a really good episode.

Anonymous said...

Great entry, tvfan. This ep was everything I had hope it would be - best of the season for me!

TVFan said...

I think her mother relayed the story of what happened to her daughter on that record -- the detectives just filled in the blanks. Her mother felt so guilty about her daughter's death that she made that recording to remind herself of what happened.

Anonymous said...

Ok, I am a huge fan of Cold Case, and I love the show a lot, but I would have to say that this is the worst Cold Case I have ever seen. First of all, a little bit too politically correct for me. Women should not get special recognition for any job they take just because of their gender. If any man of today were to become a maid or something usually dominated by women, it would just be looked on as strange. Or, if any men wanted to create a "mens' club" it would be considered discriminatory, unlike womens' clubs. If women (Or any other discriminated social group) want to be treated as equals, it should not be treated as some sort of special thing, but as normal. Second, the episode was a bit far-fetched. Any homicide squad of today would refuse to take any case like this because they would know that a case like this would probably never be solved and the killer put to justice. And, third, the clues were just to conveniently placed, like the confession record that was conveniently placed on a shelf and never noticed before, and just happened to be noticed when Valens was looking at the shelves. Plus some were just made up, from what I could tell (i.e. Valens and Jeffries discovering that it was the maid who tipped the parents off based off of a log of visitors to the jail). So, this episode was just really bad for me.

Anonymous said...

I think we have to "suspend reality" as tvfan says with these cases to have a story. Although the show was down about 3 million possibly due to the Easter observance. I liked the episde and gave it an Excellent. Not quite a Best Of Season for me. I would like to see some "edgier" (is that a word) episodes if the writing were different. I think what the ep showed was how powerless a woman could be if she chose to go against the social conditioning of the day. And that it did. I'm liking Kevin Bray as director more and more.


~Naj