Directed by: David McWhirter
Written by: Duppy Demetrius
First aired: June 24, 2013

---

A high-speed car chase leads Major Crimes to a man covered in blood, a car full of heroine, a chop-shop full of dead bodies, and a contender for the Mother of the Year award. Captain Raydor shows off her knowledge of all the loopholes while she has to deal with an annoyed teenager and an annoying Hollywood writer.

So, this is when the whole “Badge of Justice” thing begins. Before long, Mike mentioning his work on the show will become a bit of a running gag and a rather sore spot with Flynn, but this is where it all started, and for now, it is not really Andy who is annoyed by it. Jason Andrews, a writer on Badge of Justice who is following Mike at work, is our first introduction to the upcoming show and is already on Julio’s nerves when the episode starts with the three men in a car. By the time they come across their suspect of the week and have him in an interview room, I’m pretty sure Julio has thought about tossing Jason out of his moving car several times. The young writer then proceeds to annoy Captain Raydor, and isn’t that a thing of beauty? I mean, when she gets this really deep, annoyed tone and gives him those glares? And when Buzz gets angry about being recorded and she tells him she’s got this before she asks for Jason’s phone? I cannot express how much I love this scene. We also learn that Sharon knows a great deal about fashion, as she identifies the brands of all of their suspect’s clothes and accessories on sight.
Sharon is extra badass in this episode, with nothing more than her looks, the sound of her voice, her expressions and the way she thinks her way around all the obstacles and through all the loopholes (more about that later). This is just the first taste we get of that kind of badassery in this episode.

What the previous scene already hints at is that Sharon has pretty much all the relevant ideas for solving that crime, from figuring out how to hold on to their suspect with a few minor traffic violations, to using the Patriot Act to get Agent Morris to listen in on their suspect’s conversation with his lawyer, to figuring out that their suspect is related to the person whose car he was driving, to finally finding a way to have both their suspect and his mother punished for their crimes. We get to see a ruthlessness in her here that I don’t think we have seen up until this point. She’s been badass before, but not quite like this. Usually, it’s all let the justice system do its job, but here, faced with Mrs. Vega, who is clearly involved in drug smuggling and triple homicide, but cannot be charged with anything, she suddenly goes you don’t wanna work with me? You know what? Fine. I’ll send you to Mexico where there’s a 100% chance you’ll get executed by your cartel friends. See if I care. And while I’m at it, I’ll use your fate to intimidate your son into taking the deal I’m offering him. This is so far beyond what one would expect of our favorite, rule-loving Captain. It really is more of a Brenda thing to do. I think she might have used the idea of sending their suspect to Mexico to pressure his mother into flipping on him in order to protect him without actually intending to go through with it. When the mother says that she doesn’t really care if her son dies, you can see how shocked and disgusted Sharon is. We have already gotten to know her as someone who would do anything to protect her kids (even those that aren’t quite her kids yet), so it’s easy to imagine that she cannot understand how any mother could be so coldhearted.

I suppose actually going through with knowingly sending someone to their death without a trial might have come from that place of disgust. There really is no other way I can make the whole thing make sense in my head. What I really would have loved to see is how Sharon deals with her actions later on, when the worst of the anger dissipates, because I cannot imagine that it won’t affect her in some way. If we’re honest, this is not all that much different to what Brenda did in the Baylor case, only that Mrs. Vega will conveniently be in Mexico when she turns up dead instead of in their own jurisdiction. Sharon might also be on stronger legal ground, considering that Mrs. Vega is wanted in Mexico and they are just honoring their extradition treaty, but morally, things seem a little more shaky. I would imagine that this might lead to some conflicting feelings for Sharon. It would have been interesting to see that explored. In the following scene—one of the last ones of that episode—we see what might be interpreted at a slightly troubled look on Sharon’s face when they take Mrs. Vega away. It is her son’s lawyer, however, who voices all the legal and moral objections—something that’s usually Sharon’s role. If Sharon has any reservations about what they’re doing, she pushes them away and gets the deal she wants.

Despite Sharon’s ruthlessness, there are a lot of lighter moments in this episode. Jason Andrews is a big part of that with the way he keeps annoying everyone—especially Sharon—and his attempt to get Amy’s attention. A particular pet peeve of Sharon’s seems to be unqualified dudes trying to mansplain the law to her—probably something she’s had to deal with plenty over the course of her career—and her exasperation with Jason’s efforts is obvious. She does seem to derive some pleasure from letting him know how very wrong he is about pretty much everything, though. My particular favorite is when he tells them how having Morris listen in on the suspect’s conversation with his lawyer is a violation of his civil rights and Sharon simply turns to Andy with a rather desperate hum and that pleading look on her face that says please deal with him before I’m forced to shoot him in the middle of my murder room.

She’s clearly running out of patience, which is not helped by Rusty complaining about having to redo a school assignment because his teacher didn’t like what he wrote. It’s so funny how Rusty has no sense of self-preservation, because if he did, he would have read Sharon’s mood and not approached her with this huge crisis—twice. Also, calling a bad essay a huge crisis, especially when you only recently got an anonymous letter threatening your life, is peak teenage melodrama, for which Sharon obviously has neither the bandwidth nor the patience at that moment. What he had hoped she would do other than tell him to rewrite it, I don’t know. I absolutely love her disappointed little hum when she reads the first sentence, and the way she and Rusty both look at Jason when he calls her Rusty’s mom gives me life. Also, the amused looks of the team in the background while she goes all Darth Mom on Rusty are too funny. Makes you wonder how many of those conversations they might have overheard since Rusty came to live with Sharon.

In the end, he has to rewrite it twice, because of course Sharon knew that the second version was mostly written by Jason. Young Rusty still has so much to learn about the special bullshit-detecting powers of mothers. In the end, he manages to write something that earns Sharon’s enthusiastic approval and seems to have taught him something about himself. That final scene of the episode is so touching that it always makes me tear up.

On the topic of Andy’s ongoing health issues we have a new development, too. While the team spoiled his last amazing cleanse at the end of the last episode, he now has a new one, that he keeps carrying around in a thermos because it can’t get warm. Why the heck he doesn’t just leave it at the air-conditioned office we will never know, but I guess the writers couldn’t figure out another way to make it come up. So here he is once again, a seasoned homicide detective carrying a thermos around with him while investigating a crime. It’s so ridiculous that it’s really not even funny anymore. But I guess I lost my sense of humor when it comes to Andy’s health issues when the curtain came down on the mid-season finale of the fifth season. Seeing him throw longing glances at bags of chips—to the point where Amy has to nudge him on—is kinda funny, though. I like that, instead of the teasing he got last episode, Amy seems sort of quietly supportive here, first when she nudges him away from the chips at the crime scene and at the end of the episode, when she smiles at him as he blows the dust of the pack of chips he found in his desk. Seriously, though, find someone who looks at you the way Andy Flynn looks at a pack of chips.

home < season 2 < previous episode < next episode