Directed by: Anthony Hemingway
Written by: Mike Berchem, James Duff
First aired: December 9, 2013
A body is found on a golf course, and Major Crimes has to wade through an “Olympic sized suspect pool” to find the killer. Meanwhile, Andy has some past embellishments come back to haunt him, and DDA Rios is unhappy about Rusty’s psychological evaluation.
The case honestly isn’t all that interesting, so I won’t focus on that. Instead, let’s start with DDA Rios storming into the Murder Room in a bit of a huff, because no one told her about Rusty’s psych evaluation and the plan to let him be part of an undercover operation. Although, I suppose someone must have told her at some point. As is her habit, she isn’t exactly diplomatic about how she voices her concerns, so she ends up ruffling a few feathers—mostly Rusty’s. His first concern is that people other than the team would find out that he saw a shrink, and I love that everyone is trying to make him understand that there’s nothing wrong with that. This is also how we learn that Andy is seeing a psychiatrist right now. It is one of many little hints in this episode that let us know something is going on with him.
What I find interesting is that Sharon invites Provenza to join that private conversation about Rios’s concerns. Sure, we have seen him play the role of secondary guardian or whatever before, but I wonder what exactly his role here is. Does Sharon want him there as backup or as a sort of impartial voice for the LAPD or something else? Because she obviously cannot be impartial where Rusty is concerned—and no one expects her to be. She pretty much says it when she tells Emma that, legally, she has all the rights and responsibilities of a mother, and she refers to Rusty as her son. And can we please take a moment to appreciate how easily those words come now, compared to two episodes ago, when she called herself his mother by accident?
I also enjoy very much how Rusty is handling this conversation. While he was still completely freaking out earlier, he now presents reasonable arguments. When he yells at Rios for trying to keep him from seeing a doctor, that is a marked change from not so long ago, when he was trying everything he could to avoid seeing one. Twice during this conversation Sharon allows Rusty to speak his mind (despite his slightly harsh tone), and once she even stops Provenza from interfering.
Rusty’s arguments even manage to make Rios soften her stance somewhat from “I tried to get the kid a safe place to live, so don’t complain about dealing with a security detail now” to “I just think we should make these kinds of decisions together” which is a good point, actually. I’m not quite sure why Captain Rulebook neglected to discuss their plan to use their material witness as bait with the DDA, especially considering that Sharon never really liked the idea in the first place. One would think that she’d welcome having someone on her side in that matter? Or maybe she knows, logically, that it’s their best chance to catch the guy and that the time when she has the legal right to make decisions about his safety—and his life—is coming to an end. And maybe she wanted to prevent her obviously rather weak resolve to allow Rusty to play bait from crumbling.
A cute moment in this scene is when Provenza presents Emma with a solution to her concern about them losing Rusty in an SIS operation. His little aside to Sharon about how that has never happened is so sweet!
The last scene of the episode is also very sweet. Rios apologizes to Rusty for the way she acted. It shows so much growth for both characters, because I can’t imagine the Rios we met at the beginning of season 2 doing that, and I also cannot see the Rusty of the past accepting that apology. They have both come a long way, and even though their roles put them at odds to a certain extend, they’re one step closer to being on good terms.
The main side-plot for this episode is Andy Flynn and his habit of lying to his ex-wife—or rather the consequences of that habit. Throughout the episode, he is distracted and even a little mopey, and he makes several attempts to talk to Provenza about the Nutcracker performance his step-grandkids are a part of. The fact that Provenza isn’t exactly supportive of the closeness that seems to have developed between Sharon and Andy is not surprising. There were some bad experiences with personal relationship within the team on The Closer, so I understand that he might be weary of another one of those. It is funny, though, that he tells Andy to stop calling her Sharon when he did the same only two episodes earlier. We do learn a little more about how Andy misrepresented his relationship with Sharon to his family here, and it really makes me wonder just how bad and how deliberate his lies were. He definitely doesn’t sound as if he feels much regret for misleading his family or using Sharon as a means of looking better to his kids. Well, we know that’s gonna change the next time the Nutcracker comes up…
While Flynn and Provenza quarrel over whether or not Andy should ask Sharon to accompany him to the ballet, we also learn a little more about Sharon’s private life. Sharon has a daughter (from The Closer and earlier Major Crimes episodes we only know that she has children) who is a professional dancer with the American Ballet Theater. That’s one possible explanation for the ballet theme of Sharon’s interior design choices. I wonder if this was a part of Sharon’s backstory that was decided upon before the show started, influencing the design choices for her condo, or if the design maybe influenced the decision to give her a dancing daughter.
What I love about this scene is how Sharon keeps throwing concerned glances at Andy where he is loitering outside her office and her expression when Provenza walks out of their conversation with Scammy to deal with Andy. And if you look closely, you’ll see her looking at them several times while she is continuing that conversation.
Also, Provenza accompanying Andy to the ballet to help him lie to his family sounds like it could have been another ProFlynnza adventure.
In the end, Andy decides to disregard Provenza’s warning and declines his offer to be his plus one. The story he tells Sharon about Nicole needing an “expert opinion” on her stepkids’ dancing is so ridiculous that Sharon sees through it right away. She spends most of the episode wondering what has crawled up his behind and even asks Provenza if Andy is depressed, so it’s not a big leap for her to figure out that whatever has him behaving so strangely is related to that weird invitation. I think that it says a lot about their friendship that she’s willing to go with him without knowing what exactly is going on, and that she doesn’t insist when he doesn’t want to tell her. Considering that he had no issues talking about the negative opinion the people at Nicole’s wedding had of him, I wonder what she thinks his problem might be. She obviously has no idea that his family believes they are dating because, a year later, she is completely caught off guard by that revelation. Either way, she seems to consider him a close enough friend to help him out, even though she has no clue why he needs help. That makes me wonder what has happened between them since she accompanied him to Nicole’s wedding.
On a nostalgic note, do you guys remember what this scene did to the fandom back when it aired? The feels were off the scale!
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