January 15, 2004
Family Business
Mostly boring episode (7.8) in which McCoy screws up at the end, losing a case against a wealthy murder suspect. The victim is the CFO of a high-end department store, and is married to the daughter of the store's founder. The family is fabulously wealthy, but the CFO was interfering with some illegal accounting procedures, so his wife and her sister decide to eliminate him. There is a decided King Lear quality about the episode, but instead of turning on the elderly father, they turn on the husband. Neither Briscoe and Curtis nor McCoy can figure out which sister is responsible for the murder. Predictably, they make a deal with one sister in exchange for immunity, but then during the trial, the father presents an alibi for the defendant and accuses the other sister, who already has immunity. Whoops! McCoy doesn't pull his usual "the deal only applies if your client told the truth" routine, and he's left with two in the bush and none in the hand. He admits to Cheekbones that he screwed up, and Schiff isn't particularly pleased either. Well, as Cheekbones says, it's not the first time that a rich person got away with murder, and it won't be the last.
The episode is boring, I think, because the suspects are not particularly interesting or even distinguishable from each other, and the murder of the husband, although a bad thing, doesn't seem like it's a terrible tragedy. Everything about the case is routine except for the outrageous wealth of the suspects, and that's not enough to sustain an episode.
Posted by adm at January 15, 2004 08:28 PM
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