Blood Ties – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
by Nancy Mathews
I was really looking forward to this week’s episode after all the character stuff going on last week. Interestingly this week we had a better story, but not a ton of forward movement on the character development. It’s either/or on this show – not both.
We open with Vicki talking to a serial killer. Seems it’s someone who Vicki and Mike put away 4 years ago, but has since recanted his confession. He has realized that in fact he didn’t commit the murder – he only had a psychic flash of it and mistook it for a memory…
Yeah. OK. Whatever…oh wait this is Blood Ties, not Law and Order. Sure buddy, tell me more.
Mike, of course, doesn’t buy it, but Psychic Guy says he knows another murder is about to happen in a familiar place. However, he’s not quite sure where.
Vicki decides that it’s worth looking into, so she and Coreen look over her old case files. Henry shows up and starts inquiring after Vicki’s health…huh? Oh, it seems he’s searching for signs that Vicki is irrevocably damaged by her dabbling in the black arts. Vicki, ever pragmatic, tells him if he’s going to hang around waiting for her to blacken with evil he might as well help out. Henry figures out how to find the place in Psychic Guy’s visions but – oops! too late – there’s already a body. So is it a copycat or did Mike and Vicki have the wrong guy four years ago?
In between current events we are treated to some flashbacks of Mike and Vicki when they originally worked the case. It’s kind of interesting to see that Vicki seems far more chipper than she is now. Frankly she’s a bit more chipper than I ever would imagine her being even with perfect sight and still on the force. It’s also interesting to see that Vicki doesn’t really appear to buy [now]Psychic Guy’s confession all those years ago. Yet she goes along with it since Mike buys it and they never really touch on this fact. It felt weird somehow.
[nms:tanya huff,2,0]
Back to the present day, thanks to Henry using the Jedi mind trick on Mike, Vicki gets an actual lead. Using her formidable b & e skills Vicki discovers that Psychic Guy and his two brothers (one we have met – he is the sole caretaker of an abandoned mental hospital [creepy] and two seems to have been severely mentally disabled) were actually a living psychiatric experiment for their mom. She raised them to be the three aspects of personality: the ego, the id and the super ego. Freud would have loved her.
When we get the juicy part it turns out the mom’s a goner and Creepy Caretaker Brother has killed Disabled Brother so they can fuse their splintered personalities back together.
Still with me?
Vicki goes to confront him, Henry saves her even though he’s still pissed at her and he kills Creepy Caretaker Brother. In the final reveal we see Vicki meeting with Psychic Guy explaining all that has gone on, but of course she knows and we know that the three are now one. So we not only didn’t stop a killer, we also found a way to send him back out on his merry way since I assume this brother will get out of jail with all the evidence pointing to his now deceased brothers.
I wanted this to be better. It wasn’t a bad story, but all the hard feelings going on between Henry and Vicki and Mike and Vicki really make the show less fun to watch. I’m not sure we’ll ever get another season to sort it all out either. It’s a shame, I’ll miss them all.
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Nancy Mathews works very hard at masquerading as a grown up to go to work and raise her two sons. Once the sun goes down she reverts to the 10 year old that she actually is. You can follow her plans for world domination through the formation of an army of knitters on her blog, Bronxgirlknits.
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