Saving Grace – Episode 3-8 Review

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Captain Perry goes out of town for the weekend, and with no-one on hand to marshal their immature antics, the team play the most elaborate practical joke in the history of the show – not only on Butch, Bobby and Kendra, but on the viewers, too. Meanwhile, Johnny wants to meet Earl, Rhetta has lost all faith in Ronnie, and Leo thinks he’s “living next door to Norman Bates.” 

This episode was played for laughs and, while particularly liable to offend those who think law enforcement officers should be a bastion of moral rectitude, I thought it was a work of cracktastic genius. Especially as they managed to work a real case amidst all of the tomfoolery. OCPD get the job done when it really counts, but sometimes, their downtime is infinitely more entertaining.

This episode had a surreal feel from the outset. Grace was engaged in an intense confrontation with a man who she suspected of murdering his daughter, trying to exact a confession – but she was being supportive, and pledging to help him. He flew across the table at her in a fit of rage, and she barely batted an eyelid, let alone cuffed him upside the head. I figured this must be another one of her award-winning performances to reel in the bait, but no, the guy told her he stabbed his daughter 14 times, and she held his hand and ducked her head, almost as if she was praying for him. Isn’t this the point where she pulls away from him in disgust, tells him what a sick piece of shit he is, and celebrates sending him to death row by filling up a syringe and firing water across the office? 

The world was restored to rights once I realised it was a dream – but I couldn’t help but cringe as I watched Grace, ensconced in a beam of light, walking through her office and healing the sick like the new Messiah. Please writers, no more religious anvils. That’s not what I watch this show for. Still, given that it was Johnny-the-Priest envisaging this slightly nauseating scenario, I’ll forgive them.

Johnny’s dream convinced him that it was time to meet his sister’s elusive Angel – in the middle of the night, no less. Unfortunately, when he turned up at Grace’s house, Grace and Ham were too busy filming their role-play sex to answer the door, and Earl (almost as if he was loath to interrupt Grace’s fun) sent Johnny on his merry way. Johnny traipsed back home with his tail between his legs, completely oblivious to the fact that he just accomplished what he set out to do. It’s fortunate that no-one can ever remember what Earl looks like, or Johnny might have expressed some concern about his sister spending the night with a guy who looks more like a Hell’s Angel than God’s right-hand man. Or maybe he should be more concerned about Ham, given that he was running around Grace’s house with an Indian headdress barely covering his butt cheeks, yodelling at the top of his lungs. Of course, Grace thought this was the most hilarious thing she’d ever seen and could be heard howling with laughter in the background. I should know better, but damn if it wasn’t contagious.

Leo, meanwhile, was getting a little concerned about his next-door neighbour – a reclusive Science teacher infatuated with his dead mother. Grace assured him that someone was already serving a life sentence for her murder, but after seeing Teddy come home with an old-fashioned evening dress and finding pantihose, spearmint tea and perfume bottles in the trash, Grace’s brother thought they might have convicted the wrong guy. I love the banter between these two siblings, and I love how Grace’s tomboy persona manifests itself in all the physical tussling – poor Holly Hunter must get sick of being hoisted off her feet and being bench-pressed by all the male cast members, though.

Butch’s girlfriend, Kendra, was working on her first big story – one of her informants was blowing the whistle on a multi-national Pharmaceutical company, whose anti-depressants had lethal side effects. Her source didn’t show up for their first face-to-face meeting, though, and when Pop – Grace’s own fail-safe snitch – stumbled across a body in an abandoned warehouse, it didn’t take long to deduce that the informant had met a grisly demise. What followed was one of the most ambitious ruses ever, as we watched the case become increasingly bizarre and wondered why Grace and Ham were delighting in everyone else’s misery.

The victim’s histrionic “wife” showed up at the office and used Butch as a venting post for her grief, pounding his chest and sobbing hysterically until Leo had to come and sedate her: “Sheryl said the men behind the curtain killed her husband. I think she’s had a mental breakdown,” Butch lamented, looking utterly bewildered. The poor guy was worried sick for his girlfriend’s safety, terrified that Kendra might be next on the killer’s hit list, but Kendra was willing to do anything to get the story and attempted to meet with another informant behind Butch’s back. Grace and Ham crawled over to the door, shamelessly eavesdropping as the newly-engaged couple had a heated argument about why it was OK for Butch to walk headlong into danger every day, and yet Kendra was expected to back off at the first sign of trouble. Grace and Ham could barely contain their amusement as they listened to their friends trading insults, and when Bobby handed them the last picture of the victim and his wife – who were, by some bizarre coincidence, in fancy dress as Indians – they creased up, laughing hysterically. Kenny Johnson and Holly Hunter’s chemistry is never more apparent than when they’re dissolving into a fit of the giggles.

Rhetta, meanwhile, opened a vial found at the crime scene and screamed bloody murder when the contents began to eat away at her forearm, sending a frantic Bobby on a wild goose chase to find the salve that would counteract the effects of the hydrofluoric acid. I started to get more than a little suspicious when the acid didn’t burn through the sleeve of her lab coat, especially considering that Rhetta is usually painstakingly careful when it comes to handling evidence. Things got even more fishy when she and Henry (who supposedly had a cold) turned up at the office, and Grace didn’t even show any concern for her best friend, convulsing in another fit of laughter as she jokingly referred to them as “the sick and the wounded.”

The absurdity reached fever pitch when Butch, Bobby and Ham interrogated a crackpot chemist who supposedly had the evidence to corroborate the victim’s allegations. The white woman – sporting yet another Indian headdress – clutched Bobby’s plait when she learned of the victim’s death, drawing him close while she chanted a Native American prayer. Seeing that Ham was barely able to contain his smirk, she ordered him out of the room: “Shut up, you Jack-boot Nazi.” She then proceeded to demonstrate the effects of hydrofluoric acid by throwing it liberally over Butch and Bobby, who were forced to strip down to their underwear and flee to the atrium so they could be hosed off, while Ham half-heartedly restrained their attacker. The whole squad converged on the courtyard, and Kendra frantically tried to get the hose up and running. Rhetta arrived on the scene with some foaming spray to stop the burning sensation. “Give it time!” she exclaimed, when Bobby pointed out that he wasn’t in any pain. Once the half-naked duo were coated in a viscous lather, everyone (bar Kendra) fell about laughing, revealing that the whole thing had been a joke.

They’d taken a John Doe who was due to be cremated from the morgue, stuck him in a freezer in the warehouse, manufactured his ID and all the other evidence found at the scene, and let everything unfold from there. The burn on Rhetta’s arm was fake, Henry made all of the phone calls, the victim’s wife was Grace’s cousin, the chemist was Ham’s friend, and Leo played along for the hell of it. And they’d caught everything on tape (with an Angel’s seal of approval, no less, because Earl seemed to find the whole thing as hilarious as everyone else – assuring Grace that the dead guy who they’d mercilessly exploited had a good sense of humour).

Butch promised payback (as if threatening to broadcast Ham and Grace having sex in a public place all over the national news wasn’t bad enough) and, although I’m sure many folks would be outraged at the way OCPD are spending the tax payers’ money, the team did spend the rest of the episode exonerating a cancer-stricken man who was due to spend the rest of his life in prison. It turned out that Leo’s neighbour had indeed murdered his mother, buffed up her bones and was using her skeleton for his Science lessons: “Mother’s doing what she loved… teaching.” Teddy’s flippant and completely deluded responses during the interrogation were enough to elicit a few more chuckles.

The hilarity didn’t end there, though. Sick of Johnny asking her to arrange a meeting with Earl, Grace sent Pop – a black guy in a wheelchair – to meet her brother in his best Saturday Night Fever suit, complete with a set of furry Angel wings. “Tell Grace I’m not laughing,” Johnny muttered, storming out of the house when Pop greeted him with a generic, “God bless you, my son.” 

Grace and Rhetta did forego their Three Stooges routine to make way for some poignant scenes, though. Rhetta almost breaking down when Johnny questioned her about Ronnie was particularly moving, and her confrontation with her husband shortly thereafter was very telling. When Ronnie told her she had to make a decision – whether to believe Grace, or whether to believe him, Rhetta told him in no uncertain terms that her loyalties lie with Grace. She later subjected him to a Polygraph, burying her head in Grace’ shoulder while she listened to the results, which ultimately proved inconclusive. So, Ronnie is moving out of the family home, and Grace is literally falling at her best friend’s feet to comfort her.

This episode certainly didn’t serve much of a purpose in the big scheme of things, and wouldn’t have been to everyone’s tastes given that some moments were reminiscent of a Farrelly brothers’ film, but the humour was brilliantly funny and never seemed contrived, and the premise itself was pretty cunning, too.