stunt_muppet

If the baseball player's friend was so determined to get the stripper out of the way before she could humiliate him, why didn't he just strangle her in a bathroom somewhere and dump her body? Or shoot her as she went home from work? All of those would have been so much less complicated than the remote-triggered gun turret, not to mention less conspicuous and with much less chance for error. Oh, not to mention the gun turret was set to kill her in public, which would have raised an immediate outcry. If he'd disposed of her quietly somewhere else, she might not have been found for days. 

I could have bought the motive if the MO wasn't so ridiculous. I buy that kind of thing coming from Hodges, okay, writers? He's a science geek. He'd do something like that. Not from a baseball player.

Dimly-lit fetishistic "lesbian" sex from two characters who weren't actually lesbian. There is very little I loathe more than this in a television program. Because, of course, the only reason a woman would ever act sexually toward another woman is for the benefit of a male voyeur. What's that you say? Women can have sexual preferences and orientations without catering to the wants and needs of men? Bah! What rubbish are you talking now? Everyone knows that women are objects for men's sexual gratification no matter their orientation.

Seriously, I could almost understand this kind of thing in porn, where the whole point is for the viewer to get off anyway, but the fact that it's completely okay to show fetishistic fake lesbians on a network TV program now - legitimizing this kind of exploitation - just disgusts me in so many ways.

On a less-feminist note: If male viewers get fake lesbians to oogle at, I want fake gays. Seriously, writers. I DEMAND MANSEX. The blurry heterosexual hookups aren't gonna cut it anymore. I would have been content with them, normally and by content I mean annoyed and fed up, but you guys just had to up the ante. 

Conclusion: mansex. If it hasn't happened in two weeks, tersely-worded letters will be headed your way.

So...apparently, Our Intrepid Hero is being "extradited to Brazil for murder", to quote the trailer. Oh, stop wringing your hands; he won't be convicted. This isn't the sort of show that'd cycle out its main character (though it'd be interesting if it was). 

No, mostly I just want to throw confetti and serve celebratory cake, because it's about time we addressed the fact that the do-gooder, guilty-conscience copper we've been following around for six seasons has, in fact, committed murder - revenge murder, no less. Granted, Horatio's been going to increasingly morally iffy places this season - blackmail and bribery, for starters - so perhaps, maybe, the writers are finally going to abandon the Horatio Is Always Right About Everything Ever mantra that they repeated incessantly throughout Season 5. I'm not putting money on it or anything, but it is a possibility.

Because the fact is that he did commit murder, and even if he isn't convicted he's going to have to confront that in a tral. Now, my knowledge of the Brazilian legal system hovers at zero, but I'm assuming there are still lawyers and judges and juries of one's peers involved? There are all sorts of ways he could fail to be convicted. Equivocal or inconclusive evidence, for a start; maybe there aren't enough prints on the murder weapon to prove who wielded it, or because there are no witnesses the jury can't be certain that the killing was not in self-defense. Or the jury could acquit him for their own inscrutable, jury-like reasons. Or (and this is more likely) the prosecuting attorneys and judges will be moustache-twirling villains and all charges will be dropped and Horatio will head home free and clear again. Whatever. But if he's going to go to trial on the matter, he's either going to have to a) confess to murder (and thus be convicted and sentenced) or b) add perjury to his lengthening list of moral failings.

I'm convinced it'll be the latter, since he didn't seem inclined to confess to his crime after he committed it, and he presumably never confessed to his father's death, but that opens up this whole other can of worms. Looking at it in black and white, how are we supposed to take him seriously as someone who's all about seeing justice done and punishing the guilty if his moral code conveniently doesn't apply to himself? The answer, of course, is that he's a human being, and all but the most saintly human beings tend to become less principled when faced with the prospect of their own punishment, particularly if that punishment entails possible life imprisonment. Having him perjure himself on the stand might just be good for his character; it'll humanize him, make him crucially less than perfect in a way that we haven't seen since Season 4, possibly even Season 3 (no, the killing of Riaz and the wanton 'self-defense' killings of Season 5 and 6 don't count. Why? Because the show was very clearly on his side then; the writers went out of their way to justify his actions, thus keeping up his 'perfect' image in the face of morally wrong decisions.)

Of course, one could argue that the murder of Riaz was a critical step down the slippery slope for Horatio. Most of his morally dodgy actions come in Seasons 5 and 6, and while I highly suspect that this is lazy writing as much as anything, there might be some point to it if you squint hard enough. Committing murder that he considers justified (a feeling he might not be familiar with, considering his guilt over his father) might finally push him over some kind of edge, forcing him to realize that he can't live up to his own moral standards - or even to the law. Which casts in a whole new light many of the people he's trying to arrest, doesn't it? They think they're justified too. 

Not that I think Our Intrepid Hero is about to plunge into a life of lawlessness, mind you - just that he's finally got to cede the moral high ground and he's not adjusting to that too well. :D