Life“Jackpot”
Original Air Date: Nov 5, 2008
Brittany Wells – TwoCents Reviewer
brittanyw@twocentscorp.com
One of my favorite Barenaked Ladies songs is “If I Had $1,000,000.” Steven Page and Ed Robertson sing about all the stuff they would buy if they had a million dollars, like a K-car and a monkey. I’m pretty sure if I had a million dollars, I’d install a home theater and build my collection of Robert Patrick DVDs. If you’re Hannah Ronson, you win a huge lottery jackpot, need a support group to deal with it, and then get stabbed to death. That’s not cool.
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ReplyDelete“Jackpot”
Original Air Date: Nov 5, 2008
Brittany Wells – TwoCents Reviewer
brittanyw@twocentscorp.com
One of my favorite Barenaked Ladies songs is “If I Had $1,000,000.” Steven Page and Ed Robertson sing about all the stuff they would buy if they had a million dollars, like a K-car and a monkey. I’m pretty sure if I had a million dollars, I’d install a home theater and build my collection of Robert Patrick DVDs. If you’re Hannah Ronson, you win a huge lottery jackpot, need a support group to deal with it, and then get stabbed to death. That’s not cool.
Crews and Reese connect her to a Lottery Winners’ Anonymous group at a local church, where they find out she had moved to L.A. to avoid all the people in Florida who wanted a piece of her fortune. (Yes, because moving to one of the most money-obsessed places in the country is a solution to that problem.) She was sleeping with another member of the support group, a guy named Ben. Actually, as we come to find out, she was sleeping with half the support group, including one really hyperactive guy named Dale (Jonathan Slavin, who will always be known to me as that guy from Andy Richter Controls The Universe) to the creepy quiet guy, Tom. Because you know what else we find out? Hannah is actually Leanne, and she’s a very good con artist.
Apparently Leanne and her boyfriend Lenny (every time he gets mentioned, I keep thinking of The Simpsons and wonder if he has a friend named Carl) set her up as a fake lottery winner so she could go and steal the money from the real lottery winners. She was playing each of them, making them think they were the one she loved, and she was going to take their money and blow town. Now Lenny is apparently finishing the job. He’s killed Leanne and two of their accomplices. At least that’s the theory given that all three have died the same way and Lenny’s the only person in on the con that’s still alive.
Long story short, when going back to talk to Ben again, Charlie realizes Ben’s conveniently new bodyguard is acting weird. Surprise! It’s Lenny. Charlie stabs him with his own knife when the guy tries to pull it on him, and he’s safely arrested. Turns out he was blackmailing Ben, saying he’d let him live once he’d taken all of his money, finishing the con. He’d killed Leanne because he’d forgotten it was a con and thought she was really cheating on him with Ben. At least I think so. This episode? Not the easiest in the world to follow.
In the subplot, Rachel Seybolt, the young daughter of Charlie’s murdered friends, comes to live with him and Ted. This doesn’t go well because she’s still convinced he murdered her parents, until she goes with him to interview Dale and sees who he really is and how he relates to people. At the end of the episode she realizes he didn’t kill her parents, although he admits for a time in prison he even began to doubt himself. We finally see the two of them maybe start to open up to each other. Who knows what they might learn from each other, especially about the conspiracy?
On a random note: it’s nice to see Ted still healing from the pencil through the hand he suffered last week. I love shows that carry details over from one week to the next.
Meanwhile, Reese learns that after thirty years of marriage, her father has just walked out on her mother, and of course Captain Tidwell wants to be there to comfort her. This was an interesting development, and somehow I think it won’t be the last we hear of it, but I would have liked to have seen her find out in some way other than over the phone. It seems too big a happening for it to happen off-screen. Donal Logue as Tidwell is finally growing on me, even though I still expect to see his buddies from the short-lived ABC sitcom The Knights of Prosperity (or, its original and much cooler title, Let’s Rob Mick Jagger).
I thought this was a slightly confusing episode, and I really didn’t get into it as much as I have some of the past ones this season, although there were still some great quips (Charlie: “I was first in my fence-jumping class at Pelican Bay”). However, I think we saw some good subplots here that will develop as the season goes on. What do you think? Are we setting up for something else bigger down the road? And what would you buy if you had a million dollars? (No one say Kraft Dinners.)