It's taken a while but happily Criminal Intent has returned to the airwaves of Australia with a new season. Clearly in between time Vincent D'Onofrio has been eating all the pies because it looks as though it's been necessary to widen the door spaces for him to enter the sets. Greyer and fatter, poor old Goren looks in the worst shape he's looked in for the past seven years.
Over the past few years Criminal Intent has become the least popular of the Law & Order franchise and with Warren Leight taking over from Rene Balcer as the showrunner, the series has had some serious changes (and I'm not just talking about the introduction of a second team of detectives). Criminal Intent has gone away from showing crimes from the perspective of the criminals (hence the intent, or mens rea) and now spends a little more time on the lives of the detectives involved. I have to admit I'm not a fan, particularly when the crimes the detectives are investigating suddenly start to involve their family members.
Regardless of this, the first episode of the new season kicks off with a little case that just happens to be about the murder of the detective who was the last partner of Eames' late husband. To the surprise of virtuarlly nobody the case ends up being about the murder of Eames' late husband.
Vincent D'Onofrio still looks a little distracted as Goren these days and lot of the bizarreness of Goren seems to have seeped away. The curious head mannerisms have been replaced by just general crazy behaviour (watch him he describes himself as the "whack job"), but happily there are a few moments when the real Goren surfaces. This comes to the fore particularly when they look into the murder of Eames' husband.
Kathryn Erbe on the other hand never seems to look out of place as Eames and while the downsides to having to sit through the detectives emotional baggage has already been described, on the plus side it does give the actors the chance to show something more than just a dry, laconic wit. Eames gets the chance to show how much the murder of her husband affected her over the past few years, and so for that it's almost worth it.
I still can't say that I have particularly warmed to Captain Ross (and precisely why is the Chief of Detectives in Criminal Intent a different man to the one in Special Victims Unit?) and he clearly hasn't warmed to Goren. There is a nice moment when Eames effectively suggests that Goren is virtually autistic and unable to cope with change very well.
Next week is Logan and his partner, and I'm frankly hoping that with this episode we've left behind the emotional angst and can move on to just solving crime.
"B+"
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