It's still a little difficult to get used to seeing Chris Noth head up Criminal Intent (although this is his third year so I should probably get over it) but to our surprise he has yet another new partner - this time Nola Folacci played by the criminally underrated Alicia Witt. Why she doesn't get more work is completely beyond me. Although why she is walking with a limp is also completely beyond me. I tried to find out if Witt has a limp but she doesn't appear to, so maybe it's just Folacci's character. Interesting...
As was the episode, although as is often the case with being a Law & Order fan I got vauge feelings of deja vu as the story lead to revealing that a doctor was impregnating his patients with his own semen. I think this has been done on the mother series guys...in fact, I think the episode was called "Seed"...
One of the great things about the Logan episodes is that they have gone back to seeing things more from the point of view of the criminal which was part of the appeal of CI in the old days, before big, bad Warren Leight took over as show runner and suddenly Goren developed more personal problems than Woody Allen. Logan doesn't seem quite so crippled by these things (mostly) and so the cases become more CI than Goren's. That said, however, one of the chief problems with the Logan episodes over the past years is trying to actually make them CI. CI was so uniquely about Goren's perculiar form of investigation that bringing in another detective to take the lead meant that there was some problems with keeping that CI feel - it would be a bit like having episodes of Monk investigated by another PI. The first year of Logan seemed to have just used Goren/Eames scripts with Logan effectively playing the Eames role and Barak being the quirky detective. The Logan/Barak partnership didn't really work, but the series was very CI. Last season we had Wheeler replace Barak and neither of them were really quirky, but the partnership was a lot better. Unfortunately the episodes turned into the Law side of Law & Order (Prime), but double the length. Ironic considering this episode.
Logan and Folacci have a good relationship (perhaps Logan just prefers redheads...or maybe it's Noth that does ho ho ho) and it's clear that there is an attempt to return to the CI feel by, as mentioned above, going back to featuring more from the criminal's point of view. This episode even had a pretitle sequence that wasn't crazily edited to a funky piece of music, which didn't flash to red.
However, as stated, it was a bit of retread of a previous L&O episode, but fortunately the motive for the killer was a bit different this time round. But come on writers...try being original.
"B+"
No comments:
Post a Comment