Poor research mars this episode of a usually good series.
Someone's killing people and making them look like characters from 'classic horror' stories ... or should that be films? The scriptwriters don't appear to be sure.
The body of a judge turns up with her hair dyed red and wearing what the investigators describe as a Victorian dress (it's a floor length dress but not particularly Victorian - the shoulders are bare: this was frowned on in Victorian times). The resident geek assures us that she has been made up to look like Lucy Westenra from Dracula, and shows us a picture that an artist has made of the character that he insists proves it. Well ... as far as I can see, whoever drew that picture is clearly the murderer, because it looks exactly like the victim ... and here's the thing - there is no detailed or definitive description of Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's novel. As far as hair colour goes, Lucy is described as having 'sunshiney curls' and is later described as a 'dark haired woman' : nowhere is it specified her hair is red. Looks like the scriptwriters just watched the Francis Ford Coppola adaptation and thought the viewing public would be too illiterate to notice they had not done their homework.
But here's the really offensive thing about this episode: mental illness is once again used as a shortcut to villainy.
Turns out that when a lie detector test doesn't work on suspect number one, the handsome criminal investigator concludes he's got disociative personality disorder (with zero reasoning except that it means the team won't have to get off their backsides to investigate other suspects). Stone me, it turns out he's correct in his plucked out of the air reasoning. The team manage to get the suspect to turn nasty by shouting in his face (in real life shouting in someone's face is likely to turn at least 80% of the population nasty out of an instinct to defend oneself). From then on in the episode turns into a knock-off of 1992's 'Primal Fear' and the suspect does his best Edward Norton impression.
There's some fun stuff about Halloween costumes, CCH Pounder and Lucas Black give nicely natural performances and the actor playing the suspect gives a good performance in a role the scriptwriters didn't bother to research except to find useful bafflegab so that the other actors can deliver exposition heavy dialogue that is basically explaining the plot and sounds like it - particularly when they do that thing where they share one long speech between several characters but the actors don't act like any of these ideas are occurring to them as new thoughts. Some better direction of the actors would have ironed out this problem.
Someone's killing people and making them look like characters from 'classic horror' stories ... or should that be films? The scriptwriters don't appear to be sure.
The body of a judge turns up with her hair dyed red and wearing what the investigators describe as a Victorian dress (it's a floor length dress but not particularly Victorian - the shoulders are bare: this was frowned on in Victorian times). The resident geek assures us that she has been made up to look like Lucy Westenra from Dracula, and shows us a picture that an artist has made of the character that he insists proves it. Well ... as far as I can see, whoever drew that picture is clearly the murderer, because it looks exactly like the victim ... and here's the thing - there is no detailed or definitive description of Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's novel. As far as hair colour goes, Lucy is described as having 'sunshiney curls' and is later described as a 'dark haired woman' : nowhere is it specified her hair is red. Looks like the scriptwriters just watched the Francis Ford Coppola adaptation and thought the viewing public would be too illiterate to notice they had not done their homework.
But here's the really offensive thing about this episode: mental illness is once again used as a shortcut to villainy.
Turns out that when a lie detector test doesn't work on suspect number one, the handsome criminal investigator concludes he's got disociative personality disorder (with zero reasoning except that it means the team won't have to get off their backsides to investigate other suspects). Stone me, it turns out he's correct in his plucked out of the air reasoning. The team manage to get the suspect to turn nasty by shouting in his face (in real life shouting in someone's face is likely to turn at least 80% of the population nasty out of an instinct to defend oneself). From then on in the episode turns into a knock-off of 1992's 'Primal Fear' and the suspect does his best Edward Norton impression.
There's some fun stuff about Halloween costumes, CCH Pounder and Lucas Black give nicely natural performances and the actor playing the suspect gives a good performance in a role the scriptwriters didn't bother to research except to find useful bafflegab so that the other actors can deliver exposition heavy dialogue that is basically explaining the plot and sounds like it - particularly when they do that thing where they share one long speech between several characters but the actors don't act like any of these ideas are occurring to them as new thoughts. Some better direction of the actors would have ironed out this problem.
