Flashpoint last night: "No Promises"
Okay, Show? Not one of your high-water marks in heartbreak, which is probably just as well considering exactly how heartbreaking you can be. But we are going to have words about this episode in a minute or two.
The episode begins with a middle-aged cop at a payphone, speaking to a smarmy guy in a suit. The cop is assuring the smarmy guy that everything is going to be cool, the smarmy guy is being threatening, and then the smarmy guy's minion holds the phone for a bruised and extremely scared young woman to talk to the cop. This looks like an extremely bad day all around.
Timejump.
We find ourselves on a country road as a police car arrives at an accident scene. There's a bus on its side on the verge, and a black car smashed into a tree or something on the other side of the road. The young patrol cop--I think he's Metro Police, although he might conceivably be OPP--runs to the car to check on the driver.
Who is the same heavyset middle-aged cop we saw in the opening. He looks squashed and banged up but not seriously injured, and sends the patrol cop to check on the people in the bus. We see the cop walk around the back of the bus making reassuring noises.
And then we hear gunfire and patrol cop comes staggering back around the bus, clutching his thigh and bleeding profusely. He ends up sitting propped against and thus sheltered by the undercarriage of the bus, and calls in the shooting.
At which point the SRU is called out.
En route to the scene, the team gets as many details as are available, including the name of the cop in the crashed vehicle. He is one Sgt. Oliver MacCoy, who turns out to have been Spike's training officer. Actually, he was a lot more than that: Spike explains that when he decided to join the cops his dad was not thrilled (I guess I can sort of see that, when you've got a kid as smart as Spike you probably envision him doing something less dangerous and more remunerative) (but you're proud as hell now, right, Mr. Scarlatti?) and his mum "didn't want to take sides," so the upshot was that for a while there Spike didn't have anybody (oh, Spike) and "Mac" kind of took up the slack. Mac was even the person who landed Spike with his nickname.
Well, Greg assures him, you're here for him now.
Again, Mac is more stunned than hurt, and seems to be staying in his vehicle not because he can't get out, but because he's under cover in there. The poor little guy from the squad car is in considerably more immediate danger, including (and this is what I was mostly worried about) the danger of bleeding out from a severed femoral artery, depending on where the bullet hit him.
Spike has found nothing unusual on the bus manifest: driver, six passengers, nobody throws any red flags. However, Mac was transporting a couple of guys to lockup who'd been busted for dealing. One of them, Jeremy Bullard, is the nephew of a local hard guy named Paul Bullard, whose organization (the Bedlam gang) apparently runs the drugs, prostitution, and weapons racket in the eastern part of the city. The two prisoners escaped in the crash and seem to have stolen Mac's riot gun. Either because the squad car arrived so promptly or because Jeremy, injured in the crash, is too banged up to travel very fast, the prisoners have taken refuge in the bus and are holding everyone hostage.
So when the team arrives its priorities (endorsed by Mac) are as follows:
(1) Retrieve the injured officer.
(2) Rescue the hostages.
(3) Arrest the escaped prisoners.
(4) Extract Mac from his vehicle.
Okay. Greg attempts to discuss the matter, via the bullhorn, with the felons in the bus. His response, from an escape window now on top of the bus, is gunfire, so negotiation appears to be out. As is the idea of sending EMTs down there right now. So the team goes to the "turtle" formation (kind of the same principle as this, only with fewer skirts) (for which I assume Ed and Sam are truly grateful) and under cover of shields, they pick up the injured officer.
On the principle of "just when you thought things could not get worse, they do," the bus's gas tank has been leaking, and a spark or something from the shots fired by the escaped prisoner ignites the gas. The team goes back, with shields and fire extinguishers, but before they get the fire out there's a sudden flood of passengers (well, a small flood, there were only half a dozen of them in the first place) coming out the escape window. They don't know where the hostage-takers are, but the driver is still on the bus, unconscious, so Ed and Sam go in after him. The bus is clear and the fire department moves in.
No sign of the escaped prisoners.
And also, the team suddenly realizes, no sign of Mac, either: the crashed police car is empty.
Spike is, understandably, quite freaked out by this, but he doesn't come apart. Instead he calls in a helicopter and other backup. Sam, Jules, Ed and Wordy break into pairs to search the woods nearby, and you can only imagine how frustrating it is for Spike to be stuck in the truck, directing traffic.
One of the former prisoners spots Jules before she spots him, but luckily Sam spots him before he spots--well, never mind. The former prisoner bolts, but before he gets very far Ed Happens to him (as Ed does) and he becomes a present prisoner with great haste.
Okay, Ed asks, where is Jeremy Bullard, and what has he done with Mac?
"You've got it all wrong," the once-and-future prisoner replies. "As soon as we were clear and your backs were turned, the cop grabbed Jeremy." And, being uninvolved, the O-A-F Prisoner bolted in a different direction.
Spike, as you can imagine, is not buying this crap for one second. Greg, being Greg, doesn't argue with him, but also being Greg keeps an open mind.
And it's not long before we see, and the team shortly afterward learns, of a woman being carjacked on a nearby road.
By a cop.
Okay. By this point even Spike can't deny there is something seriously messed up going on here. I said a while back, in a post about writing mystery fiction, that in the case of an amateur sleuth I am actually fine with the sleuth trying to clear an old friend or family member based solely on, "I know this person, and he wouldn't do this." However, Spike is a cop, and he's a good cop, and as much as it kills him, he doesn't stop being a cop just because the apparent subject is someone he loves.
So. Anything about Mac that might make him likely to snap?
Well, Mac's wife died (of cancer, I think) a couple of years ago, and his daughter Lesley has had serious drug problems, which could conceivably have put her into contact with unsavoury people. But she's been through rehab at a well-known facility and seems to be doing all right. (This bit is told via a flashback that makes it clear Spike is in current affectionate contact with Mac and his daughter.)
Greg has heard of the rehab facility. It's an expensive proposition, and you can see him filing that piece of information away for future reference.
It also transpires that Mac wasn't supposed to be on transport detail that morning, but swapped shifts with the officer who was. Actually, he pulled rank and demanded the swap.
At this point, Spike becomes very quiet.
The O-A-F Prisoner hasn't been a model of cooperation thus far, but Ed is pretty sure he knows something. He and Wordy, by dint of a little "tell us what you know or word on the street will be that you left Paul Bullard's nephew to bleed to death," pry some info out of him: the two young men were busted with an extremely large amount of heroin. Mac was supposed to take the two of them to Paul Bullard, who was planning to get them out of the country. Only when Jeremy, who was already panicky about the stretch of jail time he was looking at, heard this, he freaked out in the back of the police car, distracted Mac, and caused the accident in the first place.
Okay, so why would Jeremy flip out over the news he was being delivered to his uncle?
Well, uh, the heroin? It wasn't exactly ours to sell. It belonged to Uncle Paul, who had a buyer lined up, but, um, we found a buyer whose price was better and we thought we could impress him with our entrepreneurial spirit.
And the buyers turned out to be cops, right? asks Wordy, with the expression of one who has ceased to be amazed by criminal stupidity but still finds it pretty entertaining.
Well, yeah. Which is entrapment! argues the O-A-F Prisoner.
No, says Wordy, it's you being an idiot. Not even the O-A-F Prisoner can really argue with that. And they do get a location for the meeting out of him.
At this point, Mac's complicity in this whole mess is beyond question. The question is, how did he get sucked in? I may not be the only person who figured there was some connection between Lesley and the mess. And there is, only not the one I was expecting: when Sam and Jules check her apartment, it becomes obvious she's been abducted.
Okay, this is making some sense now: Lesley was grabbed early this morning, and Mac got the transport detail soon after. Clearly, and when Spike makes contact with him the team confirms it, he's being coerced by Bullard Sr and trying to rescue his daughter.
But, and this was a question that did occur to me before the team asked it: Why Mac? Why not coerce the cop who was originally scheduled to do the shift? Did he have no significant others? Did Bullard just happen to know about Lesley because of a prior client/dealer relationship?
I had these thoughts, and I am ashamed of them. Winnie, who's been doing some investigating back at the barn, breaks in with the news: Internal Affairs is investigating Mac. He's had some unexplained income for the last few years, and it looks like it's tracing back to Bullard and his crew, and now I feel like crap for blaming this mess on Lesley even a little in my head, and I can only imagine how Mac feels about her tearful assurances over the phone that she's stayed clean and she doesn't know what's going on. Lesley seems to think this is all somehow her fault, too.
Well, no. As Mac tells Spike, he took the money in exchange for information, and he spent it on faint-hope treatments for his wife, and she died anyway. And he took more money and spent that on Lesley's treatment. Spike can't believe he didn't figure out something was wrong, that Mac had some sort of illicit source of income, but Greg stops that train of thought before it can get rolling: Spike believes the best of people, especially the people he loves, and that's actually one of the things that makes him Spike. Blaming himself is not going to help, and it's also not like Mac didn't make his own decisions. He did.
And now he's stuck, with the SRU too far behind him and scrambling to figure out where he's going, and he has to get Lesley out of this mess.
In the back of his head he's also concerned about Jeremy, who's still bleeding a lot from what appears to be a compound fracture in his arm, and keeps fading in and out of consciousness and pleading with Mac to let him go, or take him back to jail. By this point I had pretty much stopped caring about what Jeremy had done to get himself (deservedly) arrested, he was just a badly injured and very scared kid. Mac is not in any mental state to register this, but Jeremy is not one bit anxious to be turned over to Uncle Paul. And Uncle Paul doesn't seem to be the family-oriented type.
[Okay, a word about Paul--what the hell is that accent? You all know how I feel about Bad Guy With Accent anyway, but the guy's name is Bullard. That's pretty anglo, isn't it?? I would be much more pissed about this if Flashpoint didn't generally make such a point of not going there, but I don't understand that accent at all.]
Ahem. At this point I was pretty sure Bullard was planning to make an example of his fuckup nephew and his fuckup friend. But Winnie has not stopped digging (and she's good at it. If she and Spike got married their kids would definitely grow up to be spies and reference librarians. I'm just sayin'.) And Winnie has found out that Jeremy and his lawyer made a deal to give evidence against Uncle Paul in exchange for a reduced sentence.
And Uncle Paul apparently has eyes everywhere.
Oh, no. All of a sudden Jeremy's panicky plea to Mac, that he doesn't want to die, doesn't sound like he's talking about exsanguination anymore. And Mac still doesn't get it--he figures he's sold out, but I don't think he realizes yet that he has actually sold his soul, too.
The team arrives at the location where Lesley is being held, and they rescue her. But Paul and his main lieutenant aren't there, and neither is Mac. That happy family reunion is taking place across town, and by the time the team arrives, Mac has figured out that he's just delivered Jeremy to his execution. Paul and his lieutenant are so occupied with explaining things to Jeremy that they lose track of Mac for a minute. Mac probably hasn't been in a gunfight since... well, ever... but he gets the drop on the lieutenant and gets his gun, drags Jeremy into cover, and exchanges a few shots before Paul and his pal decide to escape.
Just as Team One arrives. As Mac says to Spike, "Just in time to get the glory."
Spike isn't paying much attention to the teasing, because it turns out Paul is a better shot than a THRUSH agent and although Mac is wearing a vest, the vest doesn't cover everything vital. By the time Spike gets to him, Mac's in a pool of blood and Jeremy seems to be trying to stay conscious long enough to comfort him, which kind of indicates there might be something in there worth salvaging. Spike is reassuring, and also lying, and Mac knows it. And despite the fact cops don't know what will happen and therefore should not make promises they might not be able to keep, Mac extracts a promise from Spike to keep an eye on Lesley. This sounds pretty old-fashioned until I remembered Lesley's previous problems and the fact she now has... well, nobody.
Aside from Spike, and the final scene in the episode has the two of them looking through a collection of pictures and memorabilia Mac apparently kept of Spike's career. We've already seen Greg talking to Spike about the fact that Mac was, at the end, a good enough cop to save Jeremy, when he figured out what was going to happen to him. And the fact he knew Spike had his back and was looking after Lesley maybe helped him do that.
And Spike seems... well, not okay, but it seems like he accepts that. It's possible, and this is a terrible thing to say, but it's possible the fact Mac died heroically rather than living to be disgraced, helps him put the whole thing into perspective. I don't know.
I do know the show and I need to have a quiet word, and here it is:
OKAY SHOW, STOP KILLING SPIKE'S PEOPLE!
I am serious here. First Lew, now Mac? Stop it. Quit. Please. Enough. One Greg on the team is enough, you know??
I don't have a snappy ending for this one. I'm beginning to hope the writers don't turn their attention to Wordy...
The episode begins with a middle-aged cop at a payphone, speaking to a smarmy guy in a suit. The cop is assuring the smarmy guy that everything is going to be cool, the smarmy guy is being threatening, and then the smarmy guy's minion holds the phone for a bruised and extremely scared young woman to talk to the cop. This looks like an extremely bad day all around.
Timejump.
We find ourselves on a country road as a police car arrives at an accident scene. There's a bus on its side on the verge, and a black car smashed into a tree or something on the other side of the road. The young patrol cop--I think he's Metro Police, although he might conceivably be OPP--runs to the car to check on the driver.
Who is the same heavyset middle-aged cop we saw in the opening. He looks squashed and banged up but not seriously injured, and sends the patrol cop to check on the people in the bus. We see the cop walk around the back of the bus making reassuring noises.
And then we hear gunfire and patrol cop comes staggering back around the bus, clutching his thigh and bleeding profusely. He ends up sitting propped against and thus sheltered by the undercarriage of the bus, and calls in the shooting.
At which point the SRU is called out.
En route to the scene, the team gets as many details as are available, including the name of the cop in the crashed vehicle. He is one Sgt. Oliver MacCoy, who turns out to have been Spike's training officer. Actually, he was a lot more than that: Spike explains that when he decided to join the cops his dad was not thrilled (I guess I can sort of see that, when you've got a kid as smart as Spike you probably envision him doing something less dangerous and more remunerative) (but you're proud as hell now, right, Mr. Scarlatti?) and his mum "didn't want to take sides," so the upshot was that for a while there Spike didn't have anybody (oh, Spike) and "Mac" kind of took up the slack. Mac was even the person who landed Spike with his nickname.
Well, Greg assures him, you're here for him now.
Again, Mac is more stunned than hurt, and seems to be staying in his vehicle not because he can't get out, but because he's under cover in there. The poor little guy from the squad car is in considerably more immediate danger, including (and this is what I was mostly worried about) the danger of bleeding out from a severed femoral artery, depending on where the bullet hit him.
Spike has found nothing unusual on the bus manifest: driver, six passengers, nobody throws any red flags. However, Mac was transporting a couple of guys to lockup who'd been busted for dealing. One of them, Jeremy Bullard, is the nephew of a local hard guy named Paul Bullard, whose organization (the Bedlam gang) apparently runs the drugs, prostitution, and weapons racket in the eastern part of the city. The two prisoners escaped in the crash and seem to have stolen Mac's riot gun. Either because the squad car arrived so promptly or because Jeremy, injured in the crash, is too banged up to travel very fast, the prisoners have taken refuge in the bus and are holding everyone hostage.
So when the team arrives its priorities (endorsed by Mac) are as follows:
(1) Retrieve the injured officer.
(2) Rescue the hostages.
(3) Arrest the escaped prisoners.
(4) Extract Mac from his vehicle.
Okay. Greg attempts to discuss the matter, via the bullhorn, with the felons in the bus. His response, from an escape window now on top of the bus, is gunfire, so negotiation appears to be out. As is the idea of sending EMTs down there right now. So the team goes to the "turtle" formation (kind of the same principle as this, only with fewer skirts) (for which I assume Ed and Sam are truly grateful) and under cover of shields, they pick up the injured officer.
On the principle of "just when you thought things could not get worse, they do," the bus's gas tank has been leaking, and a spark or something from the shots fired by the escaped prisoner ignites the gas. The team goes back, with shields and fire extinguishers, but before they get the fire out there's a sudden flood of passengers (well, a small flood, there were only half a dozen of them in the first place) coming out the escape window. They don't know where the hostage-takers are, but the driver is still on the bus, unconscious, so Ed and Sam go in after him. The bus is clear and the fire department moves in.
No sign of the escaped prisoners.
And also, the team suddenly realizes, no sign of Mac, either: the crashed police car is empty.
Spike is, understandably, quite freaked out by this, but he doesn't come apart. Instead he calls in a helicopter and other backup. Sam, Jules, Ed and Wordy break into pairs to search the woods nearby, and you can only imagine how frustrating it is for Spike to be stuck in the truck, directing traffic.
One of the former prisoners spots Jules before she spots him, but luckily Sam spots him before he spots--well, never mind. The former prisoner bolts, but before he gets very far Ed Happens to him (as Ed does) and he becomes a present prisoner with great haste.
Okay, Ed asks, where is Jeremy Bullard, and what has he done with Mac?
"You've got it all wrong," the once-and-future prisoner replies. "As soon as we were clear and your backs were turned, the cop grabbed Jeremy." And, being uninvolved, the O-A-F Prisoner bolted in a different direction.
Spike, as you can imagine, is not buying this crap for one second. Greg, being Greg, doesn't argue with him, but also being Greg keeps an open mind.
And it's not long before we see, and the team shortly afterward learns, of a woman being carjacked on a nearby road.
By a cop.
Okay. By this point even Spike can't deny there is something seriously messed up going on here. I said a while back, in a post about writing mystery fiction, that in the case of an amateur sleuth I am actually fine with the sleuth trying to clear an old friend or family member based solely on, "I know this person, and he wouldn't do this." However, Spike is a cop, and he's a good cop, and as much as it kills him, he doesn't stop being a cop just because the apparent subject is someone he loves.
So. Anything about Mac that might make him likely to snap?
Well, Mac's wife died (of cancer, I think) a couple of years ago, and his daughter Lesley has had serious drug problems, which could conceivably have put her into contact with unsavoury people. But she's been through rehab at a well-known facility and seems to be doing all right. (This bit is told via a flashback that makes it clear Spike is in current affectionate contact with Mac and his daughter.)
Greg has heard of the rehab facility. It's an expensive proposition, and you can see him filing that piece of information away for future reference.
It also transpires that Mac wasn't supposed to be on transport detail that morning, but swapped shifts with the officer who was. Actually, he pulled rank and demanded the swap.
At this point, Spike becomes very quiet.
The O-A-F Prisoner hasn't been a model of cooperation thus far, but Ed is pretty sure he knows something. He and Wordy, by dint of a little "tell us what you know or word on the street will be that you left Paul Bullard's nephew to bleed to death," pry some info out of him: the two young men were busted with an extremely large amount of heroin. Mac was supposed to take the two of them to Paul Bullard, who was planning to get them out of the country. Only when Jeremy, who was already panicky about the stretch of jail time he was looking at, heard this, he freaked out in the back of the police car, distracted Mac, and caused the accident in the first place.
Okay, so why would Jeremy flip out over the news he was being delivered to his uncle?
Well, uh, the heroin? It wasn't exactly ours to sell. It belonged to Uncle Paul, who had a buyer lined up, but, um, we found a buyer whose price was better and we thought we could impress him with our entrepreneurial spirit.
And the buyers turned out to be cops, right? asks Wordy, with the expression of one who has ceased to be amazed by criminal stupidity but still finds it pretty entertaining.
Well, yeah. Which is entrapment! argues the O-A-F Prisoner.
No, says Wordy, it's you being an idiot. Not even the O-A-F Prisoner can really argue with that. And they do get a location for the meeting out of him.
At this point, Mac's complicity in this whole mess is beyond question. The question is, how did he get sucked in? I may not be the only person who figured there was some connection between Lesley and the mess. And there is, only not the one I was expecting: when Sam and Jules check her apartment, it becomes obvious she's been abducted.
Okay, this is making some sense now: Lesley was grabbed early this morning, and Mac got the transport detail soon after. Clearly, and when Spike makes contact with him the team confirms it, he's being coerced by Bullard Sr and trying to rescue his daughter.
But, and this was a question that did occur to me before the team asked it: Why Mac? Why not coerce the cop who was originally scheduled to do the shift? Did he have no significant others? Did Bullard just happen to know about Lesley because of a prior client/dealer relationship?
I had these thoughts, and I am ashamed of them. Winnie, who's been doing some investigating back at the barn, breaks in with the news: Internal Affairs is investigating Mac. He's had some unexplained income for the last few years, and it looks like it's tracing back to Bullard and his crew, and now I feel like crap for blaming this mess on Lesley even a little in my head, and I can only imagine how Mac feels about her tearful assurances over the phone that she's stayed clean and she doesn't know what's going on. Lesley seems to think this is all somehow her fault, too.
Well, no. As Mac tells Spike, he took the money in exchange for information, and he spent it on faint-hope treatments for his wife, and she died anyway. And he took more money and spent that on Lesley's treatment. Spike can't believe he didn't figure out something was wrong, that Mac had some sort of illicit source of income, but Greg stops that train of thought before it can get rolling: Spike believes the best of people, especially the people he loves, and that's actually one of the things that makes him Spike. Blaming himself is not going to help, and it's also not like Mac didn't make his own decisions. He did.
And now he's stuck, with the SRU too far behind him and scrambling to figure out where he's going, and he has to get Lesley out of this mess.
In the back of his head he's also concerned about Jeremy, who's still bleeding a lot from what appears to be a compound fracture in his arm, and keeps fading in and out of consciousness and pleading with Mac to let him go, or take him back to jail. By this point I had pretty much stopped caring about what Jeremy had done to get himself (deservedly) arrested, he was just a badly injured and very scared kid. Mac is not in any mental state to register this, but Jeremy is not one bit anxious to be turned over to Uncle Paul. And Uncle Paul doesn't seem to be the family-oriented type.
[Okay, a word about Paul--what the hell is that accent? You all know how I feel about Bad Guy With Accent anyway, but the guy's name is Bullard. That's pretty anglo, isn't it?? I would be much more pissed about this if Flashpoint didn't generally make such a point of not going there, but I don't understand that accent at all.]
Ahem. At this point I was pretty sure Bullard was planning to make an example of his fuckup nephew and his fuckup friend. But Winnie has not stopped digging (and she's good at it. If she and Spike got married their kids would definitely grow up to be spies and reference librarians. I'm just sayin'.) And Winnie has found out that Jeremy and his lawyer made a deal to give evidence against Uncle Paul in exchange for a reduced sentence.
And Uncle Paul apparently has eyes everywhere.
Oh, no. All of a sudden Jeremy's panicky plea to Mac, that he doesn't want to die, doesn't sound like he's talking about exsanguination anymore. And Mac still doesn't get it--he figures he's sold out, but I don't think he realizes yet that he has actually sold his soul, too.
The team arrives at the location where Lesley is being held, and they rescue her. But Paul and his main lieutenant aren't there, and neither is Mac. That happy family reunion is taking place across town, and by the time the team arrives, Mac has figured out that he's just delivered Jeremy to his execution. Paul and his lieutenant are so occupied with explaining things to Jeremy that they lose track of Mac for a minute. Mac probably hasn't been in a gunfight since... well, ever... but he gets the drop on the lieutenant and gets his gun, drags Jeremy into cover, and exchanges a few shots before Paul and his pal decide to escape.
Just as Team One arrives. As Mac says to Spike, "Just in time to get the glory."
Spike isn't paying much attention to the teasing, because it turns out Paul is a better shot than a THRUSH agent and although Mac is wearing a vest, the vest doesn't cover everything vital. By the time Spike gets to him, Mac's in a pool of blood and Jeremy seems to be trying to stay conscious long enough to comfort him, which kind of indicates there might be something in there worth salvaging. Spike is reassuring, and also lying, and Mac knows it. And despite the fact cops don't know what will happen and therefore should not make promises they might not be able to keep, Mac extracts a promise from Spike to keep an eye on Lesley. This sounds pretty old-fashioned until I remembered Lesley's previous problems and the fact she now has... well, nobody.
Aside from Spike, and the final scene in the episode has the two of them looking through a collection of pictures and memorabilia Mac apparently kept of Spike's career. We've already seen Greg talking to Spike about the fact that Mac was, at the end, a good enough cop to save Jeremy, when he figured out what was going to happen to him. And the fact he knew Spike had his back and was looking after Lesley maybe helped him do that.
And Spike seems... well, not okay, but it seems like he accepts that. It's possible, and this is a terrible thing to say, but it's possible the fact Mac died heroically rather than living to be disgraced, helps him put the whole thing into perspective. I don't know.
I do know the show and I need to have a quiet word, and here it is:
OKAY SHOW, STOP KILLING SPIKE'S PEOPLE!
I am serious here. First Lew, now Mac? Stop it. Quit. Please. Enough. One Greg on the team is enough, you know??
I don't have a snappy ending for this one. I'm beginning to hope the writers don't turn their attention to Wordy...