Episode 18/10: Tango

Fan Review by Mari

CAUTION: POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!

Two teen girls party a bit too hard and end up pretty drunk. When their car gets towed and the cops won't just let them take it home, one girl starts mouthing off before passing out cold, while the other wanders away, an eeriely sad expression on her face after a cop refuses to let her use his phone to call her folks. Why that cop had to be such a dick is beyond me.

Anyway, the girl who walked off down the street, toward a busy freeway, is now missing. Her parents are frantic. "Don't worry," Green tries to assure them. "We'll find her. We always find them." To which Lupo quietly mutters, "Yeah...we find them." At this juncture, Lupo's not-so-new-anymore job has indeed turned him into a pessimist. Who can blame him?

Witnesses put Anne Marie, the missing girl, into a specially painted taxi. The driver says he drove the girl, along with some couple, to a seedy motel. Although the video camera at this pisshole fails to show the faces of the man dragging the missing girl into the building, the dimwit manager IDs the other female as "Sugar...nice girl...meth-head hooker...but nice girl." Sisto's reaction to this statement was terrific!

The detectives find blood and a cellphone in "Sugar's" room, and through the phone, they track down her parents. Sugar's real name is Melinda, and her parents live on the upper east side. Of course. Another bored little rich girl seeking street cred and adventure. Instantly I hated Sugar. I hated her more when Green and Lupo finally got ahold of her thanks to one of her meth-freak buddies at an expensive clinic and a meth dealer named Lysol (!!!???) Of course the little twit plays dumb and innocent. When Anne Marie is found in a dumpster outside the motel, victim to rape, sodomy and ligature strangulation, Sugar still refuses to disclose anything about it. They are forced to release her, but they don't let her out of their sight.

Lupo comes up with another sly scheme, and has a fake note delivered to Sugar, who instantly seeks out her boyfriend/pimp Tito. Boy, I'll tell you, the actor who plays Tito is GOOOOOOOOOOD. I hated that motherfucker. I loved it when Lupo shoved the table into his stomach after enduring the smug braggart talk about "putting Sugar in her place" and what an irresistable love-man he is...ugh...pudding with cat hair in it could not make me more nauseated than Tito. Even Green turned green around the gills!!! I wished Lupo would have gone further, like string the bastard up and castrate him right there in the squad room!

Sugar is a pathetic puke herself, and Lupo plays on her stupidity, hoping to get her to rat Tito out. In court, the dumb slut loudly recants the confession she had made at the station, and suddenly Lupo and his note are under fire, thanks to a judge who is probably dumber than Sugar. Cutter and Rubirosa are forced to seek out new possible witnesses to the murder. They interview a battered woman and her drug fiend boyfriend Timmy, who (in exchange for disappearing drug charges of course) agrees to help them, telling them of Sugar, alone in the motel room, with a bag that had a "yelping dog" inside it. Of course, Timmy could not be bothered to question this "dog" or call police. There is no end to the deplorable characters that the DAs end up having to ask for assistance in this case!

A hairdryer with blood on the cord is revealed to be what was used to strangle Anne Marie. Sugar, being the one who was alone with the victim at the time of the murder, is re-arrested. Jury selection is made for the trial, and in spite of Connie's misgivings about a certain juror, Cutter likes the guy. When I said all kinds of less than upstanding people were used in this case, I meant it. I'm really unsure as to why this story arc was even used, except to challenge viewers: Was Cutter a jerk to use this guy? His intuition told him that this juror was attracted to Rubirosa, and he used that to help the DAs win the case. Skillful lawyering? No doubt. But what would Cutter have thought of himself if this juror had truly been a dangerous, obsessive psycho who ended up raping or murdering Connie? He was practically a stalker IMO.

It's hard to know what to think. Was Connie being unreasonably uptight? I tend to think that while she might have been on a slight soapbox about sexism (in a later episode, Cutter uses his own sexuality, and in several episodes, Lupo and Green assume the roles of lures to gain information needed for cases), I can't blame her for being spooked by this guy's emails and approaching her on the street. It would have been right to toss his ass off the jury for his conduct.

Then again, for Sugar to get off after what she did (she did all her evil deeds over that puke Tito!!! Unbe-fucking-lievable!!!) would have been completely intolerable. I wanted Tito to be punished too, but I wonder if he was, being that he claimed Anne Marie "wanted" what he did to her, and that he was not the one who murdered her?

A very thought (and anger) provoking episode. I'll give it an A.