Strings (S)

(Not aired yet)

Week starting January 7th, 1996

Roy Sallows

Don McCutcheon

Joy Tanner as Christie Black & Peter Hutt as Dr. Ben McGee

A woman gets off a bus and starts walking down a city street. Then she is deliberately run down by a car and thrown through a shop window. Mannequins are silent witnesses as the driver gets out of the car and shoots the woman five times. (Okay, I think she's dead now.)

Nick and Tracy arrive on the scene to investigate the case. While they examine the car, Tracy gets an inconvenient call from her father, who wants Tracy to accept a transfer to the corporate crime division. Natalie identifies the murdered woman as Helen Neary. When Nick and Tracy try to notify Helen Neary's son, Matthew Neary, he flees before they can talk to him. Nick and Tracy have a look around Matthew's apartment, and Tracy gets another inopportune call from her meddling father. While Tracy chats with Dad about her impending transfer, Nick flashes back to memories of other family meddlers he knew in the past.

Nick and Tracy call on the dead woman's daughter, Christie Black, a famous singer with serious dependency problems, and an equally serious lack of gray matter. Although she is a famous singer, no one except Tracy seems to know of her. Christie is living with her therapist, Dr. Ben McGee � in his house. Dr. McGee is treating Christie with a combination of drugs and videotape therapy. Childlike and almost in a trance, Christie at first seems unaffected by the news of her mother's death, but then she leaves the house and nearly walks in front of a car. Nick catches up with her and pulls her to safety.

Nick, Tracy and Reese discuss the murder of Helen Neary and decide the prime suspect in the case is Matthew Neary, who is a drug user and apparently had a difficult relationship with his mother. After dismissing Nick, Reese scolds Tracy for not notifying him about her impending transfer. Tracy says she hadn't made a decision herself yet, but apparently her father has made the decision for her.

Nick visits Natalie in the morgue and asks her about Dr. McGee. Natalie attempts to explain competing theories of psychotherapy to Nick. For his part Dr. McGee is quite alarmed at Christie's suicide attempt � after all he doesn't want to lose a goose that lays golden eggs. He regains control of her with a transparently manipulative speech that's so inane it's hard to believe even Christie could fall for it.

A bit later, Nick and Tracy return to Dr. McGee's residence to question him about his treatment approach and to learn what he knows about relationships among the members of Christie's family. While Nick and Tracy wait in the living room, Dr. McGee responds to the doorbell, and becomes the apparent target of an attempted murder. The culprit is Matthew Neary. Nick and Tracy take him into custody. Matthew tells them he was only trying to frighten McGee, who he believes is brainwashing his sister. He denies any involvement in the murder of his mother, Helen Neary.

The next day Tracy begins her new career in forensic accounting. While she's busy rooting out corporate crime, another woman, Christie's business manager, is murdered. This time we see the killer � it is Christie herself. Christie then visits her brother at the precinct and kills him too, right under the noses of the police.

Bored with her new job, (and a homicide detective at heart), Tracy decides to look into Christie Black's financial statement instead carrying out her new assignment. Tracy discovers that all those who were murdered had a controlling interest in Christie's music business. And only two people are left: Christie herself, and Dr. McGee. Tracy alerts Nick and joins him at Dr. McGee's. When Dr. McGee doesn't answer the door, Nick forces it open with a flick of his wrist. Nick and Tracy look around for evidence. Nick listens to one of the tapes used in Christie's therapy, and hears a subliminal message which says "This is the person you must shoot." Nick realizes that Christie will kill herself next. While Tracy takes Dr. McGee into custody, Nick flies off to save Christie, arriving just as she has turned her gun on herself. Nick puts the whammy on Christie to counteract the conditioning Dr. McGee used to control her.

At the epilogue, we learn that Christie is getting better � somehow. (But a brain transplant seems the only thing that could help.) Tracy's cell phone rings yet again. It's Dad. But this time Tracy finally seems to begin to stand up to her overbearing father.

The flashbacks were to Russia under Czar Nicholas II, just before the revolution. We all thought little Alexis was a hemophiliac, but it turns out he was actually a victim of the vampire Rasputin. Rasputin used the power of the whammy to control the Czarina, so he could sip from the czarevich. Nick tries to interfere, but fails in an attempt to out-whammy Rasputin. Lacroix, master of control and manipulation, does not waste the opportunity to have some fun of his own. (And guess who brought Rasputin across, and who was really responsible for the Russian revolution?) Poor Nick is left to clean up the mess and in doing so, exposes himself and loses a friend.

As always, Lacroix gets to make the profound points. This time the lesson is that the feeling we have that tells us we are actually in control over our lives is but an illusion. There's always someone or something else pulling the strings.

This episode is all about dependency and control, manipulators and the manipulated. Dr. McGee has Christie Black on a string, Commissioner Vetter has Tracy on a string, Rasputin has Alexandra on a string, and of course, Lacroix has Nick on a string. This really could have been a great episode, but unfortunately the theme wasn't developed fully. Instead of something we could really sink our intellectual teeth into, there was a collage of unrelated and ultimately unresolved stories which never really explored how people come to be victims and victimizers. (Oh well, they only had an hour after all.) The guest characters were even more poorly developed than the theme. Christie Black is a character without any dimension at all. She's a very far cry from Rebecca of the first season. Not only does Christie not sing, she also has absolutely no brains, which makes it easy for Dr. McGee to manipulate her. And Dr. McGee certainly needs an easy target. He didn't impress me as much of an operator, only a total sleaze. At least the flashbacks were nicely done. The costumes were good, and the liberal use of stage smoke and dramatic camera angles lent an appropriate air of mystery and intrigue to the backstory about the Russian royal family on eve of the revolution. But it's not completely clear why Lacroix had Rasputin shot by a firing squad at the end. Lacroix said it was because Rasputin (his acolyte) had gotten out of control. Perhaps this demonstration was intended as warning to Nick, who also resisted Lacroix's control. If so, then why not really kill Rasputin? Nick correctly observes that as a vampire Rasputin could not be in that way. Lacroix gleefully remarks that the deed "will catalyze events." The question is why? Why should Lacroix care about the Russian Revolution? I always thought he was above politics. I suppose he wanted to deprive Nick of his friend Czar Nicholas. In any case, this episode provides us another example of how masterfully (and sometimes cruelly), Lacroix plays with his favorite toy Nick. And it affords us yet another glimpse of Nick looking confused, surprised, and a little frightened of his smug master, Lacroix.

This is a very good episode for Perkulators, in which Tracy really holds her own, despite her domineering father. Nick is cute as a button in this one, especially in the flashbacks (Knighties), where as always, he just wants to fit in. But of course, Lacroix puts a very quick end to that (Cousins). Lacroix has his own ideas of where Nick should fit in!

Tracy & Nick:	Tracy: "[It] looks a little bit like a hit." Nick: "How many hired killers do you know soften up their victims by ramming them with their cars first?"
Lacroix to Nick:	"Bumping through history again Nicholas?"
Nick to Reese:	"Sounds like his [Commissioners Vetter's] ring to me."

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