Major Crimes - Party Foul - Review - "No Romeo"

3.12 - "Party Foul"

Major Crimes returned last week from its midseason hiatus, and continues on this week, with another fairly simple but effective procedural episode. This time around, a young couple is brutally stabbed in the middle of an underage and unsupervised birthday party. Meanwhile, Rusty contemplates his future and whether to immediately jump into college during the upcoming winter semester.

"Happy Birthday, Chip!"

In a large house, we see the sweeping shots of a 'happening' party taking place, where dozens of high school-aged friends of over-privileged, and under-supervised Chip Olsen are having the time of their lives. Chip makes the rounds to check on his partygoers, and all seems well until his friend Toby stumbles out of the garage with multiple stab wounds and falls dramatically to the ground in the hallway, proceeding to bleed out in front of Chip and his other guests. This puts a dampening on the festivities as the horde of teens bolt from the house. Chip runs into the garage to find a trail of blood leading to Toby's girlfriend, Keisha, who is on the ground, with a pair of scissors sticking out of her chest. Toby dies before anyone is even called, but Keisha is taken to the hospital and goes into surgery to help stabilize her after the attack.

The Major Crimes team brings Chip in immediately for questioning, but he insists that these were his good friends that were attacked, and he wants to see the attacker brought to justice just as quickly as any of the officers there. When pressed for who might have attacked Toby and Keisha, Chip quickly points them to Wesley Grant. Wesley has had a thing for Keisha for years it seems, but he never quite took the hint (either in person, or through extensive texting and emailing over time, as Lt. Tao came to find out later) that she wasn't interested. It immediately painted him as a possible predator, but they had no way of locating him.

Chip continued to give more insight into what had happened that night, and mentioned the security footage of him kicking Wesley out of his house after he got very drunk and doing his best to get to Toby and Keisha to break them up. There was a drunken tiff between Wesley and Chip before Wesley left, and the whole thing made it much more likely that he was the attacker. By this point, as a trained and experienced procedural cop show viewer, I knew that it would never, in 100 million years be Wesley who killed Toby and stabbed Keisha.

During Chip's interview, his parents meandered in from a couple's therapy retreat, and immediately started annoying everyone with their obvious lack of regard for their family unit (who the hell leaves a troubled teenager alone on his birthday? They deserved to have their house trashed in a birthday bash!) and then went on to look at some of the video evidence that was recorded in their home after the murder in their house. Mr. Olsen immediately noticed his golf clubs were missing from the garage, and traced them with his phone to the very hospital at which Keisha was staying.

Lt. Provenza had spent the morning at the hospital, with Keisha's only family member, her grandmother Patrice. Patrice, played terrifically by Dawnn Lewis, from her first appearance stole the scenes in which she took part. She had worked in the ER before retiring, and her (deceased?) husband was a police officer, so while she was terribly worried for her granddaughter, she also had a resolute focus, and a calm demeanor where typically most parents would have been a mess. She also did a fair amount of manipulation, as she kept knowledge of Keisha's wound from Provenza, had him zero in on Wesley by drawing Wesley out with an email, and kept Keisha from speaking with Provenza as long as she could. It started to seem like she was involved in the attack somehow, but there was more to dig into yet.

"Has she made it to crazy yet?"

After finding Wesley at the hospital, they bring him in for questioning, where he refutes all the evidence against him. He argued that her boyfriend Toby was no good for her, and that he could've been more to her.

He comes off like a crazed stalker at first, but reasoning follows as well: First, he claims  Chip had a thing for Keisha as well, and he did his best to put Wesley out of the running for her attention by doping him up and getting him drunk, only to provoke him into humiliating himself in front of everyone. He sneaked in and stole the golf clubs from the garage to get Chip into trouble with his parents, and then passed out in his car a couple blocks away. Having all of this evidence made it more and more likely that Toby's killer was actually Keisha herself.

With help from Patrice, Provenza and Sharon convinced Keisha that she was dying and they were going to charge Wesley Grant with a count of 2 murder charges, and asked if they were right. In another room, D.D.A Hobbs (with her usual quips and dry humor) comment that if they're going to get Keisha what they agreed to for Patrice's cooperation, Keisha needs to come across as more crazed, and less calculated in her attack. Keisha ends up gushing about some sort of promise they made each other, much like Romeo and Juliet, and that she would have done anything to keep her and Toby together forever. Hobbs is more than satisfied by her display of insanity, and says that testimony will likely land her in a psychiatric facility as Patrice was hoping for, instead of a jail sentence, given her suicidal state.

Provenza attempts to woo and comfort Patrice in the wake of her granddaughter trying to kill herself after murdering her boyfriend, and to some extent succeeds through reminding her that she did her very best, but others make decisions on their own as well. She cries on his shoulder as they exit the scene. (I really hope to see more of that dynamic between those two!)

"That's what real stability means, Rusty."

Rusty's story was relegated to the background mostly in this episode. He comes in really late from a shoot on the tv show that he's helping on, and mentions that someone he's rather enamored with, named Jeff, said it'd be great to have Rusty stay working on the show until May, when the season ended.

Sharon exploits Tao's connection to the show to get this Jeff individual to possibly help shift Rusty's thoughts back to not skipping a semester of school for an internship that may have run its course by then. By the end of the episode, Rusty is making efforts to start in the winter again, and says that Jeff said something along the lines of not working on the show doesn't mean that they stop being friends, and he'd be crazy to put off going to school. Sharon knowingly takes it in with a glass of wine, as she has somehow worked a deal out both at home and at work that kept things on track for the day. Good job, Sharon.

Sidenotes:

- They made an awful big deal about telling Toby's family about his murder only to never actually contact his family at all this episode... Does that not seem rather strange to you?

- After all the buildup of seeing people vilify Wesley, he had a decent "speech" of his own about not being Romeo, which was to say, he wouldn't be as flippant in his love for a person than to dismiss it when seeing another pretty face. He was still pretty damn stalkerish, but his fervor paled in comparison to what Keisha had going on.

- Ok, I'm intrigued to see who this Jeff fellow is, and I wonder if they will ever bring that character into the show. The age gap between Jeff (25) and Rusty (18) made me think it's a one-sided situation to an extent, you know?

- Dr. Provenza was easily one of my favorite parts of the episode. He played the glib doctor role so well, that even I didn't see Wesley's arrest coming!

- Chip's parents' relationship was more depressing than watching the opening murder sequence. When your relationship's detriment is more depressing than murder, you neglecting your brat of a son on his birthday weekend is isn't going to be helping anything anytime soon. (These people, I swear...)

What did you think of this week's episode? Start a discussion below in the comments!

About the Author - Wilson Crawford

Wilson is an avid fan of television, music, and the occasional video game. He enjoys well-written, thought-provoking characters and series that get better with age. Current favorites include The Good Wife and Mad Men. Past favorites include Damages, Fringe, Breaking Bad, 30 Rock, and Veronica Mars.

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