The Mysteries of Laura - The Mystery of the Taken Boy - Review

Our favourite red-head detective is back on our scenes and of course her fantastic team. The last time we left them Captain Broderick was in hospital after a gun-shot wound left him fighting for his life, and professing his undying love for Laura and of course forgetting he even told her because of his injuries. After the Captain almost dying, Meredith thought it was the right time to express her emotions towards Billy and kissed him in the middle of the hospital.

Now we are back at the station five months later in a nice quiet working environment, no thanks to their replacement Captain, Captain Santiani or as Laura says Santini. Santiani has made some changes to the work environment including having Frankie transferred back to her original location, so no more county girl naïve humour. Santiani shows no signs for leaving anytime soon even though Broderick comes back from his medical leave early and ready to work.

The team catch a case with a man run down by a Taxi at a playground in the middle of the day. Just before the man got hit he saw the Taxi coming into the park and yelled out for the kids to run out of the way, saving their lives. Broderick and Diamond head over to speak to the family of the victim, Ronald, to find he has left a pregnant fiancé behind. Ronald had been previously in prison for statutory rape, however, it was his fiancé that was the ‘supposed’ rape victim, she was 17 at the time and her father reported the crime because he didn’t approve of Ronald. While Ronald was in prison he picked up a drug habit, however, his fiancé reassures them when he came out and found out she was pregnant he did everything he could to become clean.

Detective Bose and Soto find the stolen Taxi burnt to a crisp but they were able to find a camera and recover the SD card to find images of a boy over a period of time, the same boy Ronald saved from getting hit. This wasn’t just a murder it was an attempted kidnapping.

Broderick and Diamond race over to the house of the boy, Theo, but they don’t make it in time Theo has been kidnapped and the mother is left in tears. The mother, father and sister are devastated about the kidnapping and Laura speaks to the mother and sister about whether anyone would want to kidnap Theo for any reason, however, the mother says Theo is a perfect child even his home birth was perfect, however, he has diabetes and if he doesn’t have his insulin in the next six hours he will go in a diabetic coma.

So against the clock they need to find Theo before it’s too late, they follow a lead from the father talking about an ex-employee that stole money off him, however, the lead doesn’t go anywhere because there is evidence in the companies financials that the father took out $100,000 around the same time as Theo was born. This is when Laura realises that Theo isn’t really their son and they brought him through an illegal adoption. Laura calls the mother in and confronts her about it, at first she denies it but when Laura says Theo doesn’t have much time and it could be his biological parents that kidnapped him she tells Laura the truth.

When they search for both the biological parents they find out that both of them are dead so it can’t be them. Jake and Laura go back to the family home when they find out the kidnappers have call them and said they want $75,000 and no cops involved and they will give Theo back. At the exchange the mother gets upset and opens the motorcycle helmet of one of the kidnappers, this makes the guy run for it and the van around the corner that has Theo drives off and escapes. There is a lot of tension between Captain Santini and Laura because Laura said to go after the van because she knew Theo had to be in there but the captain overruled her decision to go after the man with the motorcycle.

When Jake is interrogating the guy on the motorcycle he makes the mistake of acknowledging Ronald as a drug addict, revealing he knew him and he was a part of the original plan to kidnap Theo, however, when Ronald found out he had a child on the way he turned a new leaf and didn’t want to go along with the plan so they ran him down.

Now because Laura knows the connection has to be with Ronald and the family she realises when speaking to the family previously the sister had long sleeves the whole time when it was very hot in the house and she makes the connection that the sister is a recovering drug addict and she must’ve spoken about her life and semi-wealthy family during rehab group therapy which Ronald had been to. Laura makes the sister think about whether Ronald ever spoke about his time when he was high and a hidden place he used to do it. She remembered a closed down fallout shelter that he used to go to and Laura and her team leave straight away and find the rest of the crew holding Theo and get to him in time to return him back to his loving family.

The episode ends with everyone back at the precinct happy they finally got Theo back home. Captain Broderick steps down as senior detective so he can continue working with his current team rather than leaving to captain another precinct.

This episode, as a whole, was actually pretty good, I like it as a start to the new season and I hope the next episodes get better and better. I would rate this episode a 8 out of 10.