Next of Kin

In last night’s two-hour episode of The Closer, we saw Deputy Chief Johnson forced, though a tangled and twisted mesh of farcical devices, into a decision with the most grave of consequences.

Beginning with the obligatory nod to holiday spirit and family, as Brenda and Fritz try to decorate their house for the holidays as a means of giving it the appearance of familial bliss which would attract potential buyers. Brenda, for her part, was unhappy with being forced into being “festive”, and as it would continue to do throughout the episode, the questions being raised had to do with lies. And specifically, lies in connection to family.

Our mystery begins with a armored car hold up gone wrong, with two dead guards and a third who had only been injured who quickly disappeared from the hospital and went on the run. In searching for their suspect, Brenda and her team instead find in his apartment, instead find his younger brother, hiding and frightened. Using her southern charm to connect with the boy’s southern roots, Brenda gets the information out of him that his brother has headed back down to Georgia. And so, with Fritz in tow, Brenda heads down for a holiday with her family which is really nothing more than a trip to pick up her suspect.

Finding him, however, turns out to be the easy part. Having to contend with local police as unhelpful as the Los Angeles cops were upon her initial arrival from the south, Brenda takes the suspect into a more personal custody, having to house him in her parents’ overly decorated house even as he does everything he can imagine to make keeping hold of him difficult.

But playing against the mystery is Brenda’s own dysfunctional connection with her family. As the antithesis of her own, only decorated because she had been forced to do so, home, the home of Brenda’s parents is busting at the seams with the trappings of holiday cheer. Excited when they believe their prodigal child wanted to spend Christmas with them, they had cancelled plans to celebrate with their other children and their families only to find that Brenda had lied about the reason for her visit. Feeling guilty for her deception, Brenda attempts to extradite her suspect another way, only to have Lts Flynn and Provenza prevented from flying him back by his continued resistance (yelling “I have a bomb!” in an airport is a good way to get out of flying anywhere) and eventually the un-merry band wind up road-tripping across the country in the Johnson’s RV, with the continual trouble of the suspect plaguing them until Brenda makes a pivotal decision. Having previously kept the suspect from being able to speak with his brother as a means of trying to lure him into talking to her, Brenda changes tactics, instead telling the man that his brother had been killed by the men responsible for the original robbery. She describes a horrible death, using it to break his will to escape and milk his emotions and guilt in order to obtain his cooperation with trying to find them.

To complete the deception, she goes so far as to have a crime scene faked, looking the suspect in the eye and feigning sympathy even as she is manipulating him through the one piece of leverage she possesses, his love for his brother.

The questions raised by Brenda’s decision aren’t as simple as right and wrong. Aside from his emotions, she was trying to keep the suspect and his brother safe, catching the men who would have threatened them and whether or not the ends justify the means can be mitigated by the man’s extremely contentious behavior during his captivity. And yet, the question of truth and deception as it pertains to family is the much more complicated issue.

In an episode filled with lies, all types and degrees, the ultimate truth is that sometimes lies are necessary. As cold and brutal as Brenda’s twisting the knife in her suspect’s heart to obtain his cooperation by telling him of his brother’s death, in the end, after the suspect has realized the truth, still seeking vengeance against his former co-conspirators in order to keep Brenda’s lie from becoming prophetic, and getting himself killed in the process, it is the antithetical lie that must be told which truly defines this episode. Having lied about one brother’s death, Brenda in the end must face lying about the other brother’s life. At the request of her father, who had made the journey not knowing of the original deception, Brenda must come full circle from lying in order to hurt and cow the elder brother, to lying in order to spare the younger from the pain of finding out the truth. Instead, it allowed him to hold on to a more basic truth, that in the end his brother had been willing to sacrifice everything in order to save him, deserving to be remembered as the hero his younger brother would believe him to be.

Both of them are about artifice, just as the simple decorations in Brenda’s house were a reflection of sorts, contrasted with rigid expectation of merriment crammed into every corner and flat surface of her parent’s house. Is a pragmatic reason for telling a lie less valid than an emotional one? Perhaps the emotional lie is simply more palatable, dressed up with pretty decorations and more secure in its good intentions. The pragmatic lie is Brenda’s world, where to do her job she must delve into the minds and hearts of the criminals. In order to be the Closer, she must be so very good at lying it gives her an unfailing knack for getting people to tell the truth.

However, the much deeper question is what toll those lies take on Brenda. Lying to her parents about the reason for her trip was instinctual for her, as her knack for deception in order to get what she wants out of people can so easily be blurred into deception in order to try and give people what she believes they want. Her parent’s ability to accept the deeper truth about Brenda, herself. That no matter her methods, at her heart she does have good intentions. And the twisted roads she’s become so familiar with are a burden she accepts in order to use the talents she posses.