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“You couldn’t handle a desperate housewife. Believe me.”
- Megan
I want to start off by saying I’m not sure if the first batch of episodes are the “lost” five episodes from season 1’s 13 or not, but it definitely felt like we were following straight from where we ended last season. Anyway, I’m excited to be back blogging this fun show.
We begin in the woods in the very early morning, and we see a young girl looking really nervous. It turns out she’s waiting for her boyfriend to show up. He almost didn’t make it because his dad nearly caught him sneaking out. They have about two seconds to share a kiss before a car comes racing over the nearby embankment and straight at them. They dive out of the way just as the car smashes into a tree. Cut to later in the morning as Megan arrives to take Lacey to school. Megan’s ex-husband, Todd, needs Megan to drop Lacy off because he’s got a deposition. Megan seems thrilled to get to spend some time with her daughter until Kate walks out the front door. The two share very tense “good mornings” before Kate and Todd leave. I sort of don’t blame Megan. We get an interesting little beat with Megan and Lacey, and Lacey declines breakfast in order to study for a test since she couldn’t study the night before. The walls are too thin. Megan starts to panic a little until Lacey elaborates that she could hear the TV in the living room.
At the crash site, Megan finds Peter waiting for her. They examine the body as Bud and Sam show up (I’m glad we have them back as partners. Having just one or the other in episodes was a little dull). They discover a cell phone that fell out of the car as the EMTs tried to get to the driver, Daniel Davidson. Megan has her own phone troubles as she drops it in a puddle while trying to answer a call from her mother. It also turns out that there are no injuries consistent with Daniel being conscious when the car went over. In other words, someone subdued him and then pushed his car over the embankment.
Back at the lab, Kate is wandering around the with a schematic of a mass spectrometer when Curtis notices. Poor Curtis, he’s going to be in for a tough time this week. He starts to freak out since the new equipment costs his entire budget, but Kate assures him that she bought it with grant money. Curtis makes the comment that at least she’s in bed with the right people and Megan takes the chance to make a snarky comment about it. I like the tension between the two of them, but I really hope it gets resolved soon. Down in autopsy, Megan tasks Ethan with fixing her phone. Too bad he’s got no clue how to fix it and spends a few minutes very comically trying and nearly breaking it. Megan notices some restraint marks on Daniel’s wrists plus a splinter in his arm and a red fiber in his nose. So it’s off to talk to the grieving widow.
It turns out Daniel lives on a cul-de-sac, and we get a sort of iconic pan around of the people going about their business; one guy is fixing his motorcycle, another is watering his lawn. We don’t learn much from the widow, other than they were married sixteen years and he was a CPA. Megan is immediately suspicious of the neighbors given what kind of secrets such communities hold. While I’m not a fan of “Desperate Housewives” (I only saw one or two episodes) I loved the references and little nods to Dana Delany’s previous claim to fame. Just as Bud and Sam drive off, Megan notices Peter flirting with one of the women in the neighborhood. She calls him on it in a sort of brother-sister way which I thought was cute. The cuteness ends when Megan spots a broken white picket fence. And said fence has blood on it. So we’ve got the answer to one of Daniel’s injuries. Turns out he had a fight with one of his neighbors (played by Eliza Dushku’s boyfriend Rick Fox). The neighbor accused Daniel of poisoning his dog.
Back at the lab, Kate is looking for Megan and ends up putting Curtis in the middle of everything. Megan shows up not two minutes after Kate heads up in the elevator, and Curtis comments that it’s like a tele-novella and no one survives. It turns out Kate needed to tell Megan that Lacey was sick at school. Since she can’t get in touch, however, Kate ends up getting Lacey herself. It’s quite obvious Kate is really uncomfortable with the parent-like role she’s had to play. Meanwhile, this season we get to see more of the police precinct. Bud has found glove impressions on the back of the car and a fancy key in the driver seat. Sam discovered an unsent text message to a woman named Vicky, one of Daniel’s neighbors. And the plot thickens. Megan gets a chance to bitch a little about her dislike of Todd and Kate being together when Peter shows up to ask about cause of death. Megan says it was a result of the car crash. She’s concerned about his brain though. It was discolored and shows signs of a disease that would only be present with a weakened immune system. And Peter rules out organ transplant and cancer. The only other possibility is that he’s HIV positive.
Bud and Sam head back to the cul-de-sac to talk to Vicky, but it gets interrupted pretty quickly by her husband, Bill. Before Bill can throw them out, Bud discovers the key found in Daniel’s car goes to the locked cabinet in Vicky and Bill’s bedroom, containing all manner of bondage gear. Yeah, they went there. Creepy. And the creep factor (and the fascination with alternative lifestyles) continues when Bill reveals most of the community was into partner swapping. And Vicky had a relationship with Daniel. But Bill denies that Daniel could have been HIV positive because everyone got tested frequently. The lifestyle wasn’t all rosy for everyone. One of the neighbors, Kevin, lost his wife and kids because of the set up. Vicky admits that Daniel was with her until 4:45 that morning, approximately 15 minutes before the car went off the road. But he wasn’t really into the swapping thing anymore. He claimed it had consequences.
As usual, Curtis comes to Ethan’s aid when he can’t figure out how to fix Megan’s phone. Curtis stuck it in some rice, which absorbs the liquid. Good job Curtis! He also finds the restraints used to tie up Daniel in Vicky’s trunk of bondage gear. Just as Megan turns on her phone, she sees a missed message from Lacey and races off. She’s rather pissed that Kate didn’t try harder to get in touch. I have to say though, it’s not all Kate’s fault. If Megan hadn’t been so bitchy, she would have gotten the message and could have picked up Lacey herself.
The next morning, Ethan greets Megan with the news that Daniel didn’t have HIV or any other immune-suppressive disease and that he was knocked out with brake cleaner. So she and Peter head back to the row of unusual suspects to talk to Kevin, the guy who’d’ been working on his motorcycle the day before. They don’t find anything suspicious in his garage, though. He admits he had been seeing Daniel’s wife, Andrea, and that his wife realized before he did that he had feelings. So she left. Megan wants to understand the whole culture but stops herself from asking because it would be too weird. Peter and Megan call Sam and Bud to share the latest intel, and they discover that Andrea took out an advance of $15,000 on her credit card. So the new theory is she hired someone to kill her husband.
The gang brings Andrea in for questioning, but she says she didn’t hire a hit man. She took the money out to put as a down payment on a new time share condo on an island near Bermuda. She wanted to go there so she could rekindle her relationship with Daniel. But he got pissed when he found out about the money. Apparently, Vicky was the one touting this new condo set up and that she was having a presentation at her house. Megan offers to go to see what it’s all about since Bud and Sam don’t have a shot in hell of getting back in. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a horrible scam. Megan shoots it down pretty quickly. There is no island. It’s more of a landfill and it’s not near Bermuda, but in the Bermuda Triangle. She clears the group out pretty fast and demands Vicky return all the money. But it’s not the only thing going on. She notices all the women crying for no reason and Peter points out that Megan’s crying. Megan snags a few tears in an evidence vial and even though it comes back as negative, it’s a pH of 4. Something changed the pH levels in their mucus membranes. It’s time for Megan to take another look at Daniel’s brain slides. It turns out he was suffering from toxins found in paint thinners, acrylics and many other things.
Megan and Kate also butt heads over Lacey. Megan shares a moment when she felt like Lacey’s hero and that she’s only disappointed her daughter ever since. Kate doesn’t want to be caught up in the family drama. Meanwhile, Bud, Sam and a whole mess of cops head back to the cul-de-sac to evacuate everyone since whatever was affecting Daniel was in the whole town’s air and soil. They spot some funky flowers in Kevin’s yard. Kevin’s been cooking meth and Daniel found out. Kevin started cooking it after his wife left to try and get enough money to get him out of the hole he was in. Daniel found out and Kevin killed him to keep from losing anything else.
It looks like Peter’s hooking up with the cul-de-sac chick he’s been flirting with, and when Ethan says he wants to get in on the action, Megan says he couldn’t handle that kind of neighborhood. That night, Megan stops by to check up on Lacey. Megan correctly points out that Lacey wasn’t really sick. Lacey admits she wanted to miss her science test because she knew she was going to fail and she didn’t want to disappoint her mother. She likes art (and is pretty good) and Megan assures Lacey that she can never be a disappointment.
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