When you’re right, you’re right.
Danny pulled out all the stops to catch a serial rapist on Blue Bloods Season 11 Episode 4, regardless of whether he was violating anyone’s rights.
His decisions led to saving a woman from becoming the perp’s latest victim, but did that justify Danny’s choices?
It would have helped to know why Danny was so convinced of Strand’s guilt.
The perp’s car resembled the one used in the attack, but that wasn’t proof positive. Strand claimed to be delivering prescriptions that night, and the ride-share company said that a rogue operator had disguised himself as one of their employees.
So Danny was left mostly with his gut feeling rather than any evidence, and that’s why he had to resort to desperate measures to prove his case.
That included two things that were not quite legal: the GPS tracker and the interrogation session.
Fortunately, Danny didn’t lose his temper or physically threaten Strand; he just questioned him and got nowhere.
I had more of a problem with the GPS tracker, mostly because it didn’t seem necessary.
Couldn’t Danny have set up a sting without that? He could have had patrol cars in the area that Strand usually frequented and had Baez or another female cop pose as someone wanting a ride.
All are totally legal and above-board, without installing GPS trackers without a warrant, so his case doesn’t get thrown out in court.
Of course, Strand turned out to be one step ahead of Danny and already had another girl tied up in the back seat by the time Danny set up his undercover operation. In a way, I was disappointed.
I didn’t like Danny’s decision to focus exclusively on this suspect to turn out to be justified, especially since some of his investigative techniques were illegal.
I would have loved for Erin to tear into him about how his choices made her job harder as usual, but she was too busy with her own case.
Erin: It all comes to: should a guy be judged by his best day, or by his worst?
Anthony: Every bad guy did something good sometime. Just cause he did something good doesn’t mean he gets a pass on the bad stuff.
I’m not usually a huge fan of Erin’s storylines, but this one presented an interesting dilemma even if it was slightly contrived.
What were the odds that the same guy who got drunk and killed a child in a car accident would save a bunch of other kids from a knife-wielding maniac?
The perp with the knife sounded so drunk and out of it that when Anthony said Farmer was involved, I was expecting him to be the bad guy!
But he wasn’t, leaving Erin with a philosophical question that could deeply impact people’s lives: did the children’s lives he saved at risk to his own make up for the one he took?
Nothing can replace a life once it’s snuffed out, of course. No matter how many children Farmer saved, Diane Brooks’ daughter was still dead and always would be.
But Erin had a point. Farmer was guilty of a crime that had tragic consequences, yet he wasn’t a bad person.
There’s a reason that usually, sentencing recommendations are left up to the legal system. Victims sometimes confuse justice with vengeance. The impact of the crime on the victim is one aspect judges should consider, but it’s not the only factor in a fair sentence.
Even if the justice system was based more on making amends and less on punishment, Farmer had no real way to make amends here, and he knew that. I wonder what compromise Erin, the perp, and the victim’s mother came up with that they could all live with.
As for Frank’s dilemma, it seemed silly to presume that a detective in a wheelchair couldn’t do any in-the-field work at all.
Sure, there was always the chance that a perp could be hiding at a crime scene.
But anyone who’s ever watched a crime drama knows, most of the time, patrol officers have cleared the scene and identified witnesses. There was no reason a detective in a wheelchair could not investigate under those circumstances.
You’ll be the first. Make it work so others can follow. Good work, Detective. You just flipped the PC.
Frank
All Frank had to do was require that someone else deem the scene safe before Allison came in to do her investigation. Problem solved.
I liked Allison, though. She was spunky and strong, refusing to back down and continually pressure Frank to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, Jamie and Eddie got involved in a rather lackluster case.
The dead guy that Flores was accused of shooting went by the wayside. The case became about how Flores was taking responsibility for it because he felt guilty about his partner getting attacked, full stop.
Jamie’s insistence that Flores was getting himself in trouble by not talking to IAB didn’t make much sense, either. Defense lawyers often instruct their clients not to talk to the police for the simple reason that if you don’t tell the cops anything, they can’t use your words against you.
As a lawyer, Jamie should have known that, and it sounded like the cops’ entire case against Flores was that he expressed a desire to kill the person who shot his partner.
It’s not like there was forensic evidence unless I missed something. IAB had no case at all, which meant that Flores was smart not to talk to them in this situation.
Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter since Jamie figured out that Flores wasn’t at the scene when Gordon was shot and convinced him to stop punishing himself for it. Maybe the implication was that since Flores wasn’t there, he couldn’t have known who shot at his partner, but it seemed that the writers forgot about that case altogether.
Your turn, Blue Bloods fanatics! What did you think of the hard decisions several of the Reagans made? Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know!
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Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.