Southland - Underwater

Lucy Liu’s Jessica Tang is still around, even though it still says “guest star” in the credits. How long will she be on the show, we wonder? And yet, we are too lazy to try to look it up. We are as lazy as Tang. Lydia Adams’ new partner, Reuben, is also still around, and we find him boring and forgettable. We’re surprised we know his name. We didn’t catch it last week.

Tang, Cooper, Dewey, Rueben, and Lydia find a handbag with a severed arm still attached to the handle. Nice. Inside the purse is I.D. for a rich woman named “Meredith Williams.” Tang and Cooper are to notify the husband. When Mr. Williams is told of his wife’s demise, he laughs and the house’s butler says, “The witch is dead” in Spanish. The entire house seems to celebrate and the cops, weirded out, walk away. Lydia and Rueben look for the man who ran down Meredith Williams and find him in his garage. He had a few to drink the night before and though he hit a coyote. Oops! Also, how drunk do you have to be to think a person is a coyote or to not check. He is put under arrest, which is good, because if you are THAT drunk and you even consider driving, you deserve what you get.

Lydia and her boring partner are then called to investigate a homicide that occurred in a convenience store. The victim was a prison snitch named Mac Logan. He was a key witness against a man named Darrell Miller who spent 22 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. He was released when DNA evidence exonerated him. Lydia and Rueben go to Miller’s house, where he is uncooperative. When Miller leaves, they knock again and are admitted into the residence by Miller’s grandma, who has dementia. Wildly illegal. They find the evidence they need though. Rueben thinks Miller’s victim got what he deserved for getting an innocent man sent to prison and wonders if he and Lydia should just toss the evidence against Miller. Lydia disagrees. Hey, Rueben, just tell the court about how you guys got the evidence without knowing consent to search the house, and Miller will get off without you breaking any rules.

Cooper tries to find out about Tang’s personal life, but she is tight-lipped. Tang has to be the laziest cop on this show. Last week, she spent the day trying to get food from a taco truck. This week, she sees a naked jogger and, rather than arresting him, tells him that he can’t run around here, but he can run down the freeway. That way he will be busted by highway patrol and she won’t have to do it. Nice one, Tang. Jeez. Karma hits when Cooper and Tang spot a man running down the street, fully on fire. You give up an easy, disgusting case and you get a hard, disgusting case. Let that be a lesson to Tang. Also, the man got caught on fire while he was in a porn shop, so Tang had to go in there and investigate. Ha. We kind of like Tang though, laziness aside.

Sammy has a pool party attended by Ben, shirtless. Ben makes out with a cute female cop. Another cop comments that white boys get the hottest girls. Well…ok then. That was a random and weirdly racist comment. Ben and Sammy have a new captain, Captain Rucker, who is played by Carl Lumbly, Sidney’s partner on Alias. Hell yeah. His policy is that the cops will be hard-asses, cleaning up the streets, and for every mistake they make, they will have to fill out one line of a McDonalds application. He hands these applications out. We feel bad for all the people who work hard for a LIVING at McDonalds and get this crap from everywhere.

Ben’s sweet side is not on display as much in this episode, and we don’t like it. We guess it’s good to have a rounded character, but it’s weird to see Ben act like a saint last week and a horn-dog who punches women in the face this week. We’ll get to that… Anyway, Ben teases a female officer and Sammy suggests that he just ask for her number. Ben says the middle-school method is more fun. The sweet side makes a brief comeback when Sammy and Ben bust an underage hooker with a crack pipe. Sammy’s plan is to turn her into a C.I. so the cops can use her and Ben’s is to call social services or something and get her out of “the life.” Sammy names Ben “Captain Save-a-Ho” and the hooker lets them know where she got the drugs. We guess Sammy won that one.

They arrest the people at the stash house. There was a little drama where one of the suspects escaped, and that ends with Ben yelling at a woman for letting the suspect hide in her house. He’s all, “See if we ever answer a call down here again!” and the woman responds with, “No one asks you to come down here.” It almost gets ugly, but Sammy pulls Ben away.

We find out later that Ben is starting to get jaded. He says, “I wanted to make a difference. You know it's funny, I used to think about how these kids grew up. No parents, drug abuse, hungry. [Now] I ain't a social worker.” We hope Ben finds a happy medium between wide-eyed, too-trusting softy and the a-hole he’s becoming now. Next, he and his colleagues deal with a crazy cat lady and we have no time to go into that. There are just too many cases and incidences in one episode. It’s The Vampire Diaries of cop shows.

Ben and Sammy have to shut down a dance party in a parking lot when the property owner calls police to evict the hooligans. One of the teens girls pushes Ben, so he has to arrest her for putting her hands on a police officer. Her friend starts defending her, slapping Ben and then spitting in his face. Wow that is a) a good friend and b) a dumb friend. Ben punches her in the face. We were taught that men shouldn’t hit women, but we would have hit this bitch too. It was a huge overreaction and both Ben’s captain and Sammy chastised him for it. And that girl cop Ben was teasing? She handed him a McDonald's application. Zing. We guess. This episode brought a lot more humor than usual.

In other news, Dewey is a chubby chaser. 

Episode grade: B