Review of Patsy

Law & Order: Patsy (1999)
Season 10, Episode 7
7/10
Ambiguous.
10 January 2013
Warning: Spoilers
A young woman is found in a coma, shot up with a substance to which she is allergic. Chief suspect, the pinched-faced Sebastian Roché who first denies knowing the victim and then claims she'd been harassing him because she blamed him for the murder of her sister. Roché isn't a stereotypical big brute. He has a small frame. But he also has an explosive temper, which he demonstrates for the detectives and the DA's crew from time to time.

Roché's lawyer is James Rebhorn, always reliable as a tall, bony accountant or executive or something. He does quite well in this episode. When balked, he's convincingly stumped. But Rebhorn develops this wild theory that one sister murdered the other and then framed Roché for both crimes -- the original murder, for which the body hasn't yet been found, and the injection that sent the second sister into an apparently irreversible coma. The way in which Rebhorn argues the frame was constructed include the transfer of semen by means that my morality prohibits me from describing here. It's true that I have no principles whatever, but they're very firm.

The plot is complicated and at times you have to put some effort into grasping the machinations involved. All the time, you keep thinking that Roché MUST have done it all because he looks and acts like exactly the kind of swine who WOULD do it. Yet this inconclusive evidence keeps cropping up once in a while -- a hair here, a whore there -- indicating that in fact Rebhorn's crazy theory may be true. Maybe the surviving sister, the one now in a coma, actually DID murder her own sister and turn herself into a vegetable just in order to put Roché behind bars for good. If so, she succeeded. What makes the episode more interesting than some is that we'll never know.
23 out of 25 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed