Premierewatch: 'Saving Grace' gets complicated

Saving Grace returns, and it's just as heartbreaking, triumphant, revelatory and horrifying as I remembered. I was alternately squicked out and fascinated during the episode. This is seriously messed-up, seriously brilliant television.

This spoiler wants a juicy steak.

When we last saw Grace, she was pointing a gun at pedophile Father Murphy's head and reeling from the revelation that Ear was his last-chance angel, too. So it's deeply disconcerting when we open on a bright, sunny day, with Grace happily bopping down the street to meet Rhetta for coffee. Is this a good sign? A bad sign? What the hell is going on?

Rhetta is just as confused as we are, but Grace won't answer any questions. She's distracted by a sketchy guy who sets her cop-senses tingling. Rhetta thinks Grace is just avoiding the issue, but it turns out Grace was onto something -- Sketchy Guy attempts a carjacking. Grace runs out into traffic and gunfire to chase the guy while Rhetta radios for help. Grace and police dog Reilly bring the guy down. Turns out the guy is number six on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Grace is hailed as a hero, but she deflects the attention to Reilly, who is struggling for life.

Things get weird when a woman comes forward claiming she saw Grace doing tequila shots at a bar just before the shooting. Internal Affairs suspends Grace pending investigation. Grace has an alibi, she just can't quite share it -- it's Father Murphy, who she has bound and gagged and rolled up in a carpet at home. Eep.

The Grace/Father Murphy scenes are downright disturbing. He's helpless, and he begs to die for what he'd done, but Grace keeps him alive to torture him in the most bizarre ways -- feeding him ice-cream sundaes (something he used to do post-sex), making him watch Miracle on 34th Street, dancing and cavorting around him. It's deeply unhinged. It's almost a relief when she switches to conventional torture techniques, like draping raw steak across his lap while her dog drools. When she starts coating the entire room with plastic, you know things are bad. But she can't bring herself to kill him. In the end, she drags him into the station, saying she wants him prosecuted for the abuse.

The squad tries to track down Murphy's other victims, with varying degrees of success. One victim's father, Mr. Williams, knew about -- and stopped -- the abuse, while another man, Russ Ford, refuses to acknowledge he was one of Murphy's victims. Then Murphy turns up dead behind the site of the ice cream shop where he used to take his victims. Williams didn't know about the shop, so he's out. Ford claims he knew nothing, but Grace takes him aside, tells him he did a good thing, and tells him to leave town. Justice served, right?

Here's where things get horrible: Ford's fiancée shows up at the police station the next day, saying she just discovered Ford molested her 11-year-old daughter. Ford has locked himself in his house, and he shoots himself when the police arrive. The sins of the Father lived on through his victim, and another generation of victims was born. Grace falls into Earls arms, sobbing and apologizing for not realizing what was happening. Oof.

Highlights, thoughts and odds and ends

• The entire town rallies around Reilly, the injured police dog, and it's alternately heartening and horrifying. On the one hand, the dog deserves all the praise and prayers that he's getting -- he's a true innocent who was just hurt doing his job. On the other hand, it's depressing how a town can spend so much time fixated on one wounded animal while countless humans continue to be raped and abused and wounded and killed, and no one seems to care.
• Grace getting the hero's welcome -- literally -- when she returns to the police station is kind of awesome. She gets a red capes and the guys swoop her around the office like Superman. It's incredibly sweet.
• That makes the next time she shows up at the office that much more heartrending -- there's hero Grace, bringing in the man who made her life hell, and matter-of-factly detailing the abuse and degradation she lived through while her colleagues look on in amazement and horror.
• Possibly the most horrifying moment of the whole episode: Grace's mom asks Grace about Father Murphy, and why people are saying he was a child molester. "Because he was," Grace says. Her mother hardly blinks: "Please be careful honey," she says. "The church has been through so much." That is officially the incorrect response. All of a sudden, Grace's manifold messed-uppedness makes so much more sense.
• Speaking of Grace's damage: Deanne, the woman who told IA that Grace was drunk when she was involved in the shoot-out, turns out to be an old friend of Paige's. She blames Grace for Paige's death -- if Grace hadn't skipped babysitting because she was hung-over, Paige would be alive today. Grace looks like she agrees.
• Rhetta continues her reign of awesome, whether she's telling Grace's brother Jimmy how much she naively envied Father Murphy's attention on Grace, to telling Ham to stop freaking out and just be Grace's friend. But my favorite moment was this little exchange: Grace asks if Rhetta would have let her borrow the minivan so she could bury Father Murphy's body. No, Rhetta says. "I was going to wrap him in plastic so I wouldn't transfer evidence!" Grace protests. "Thoughtful!" Rhetta responds, but no.
• Grace lobbies to be let in on the Father Murphy murder investigation. Why would you possibly want to track down the killer, asks Captain Perry? "First, to thank him," says grace. "Second, it's my job. Third, I understand him." That last bit is what completely destroys Grace when she realize what Ford has done.

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