'The Closer' premiere: Details matter

Brenda Leigh and the whole crew (with one exception) are back with "The Closer," taking on the heartbreaking case of a family slaughtered in their own home. Plus, Provenza's in a snit, Kitty's in bad way, Ramos is in the house, and Brenda's in a pepto-pink trench coat. Sigh.

Two women and two children are shot, execution style, in a lovely family home. The mom, grandma and daughter were covered by a blanket, while the son looks like he tried to make a run for it and was mowed down. The main suspect: the father, Victor Rivera, who was conveniently missing from this scene of carnage. He left the house at around the time the crime was committed, and he has a criminal record for domestic violence.

But Victor is either innocent or a great actor -- he nearly tears his heart out when he discovers his wife, kids and mother-in-law are dead. Still, Brenda seems to like him for the perp. She and Sanchez escort him to a hotel room that has been bugged (in a makeshift fashion -- the LAPD apparently has cut its technology budget), and try to get him to confess. Which he does -- to having an affair. Not what Brenda wanted to hear. The former mistress refuses to believe Victor could have done it -- he loved those kids, even making sure no candy or soda was in the house!

Which is curious, because there was a box of band candy in the house. What's more, it's from a school that the Rivera kids did not attend. Also curious: It's far too easy to end up at the wrong address. See, there's a 26th Street (where the Rivera's lived) and a 26th Place, two blocks away. On a hunch, Brenda tries to talk to the resident at the address on 26th Place, but a black SUV thunders up and FBI goons drags the kid away before she can ask him anything. 

Brenda checks with the clearinghouse that coordinates all the ongoing investigations in LA (wow, that sounds like a dangerous trove of information) and discovers the guy at 26th Place is Hector Cruz. Narcotics officer Nick Carey jumps all over Brenda for messing up his case -- we're working on taking down a major drug trafficker, Tavio Baran, and you nearly ruined it for us! He refuses to believe the cases are connected, but Pope, Taylor and Brenda strong-arm him into turning over his evidence on the case. Baran is acting as his own attorney, and therefore gets all he discovery papers. One of those papers, which Nick prepared, accidentally contained Cruz's address. Oof.

So now it looks like a case of mistaken identity -- but how did Baran arrange the hit? The only one he sees is his pregnant girlfriend, Dina, and while hey seemed to talk about a hit, Baran never gave her a name or address. Instead, they seem to spend much of the time breathing heavily at each other and showing their naughty bits. But wait -- heavy breathing = fogged glass, which works as a way to convey info. The girlfriend got the address, but got it wrong. Then she took a box of band candy to the house, posing as a harmless pregnant teen raising money for school. She asked to use the bathroom, then killed the family -- all to get Baran, the father of her child, out of jail. Now both the baby's parents are going to jail.

Highlights, thoughts and odds and ends

• Daniels is conspicuously absent -- although no one mentions anything. I guess she took the promotion, and Gabriel stayed.
• Poor Buzz spends much of his time fighting with the equipment he's given. The video monitors in the interrogation observation room keep fuzzing out, and the mics they use to bug the hotel room don't work at all. Fortunately, Sanchez thinks fast, calls the observation room, and leaves the phone off the hook so they can hear everything.
• They missed a fantastic product placement opportunity in that scene. I want to know what carrier and kind of phone they were using, because no way would that have come through so loud and clear on my phone. Also, whenever I use the suction-cup pickup mic, it invariably falls off the handset in mid-interview.
• This case hit Sanchez hard. When Brenda is fighting to get a confession out of Victor in the hotel room, Sanchez is getting the Gideon bible to give Victor some comfort. In the end, he tells Brenda Victor will be sleeping on his couch for a few days, and he wants to take the day off the attend the funeral. Was this case too similar to the death of his brother?
• Provenza apparently had a bad breakup -- he scoffs about love, bites Gabriel's head off, even snaps at Brenda. Come on, big guy, just write some bad poetry on your LiveJournal and get it all out.
• Ramos is back... and he's once again making journalists look bad. Look, if I were a crime reporter, I'd jump on that telling, touching detail of the girl holding her doll in death, too. But he gets gleeful when he sees Victor lose his lunch on hearing his family is dead, and crows with delight when he realizes no one else is going to get this sort of detail. Look, I work in a newsroom, and we're all about the gallows humor and sometimes ghoulish interest. He just needs to dial it back a bit with these folks, who obviously hate his guts.
• Can cops be sued for malpractice? Because I'm guessing that some sort of wrongful death suit will be filed before the end of the season. Who wants to bet that Sanchez will somehow be involved?
• Something is wrong with Kitty. Brenda is blithely oblivious, but Fritz takes her to the vet. The news isn't good. And that's what really shakes Brenda, more than dead children or a pregnant murderer. Those are things she can catch, or bring to justice. But a sick pet? "Why didn't I know this could happen?"

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