1×01 Reloaded

Directed by: Michael M. Robin
Written by: James Duff
First aired: August 13, 2012

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The inaugural episode of Major Crimes, which aired right after the final episode of its predecessor, The Closer, started out with a series of robberies, committed by a group of veterans. SIS is on the case initially, but hasn’t managed to catch them, yet. Things go south when the gang deviates from their usual MO and people get killed. While the investigation is going on, the team has to come to terms with Captain Raydor as their new boss, and Captain Raydor struggles to gain her new team’s respect and figure out what to do with Rusty Beck, the material witness in their case against Phillip Stroh.

So, how is the beginning of Raydor’s transition into the role of head of Major Crimes handled in the first episode? The Captain has a hard time getting her new team to accept her and work with her (maybe that’s why we’ll later see her famous “work with me, people” sign?). The way the news of her taking over is broken to them – at a crime scene while they’re looking for heavily armed robbers – probably doesn’t help, but considering that she was the head of the Force Investigation Division before her transfer, they were never going to make it easy for her. Her patience in the face of blatant disobedience is remarkable and a clear sign that she doesn’t approve of the way the transfer has been handled – as indicated by her comment to Taylor at the crime scene that they should have waited, and a conversation with him in a later episode where she voices her displeasure once more. Showing up to the crime scene late surely wasn’t a good start, and there is no way organized, by-the-book Raydor would have chosen to do it that way. So yeah, Taylor is back manipulating people and making a mess of things.

The case itself is not particularly remarkable, so I won’t focus on that in my review. What’s much more interesting in this episode is the transition from The Closer to Major Crimes and especially Captain Raydor’s transition from antagonist to protagonist. Full disclosure, though: I never really felt that she was the bad guy. Throughout the seven seasons of The Closer, Brenda Leigh Johnson disregarded rules left, right, and center. Many of those rules exist for reasons that have become even more obvious for the majority of people as more and more cases of police misconduct have found their way into the mainstream media. While I am all for screwing the patriarchy wherever possible, not all rule-breaking serves that purpose. On top of ignoring regulations and quite often suspects’ rights, Brenda is extremely inconsiderate of the needs and feelings of the people around her. I mean, the way she treats her poor husband… I regularly thought that he deserved much better than what he got.
So, no, I do not feel like Sharon Raydor needed to be rehabilitated or made more likable. I felt a connection with her from the first moment she walked on screen, and I liked her much more than Brenda Leigh. In fact, I felt that, in the process of achieving this likability, they might have muted some character traits a little too much, her sarcasm being one of them.

What I love about that first scene is the way Sharon clearly knows from the beginning that springing her transfer on Provenza like that is a bad idea. When Taylor gives Provenza the news, her expression shows such compassion, and the fact that she doesn’t shoot Provenza down immediately for the way he openly disregards her—as would have been her right—shows her understanding for the position they’re putting him in and the feelings he has on the matter. It gives us a good idea of the kind of boss she is going to be.

We see more of that in the Murder Room, when she finally insists on her briefing. It is obvious that she’s frustrated by her team’s reluctance to cooperate, but while she’s firm in her insistence and reminds them that, in the wake of the lawsuit, they need to make sure rules will be followed, she is still relatively patient and gentle in her prodding. Considering where that particular relationship will go, it is interesting that Andy Flynn is the first to cave and give her the update she needs.

That dynamic is explored further after the autopsy, when Andy first gives her a pretty useful tip about working homicides—referring to victims by name—and then finally snaps and tells her that their dead suspect is her fault because of the rules she put in place at FID. She allows him to have his little tantrum until he inadvertently hits on something that leads to them solving the case, so she takes his anger and gently turns it around until he comes to the same realization. And just like that, she wins him over.

Despite all her patience and understanding, the good Captain still won’t let Provenza frak with her. She could have yelled at him or threatened him with disciplinary actions, but she found something better than that. She hired Amy Sykes. All the anger management seminars in the world wouldn’t have annoyed him as much as that, and you can’t tell me that she wasn’t aware of that. Maybe having someone on the team “who actually likes [her]” was part of the calculation, and maybe she sees some potential in the young detective that no one else does, but pushing Provenza’s buttons must have played a role in that, too. And it’s certainly effective.

And then there is Rusty… He is very unhappy about the fact that Brenda is gone, thus mirroring the team’s emotions and, supposedly, those of the audience: “I don’t know you, really, but I don’t like you.” Sharon’s little smirk at that indicates that this might not have been the first time she’s heard someone say that, and she readily admits that she’s aware of how undesired her presence is. Her “I’m who you’ve got” is a clear message to Rusty and, by extension, her new team and the viewers, to get over it already.

She doesn’t have to take him home with her. It certainly is not part of her job to personally babysit a material witness. As she said to Rusty, she could have had him locked up. Instead, she allows us to see a little of her maternal side. We already know from The Closer that she has children, but we have never seen her as a mother. Her giving Rusty a home allows the viewers to get a glimpse at her private life and at the woman behind the Captain. Over the course of the first season, the closeness and trust that develops between those two also allows the team to connect with their new boss, despite their misgivings about the circumstances and the changes her arrival has brought.
This strategy might be seen as a parallel to the relationship between Brenda and Fritz, which allowed us to see the Deputy Chief in her home and see her as more than the boss. Of course, considering the age difference between the characters, there is a whole can of worms that could be opened about the fact that the younger woman is seen as passionate and sexually active, while the older one gets to be the mother (especially if we look at how the relationship between Sharon and Andy is portrayed vs. that between Brenda and Fritz), but let’s not get into that…yet.

All in all, “Reloaded” is a solid start for the new show, even if it is hard to say goodbye to Sharon’s snarky, sarcastic side. I still think that it would not have been necessary to tone that side of her down so much in order to make her more “likable”. In my opinion, they overshot the goal by quite a bit, resulting in a character that might be a little too “good” and I don’t mean in the rule-following way. Just as a good villain has some likable aspects, a good heroine needs a few edges to make her interesting. While Provenza might argue that her obsession with rules and procedures is plenty disagreeable, it doesn’t qualify as a dark side in my book.

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