By Curt Schleier

Grace’s friend Rhetta Rodriguez (Laura San Giacomo) thinks she may have walked into the wrong house. It looks like Grace’s living room, but it’s neat and there are no empty booze bottles lying around. It turns out Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter) has a date with a fellow she’s been seeing. His name’s Jack (Gordon MacDonald) and he’s the visiting nephew of her next door neighbor.

But Rhetta knows Grace, and doubts that Jack is really special. “The day you don’t sleep with this guy I’ll know you’re serious.”

“I didn’t sleep with him,” Grace says.

“Who are you and what did you do with my friend Grace?”

It’s a valid question. What makes this story line particularly interesting is that it reveals a side of Grace we haven’t seen before.  It shows that the troubled Oklahoma City detective can actually pull herself together when she wants to, cut down on her boozing and hold off on her promiscuity.  Watching Jack and Grace together makes you think that there is hope for Grace after all. 


If only the rest of the show was that good.  The crime Grace investigates starts off simply enough.  An armed robber is killed by a by-stander with a licensed gun.  It seems the robber was responsible for a series of similar crimes in the area.  The investigation would appear to end there.  But the robber turns out top be Georgie, a developmentally challenged young man; his weapon a wooden but very realistic-looking gun.  Now the question becomes who gave Georgie the gun and sent him out to steal?

Then a number of disconcerting things happen.  The first is that the camera at the crime scene focuses on a woman sitting on a bench a short distance away.  Grace goes to interview her, and it turns out she is hearing impaired and very angry.  My first thought is, gee, how nice that the producers hired a disabled person – and if that’s the wrong word I apologize now – for a role that could have been filled by an enabled person – and if that’s the wrong word I apologize again.

But then my mind started to wander.  Why did she just sit there?  Why did she not come over to volunteer what she saw?  Is she involved in the crime?  And why is she so angry?  For me, anyway, when someone doesn’t behave naturally, it takes me out of the moment. Instead of paying attention to the story, I focus on the person’s behavior.  And this is not a good thing.

Georgie lived in a group home and when she visits she tries to befriend Andrew (Nick Daley), Georgie’s roommate and best friend.  But it is difficult getting any information from him.  So she tries to win his confidence by accompanying him on his rounds, where he picks up recyclables to earn some pocket change.


A video of the bus Georgie rode to the crime in isn’t much help. It shows Georgie getting off with someone else who is wearing what appears to be Andrew’s sweatshirt.  What happens next kind of ruined the episode for me.   Grace comes up with a suspect. The suspect just happens to have a real weapon.  And then – off camera, we never see it – immediately implicates a partner who comes in out of left field.  This is not a story with an end; this is an ending without a story.

It’s as though the director suddenly realized he’d devoted so much screen time to Grace and Jack, he was down to the last three minutes and still needed to solve a crime.  It’s the kind of error that while not common you do see on TV.  But coming from Saving Grace, heretofore an exemplar of creativity and the best TV can be, the error is glaring.