Loveday Writing

We are then brought back to Harrow and James, inside the former’s boat. Harrow asks James the questions he (and the viewers) have been needing answers to. James proves his identity to Harrow by showing him pictures of himself when he was a child, and pictures of him with Tanya. James informs Harrow that Tanya died of breast cancer when he was 18, and that she never told James about Harrow. He also informs Harrow that he doesn’t know what happened to the young man at the shipping yard and didn’t know him that well at all. The man lent him his car, he went to the shipping yard to return it, found him dead and panicked. He was trying to break into the car to get his phone back but was unsuccessful. James says that he didn’t know the young man’s name, but he was doing hacking work for him and didn’t trust him. He also says that he can’t go to the police as he made the false passport Harrow and Nichols found, which is a federal crime.

Nichols surprises both of them when he drops by Harrow’s boat unexpectedly. Just as Nichols is walking in, James hides behind a curtain. Nichols tells him that the man on the surveillance footage might be his son and to let him know if the man gets in touch with him. After Nichols leaves, Harrow pulls back the curtain to find that James has also left.

The next morning, Harrow meets Nichols at a crime scene where the woman in the opening moments has been found. She is identified as Erin Young, a woman in her 40s with two children and had end-stage polycystic kidney disease, although she was not on the kidney transplant list. When Harrow and Nichols go to her house to investigate further, her daughter, Izzy, states that Erin would have never drowned herself and expresses her surprise that Erin would call her son, Nate, before she died. Nate tells Harrow and Nichols that Erin called him the day she died, so she could talk to them all today. Nichols tells Harrow that Erin’s husband, Dave, was at a conference on the Gold Coast, and Izzy arrived last night from Adelaide, while Nate spent the night alone. From here on out, Nate, is clearly being portrayed as the prime suspect.

While Harrow and Edwina are conducting the autopsy, they discover that Erin bit her fingernails, with rope fibres under one of them, which leads to them discovering that she was alive when she went into the river. When they look in her stomach, they find partially digested Ramipril tablets (blood pressure medication), although Erin has taken too many of them. Harrow then decides to go back to Erin’s house, where he finds Nate trying to get into the house to no avail as it has been sealed by the police. Harrow asks him why he wants to go inside the house, but he doesn’t answer and walks away.

When Harrow goes inside and goes through Erin’s medication, he discovers other pills, opioids, inside the Ramipril bottle.  While he is sitting on a chair, on the phone to Nichols, he discovers her hidden new will, in which she was leaving everything to Nate. It turns out that Nate took Erin to see her solicitor a fortnight earlier. Harrow and Nichols eventually discover that the contents of the Ramipril capsules were emptied and replaced with the opioids (morphine), and that Nate has a drug arrest history. Harrow also questions why Erin would agree to go to a solicitor to change her will if she and Nate weren’t close.

Later, while watching a video of him and Tanya together on the beach, Harrow realises that Nate wanted to be near Erin during her last days, despite their strained relationship, Nate later turns himself in. When questioned, Nate reveals that he gave her morphine, but didn’t switch the capsules, and he took Erin to the solicitor at her request.

When Edwina is finally able to get copies of Erin’s medical records prior to moving to Brisbane, her and Harrow discover that Erin’s body isn’t Erin Young at all. When Harrow goes back to the Young’s house to find out more, he discovers a skeleton partially dug up. He calls Nichols to let him know of his discovery, only to be hit on the head and knocked out.

When he comes too, Dave has tied his hands together and his feet to a cinder block, and is preparing to drown him. It turns out that the skeleton is Erin and the body pulled from the river is Dave’s mistress, Bron. Bron killed Erin and lived her life as Erin, due to the fact that Erin came from a wealthy family. However due to her terminal condition, she began to feel remorse and was going to confess, and she changed her will to leave everything to Nate to try and make it up to him. Moments after Dave has thrown Harrow into the river, Nate sneaks up behind Dave, hits him on the head and saves Harrow. Nate tries to kill Dave, explaining that Bron always hated him and never understood why until now, however Harrow talks him out of it, pointing out that if he kills Dave he will be just like him. Nichols later informs Harrow that he found surveillance footage at a Gold Coast hotel showing Dave leaving for a few hours, then returning, on the night of the murder (although why Nichols didn’t find or look for this kind of footage earlier, to corroborate his alibi, is beyond me).

Overall I found the case of the week to be more realistic in comparison to the case of the week presented in the previous episode, however as a whole it wasn’t that compelling, until the twist that Erin’s body was that of Bron, and that Bron killed Erin. While a twist can’t appear too early in a story, much like the reveal of Andrei as the murderer in last week’s episode, I felt that the twist did come a little too late in this episode.

The episode is broken up with the progression of the James story arc. The man from the shipping yard has finally been identified as Max Zoric, the son of Mila Zoric who runs a company that develops share-trading software, which the ATO and the fraud squad are keeping an eye on. Mila questions Harrow on why his name and a note addressed to him were found in Max’s false passport. Meanwhile, Fern comes home to find James inside waiting for her.

Fern and James end up talking over beer, where he reveals to her that he looked her up online, Callan arrives, and James shows them the multiple false passports he has made. Later Harrow shows up to see Fern to find James at the front door waiting, and he asks Harrow to get his phone back.  Harrow is unable to as it has been passed onto the police’s cybercrimes unit. The episode ends with Mila looking through Max’s phone, finding a photo of him and James together. Clearly this won’t be the last we’ll be seeing of Mila, and James’ story has holes in it, so it will be interesting to see how this story arc will continue to play out.

The episode was also broken up with Grace and Ben dealing with the sale of their house and divorce, however their scenes together were so brief that I felt that their subplot didn’t really add anything to the episode.

Overall this episode was an improvement over the previous one, but hopefully some of the kinks in the writing of the A stories (case of the week) will improve over the remainder of the season.

Stray Observations:

Episode title translation: Tarde Venientibus Ossa –  For Those Who Come Late, Only the Bones.

Running gag: Nichols’ attractiveness and dating life.

-Apparently Fairley is taking a Ukiyo-e woodprint class and the class he attended focused on erotic nudes. In his class, he ended up printing a self-portrait, which he proudly showed to his colleagues at the office.

-Apparently Fern was a swim team captain when she was in school.

-Grace and Ben married on 1 June 2014.

-Ben tells Grace that they need to sign the divorce application form, however when the forms are shown onscreen, they haven’t been filled out yet.

-Steph and Renae didn’t appear in this episode. Steph is yet to make an appearance in this season.

Best one liners and interactions:

• “Missing me? We really need to get you back dating again.” (Harrow to Nichols when Nichols comes to visit him on his boat)
• “Morning, any visitors last night?” “Well I had a somewhat overweight, yet dashingly attractive senior sergeant come by, shame he’s not my type.” (Nichols-Harrow)
• “I used to chew my nails. Of course my fifth grade teacher, Mrs Geracci, had a glass eye, a limp and an unhealthy predilection for hitting me on my knuckles with her ruler when my cursive was untidy.” “So why is your handwriting so terrible now?” (Harrow-Edwina)
• “Check for opioids.” “Your office or…” (Harrow-Edwina)
• “Edwina swiped right on him.” “I can see why.” (Harrow-Fairley on Edwina accidentally swiping right on Nichols on a dating app)
• “Screw you and I’m keeping your mop!” (Fern on the phone to her boss after being fired)
• “How long have you had a thing for older men?” “Oh shut up.” “What are you doing?” “Right now, trying to avoid Fairley’s self-portrait.” (Harrow-Edwina talking back-and-forth on the phone)