Loveday Writing

Meanwhile, James takes Fern to show her a house closer to the CBD to live in. James tells her that she should move and she asks him what he has gotten her into. Fern tells him she can’t afford to live in the house. He takes her into a tech store where he collects three phones that didn’t belong to him and asks for refunds on two of them. James gets Fern to receive the refund on her card. Fern scolds him for making her complicit in fraud.

Later, Harrow is trying to find his special coffee in the Institute’s kitchen, only for Renae to show up with the bag and tell him to order his own expensive coffee. Just as he goes to make a cup, the Institute’s alarm bells ring, informing him that a body is coming in.

Nichols informs him, Fairley and Grace that two bodies are coming in – Kaara Oberg, 17, high school student, a cyclist down the coast found her in her car, in a ditch after dawn, and Mitchell Vanderhaust, also 17, run over by a sand tractor after going to a high school beach party, and is the man we saw run over at the start of the episode. Harrow expresses interest in conducting the autopsy on Vanderhaust, but Renae assigns him the Oberg autopsy. A security guard asks Nichols and Renae to go upstairs, where we find the victims’ fathers in a scuffle. Mitchell’s father accuses Kaara of being an alcoholic and blames her for Mitchell’s death. Kaara’s father, Charlie, insists to Harrow that she wasn’t drinking; she was a good kid, she was Mitchell’s girlfriend, and she ate well.

While Harrow and Edwina are conducting Kaara’s autopsy, they view her medical records which shows she visited a doctor multiple times believing that she had irritable bowel syndrome, whereas the doctor thought she had an eating disorder and was going to send her to a specialist. Edwina also finds paint on her fingernails. The photos from the crime scene also reveal bottles on the passenger seat and that Kaara wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

When Harrow goes to see Fairley and Grace over Mitchell’s autopsy, he finds Fairley and Grace haven’t started because they are arguing over the possible cause of Mitchell’s body temperature rapidly declining before he was found. Fairley goes to start the autopsy by hosing the sand off Mitchell’s body, but Harrow realises that the sand on his body and the sand on Kaara’s body are completely different, despite the two of them attending the same party.

Harrow and Grace go to the beach to try and figure out more, he notices there is no evidence of a beach party. He calls Nichols to find out where the party was, when they arrive at the party site, Nichols asks them what the issue is with both autopsies. When Harrow and Grace answer his questions, he points out that both issues could have been resolved with a toxicology report and that he came to the beach for nothing. Grace leaves with Nichols, but Harrow stays and notices a girl watching him. She tries to leave but floods her car’s engine, Harrow asks her if she was at the party, and she says yes, and asks her why Kaara and Mitchell left the party. The girl tells her that Kaara and Mitchell had a fight and that maybe they broke up. As Harrow is leaving the beach, Edwina calls to inform him that both Mitchell and Kaara had been drinking, and Kaara’s blood alcohol content was higher than Mitchell’s.

When Harrow returns to the Institute, he finds Charlie waiting for him and tells him about the toxicology report findings. Charlie shows him a video Mitchell’s father sent him, which shows Kaara drunk at school with her classmates taunting her, and the girl from the beach and Mitchell defending and protecting her.

After Charlie leaves, Harrow goes back to his office to find Renae waiting for him. She informs him that she assigned him Kaara’s autopsy to see if he could do his job and that she is reviewing his work performance over the last twenty-three years. His autopsy times are inconsistent and no-one knows where he is or when his work will be done. She also informs him that the Institute is operating over budget and that people have to go, implying that she is thinking of firing him.

After his run in with Renae, Harrow finds Fairley looking for his old files as Bramson has got him spooked. He spent half the afternoon going over his notes on the Max Zoric autopsy and he doesn’t know whether he might have got something wrong. When he was doing the autopsy, he thought Zoric was Harrow’s son, and he was so afraid of messing it up that he might have missed something. Harrow tries to reassure him, but Fairley says he can’t retire with the possibility that mistakes may have been made.

Later we see Fern, James and Callan out at a nightclub, and Fern asks James to tell her the truth about Max Zoric. James tries to avoid answering her questions, but relents when she gets up to leave. He worked at the software company owned by Mila Zoric and that Max was a bit wild. Max wanted to leave the country and asked James to make a passport for him. When Callan calls him out on his illegal activities, James says that he taught himself the skills needed for his illegal activities to help pay his mother’s medical bills. James also tells them that he didn’t trust Max, so he diverted the security cameras from the shipping yard to his phone. When he went to give Max his passport, Max told him that he didn’t have any cash, so he went back to his car but it was being towed, he went back to tell Max, but he found him dead. Callan tells James to tell the police this information, but James says he won’t because he’ll be sent to jail for creating the false passports. Harrow calls Fern while she is at the club on his way home to ask if she has seen James and she lies to him.

When Harrow gets into his boat, he sees his mentor, Jack, whom Fairley and Harrow were talking about earlier, waiting for him. Harrow confides in Jack, or rather his ghost, about his doubts surrounding James. Jack tells him that he has to believe James, despite his doubts, as he is his father and that’s part of the job.

The next morning, Harrow goes to see Charlie, only to find him unconscious on his kitchen floor with an empty liquor bottle nearby. Harrow manages to resuscitate him before he is taken to hospital. Harrow then stays and looks around Kaara’s bedroom. He finds her art supplies, which explains the paint found on her fingernails. When he looks in one of her desk drawers, he finds an acceptance letter from the Royal Australian College of Art, and her sketch book, with a note addressed to her from someone by the name of ‘M.’ Harrow then finds Kaara’s artwork depicting her issues with her eating, and a shopping list consisting of high-carb foods on the kitchen fridge. This makes Harrow realise that she was trying to avoid carbs. When Harrow and Grace look in her stomach, they find undigested food but no traces of alcohol. Harrow tells Grace that he believes that Kaara had auto-brewery syndrome, a medical condition where the digestive system converts carbohydrates into ethanol, which would explain her eating problems and why she had a reputation at school for being a drunk.

When Grace proposes that Kaara may have driven over Mitchell in anger after he broke up with her and then dumped his body at another beach, Harrow tells her she would have been too ‘drunk’ to do this. He realises that the girl on the beach is the person who wrote Kaara the encouraging note on her sketch book, and that she would have moved the body.

Harrow goes to see her, where her name is revealed as Madison. Madison tells him that Mitchell broke up with Kaara, and that Mitchell sat down behind Kaara’s car and fell asleep. When Madison went to console Kaara, she witnessed Kaara accidentally running over Mitchell and driving off. Madison moved his body to the other beach, knowing the sand tractor would be there the next morning, to save Kaara from being charged with manslaughter.

After informing Charlie of the outcome of Kaara’s autopsy, he goes back to his office to find Renae waiting there for him again. She gets Harrow’s whisky bottle out of his desk and pours them drinks, only to confiscate the bottle once they finish. As Harrow and Grace are leaving for the day, they run into Ben, who tells them that Fairley is letting him store some of his stuff in his garage.  When Fairley and Ben get in the elevator with Harrow and Grace, Renae runs to the lift to inform them all that there is a meeting at the Department of Justice that they should attend. When Harrow asks Renae why he’s attending, Renae says he was asked for.

When they get to the meeting, which has Mila Zoric in attendance, Bramson is presenting his findings to the Department. He reveals that he concurs with Fairley’s findings of cause of death, which makes Fairley asks why they are at the meeting. Bramson reveals that he believes Zoric’s knuckle injury was not caused by the fall but by punching someone, and that he was fighting someone when he fell.

After they leave the meeting, Nichols tells Harrow that cybercrimes couldn’t unlock James’ phone and asks if he has heard from his son. Harrow tells him he hasn’t. When Nichols consults with the fingerprint bureau, they match fingerprints from the ship rail, the glove box in the car, the phone, and the letter addressed to Harrow, to someone else.

The episode ends with James sneaking by a sleeping Fern and Callan to get a hold of Fern’s phone, only for Callan to wake up. James puts Fern’s phone on the table, telling Callan he doesn’t want her to step on it.

Overall I felt that this was a solid episode with a compelling case of the week, especially as it was a rare manslaughter rather than murder case. I appreciated the writers’ choice to have Kaara suffer from a rare digestive condition rather than being a drunk, the second rare medical condition that a victim suffered this season (the first being Sebastian Wells’ Erythropoietic Protoporphyria in the second episode), as it provided an interesting insight into her character. I also found it interesting that the choice of Mitchell’s death being a manslaughter lead to Madison being an accomplice with good intentions but poor execution, so to speak.

Once again, the James story arc has progressed but at a slow rate, with his story regarding Max Zoric clearly full of holes, clearly using Fern to get himself out of strife, and Callan’s suspicions and distrust of him increasing. While Harrow’s story arcs have always been slow burns, I feel this story arc is moving too slowly and that this week’s progression of it was more of a sideways than forward step – it’s already been established that James has been involved in illegal activities, his story about Max and his involvement in Max’s death was shaky at best – the only differences this week are that Harrow and Fern are both suspicious of his level of “honesty”,  and the holes in James’ story about Max and his involvement in Max’s death have been made clear. Yes, James tried to get a hold of Fern’s phone and Callan caught him, but we don’t yet know what he was intending to do with Fern’s phone and it’s clear that Callan is also suspicious of him. While you could argue that Bramson’s involvement in reviewing Fairley’s findings was a step forward, Bramson’s findings were foreshadowed throughout the episode to the point that they weren’t surprising when he revealed them.

Hopefully, now that we have reached the halfway point of the season that there will be a faster progression on the James story arc.

Stray Observations:

Episode title translation: Ut Biberent Quoniam Esse Nollent – Let them drink, since they won’t eat.

Running gag: The question of whether Harrow has ever been to beach parties.

-Nichols hates the beach, mostly because he is unsure of whether to take his shoes off whilst he is there.

-Harrow played Chess and Dungeons & Dragons in his school days.

-Both Ben and Fairley speak Japanese.

Best one liners and interactions:

• “Early start?” “Sleep and I have never really been on the best of terms.” (Fairley-Harrow)
• “Family disputes can get very ugly between you two hillbilly types.” (Harrow to Fairley and Grace on their arguing)
• “If you’re looking for a heart, I think there’s a snake one here somewhere.” (Harrow to Renae when he finds her in his office)
• “Remember that private thing that we discussed on our camping trip?” “The leech on your testicle?” “My retirement.” (Fairley-Harrow-Fairley)
• “Well if you want to do some light housekeeping, my office needs some.” (Harrow to Fairley)
• “If you’ve come here to give me another 50 lashes, can it wait till tomorrow, it’s been a big day.” (Harrow to Renae when he finds her in his office again)