To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I don't know if it's just that I've lowered my expectations so much for this show that anything seems good or if it's actually legitimately improving, but I figured I would hate this episode, and I...actually kinda liked it.

I'll get the case out of the way first. It was one of their more interesting ones; as one might expect of a show focused on medical examining, the show does red herrings related to cause of death rather well. I liked that the asshole brother turned out to be the one good guy remaining in the family, too. Plus the case provided opportunity for Megan to actually do some medical examining and draw conclusions from it (even if she and Peter did "have to go find [their] own bodies now," heh), and opportunity for Ethan to be fairly adorable. His reeling off of the symptoms and treatment for whatever disease the victim had, only to reveal he was reading from the iPad, was obvious but still really cute. (Uh, is Apple paying some kind of product placement fee for this show? Because everyone has an iPhone, and everyone at the ME's office has an iPad. Though I'm heartened to see Sam and Bud still going old school with reporter's notebooks--actually, I'm heartened to see the cops taking notes period, since I don't think I've ever seen another cop show where they actually write down important information from interviews.) Oh, and Curtis got to show off about his bugs again. Aww. The only thing about the investigative parts I didn't care for was Megan's judgy-judging at the funeral at the end. I get that she's blunt, and the mother was heinous, but really, this is getting so old.

(Okay, one other thing I didn't like: Megan, you're inspecting the body for signs of murder. WEAR SOME GLOVES.)

And now the other part. Lacey was surprisingly tolerable this time around! She was pretty cute with her junior detective work that nevertheless came to the totally wrong conclusion. And offering to hate Kate was rather sweet, although I've still got whiplash from the characterization poles she's been at this season in regards to her relationship with Megan. Apparently you can dislike and not really speak to your mother for five years, and yet she shows you some dead body parts and you're suddenly BFFs. I...you know, forget it. I'll give them this one. I'll just accept the new paradigm and go with it if they will KEEP IT THAT WAY and not suddenly remember halfway through season two that Lacey hates her mom. If they try to go back to a fraught relationship without some serious motivation, though, I'm going to be pissed.

Oh, and I kind of loved this dialogue:

Todd: I know how that story goes; she turns sixteen and wants to move in with her mother because she hates me.
Megan: Maybe that's my plan.

I do not put it past her AT ALL. I bet that really is her plan. No, really. REALLY. I'm serious.

Kate/Todd was not as bad as I feared, I think mostly because the whole storyline got about five minutes total of screen time. Ideally, it would not happen at all, but if it must, in dribs and drabs is the way to do it. I did appreciate Megan's hanging a lampshade on it with her, "Of all the women in this city, it had to be HER?" SERIOUSLY.

I can't decide if I think she was making too big a deal out of it or not. On the one hand, on the surface, it really isn't going to affect her professional life. On the other hand--well, we all know that a.) TV characters can never keep their personal and professional lives separated, and b.) even in the real world, boss/employee relationships are pretty fraught even without this kind of drama, and even if Kate really does try to be professional about it, it's a little off to have her doing a performance review for her boyfriend's ex-wife, you know?

So I don't know about that. I do think it's interesting that she was way more pissed off at Todd than Kate. I think the way Megan didn't respond to Peter's, "Well, the only reason you should hate it is if you still have feelings for him, HINT HINT," was supposed to be a, well, hint, but DD didn't play it at all as though Megan still cared for him. Then again, the writing on this show does not exactly exist on the same level as the talent of the cast. Ultimately, though, I think/hope that that would be too cheesy even for this series. So maybe she was just more angry with him because it's kind of her natural state to be angry with him? Maybe she thinks he's taking advantage of Kate somehow? (Considering we still haven't been given any reason WHATSOEVER to like this guy...) Hell, maybe she was interested in Kate and is ticked that Todd stole her away? Actually, she seemed most angry about the fact that it had been going on for five weeks and no one had thought to inform her, which I can understand. I'll go with that reason.

A couple other things:

- Was Todd wearing a dog tag? He had some kind of long silver chain around his neck, but I couldn't tell what was hanging from it. I can't quite buy him as the military type, though. Maybe it's just his father's and he wears it as an heirloom or something.

- "You always go to the bodies." / "Maybe because they don't make annoying observations." Heh heh. Awww.

- Oh, Megan. When Todd said, "It's been five years; you can't tell me you've been a nun," I'm pretty sure we ALL figured out from her expression that she had. Poor baby.

- It was kind of unbelievable for Lacey to ask Megan how she felt about the whole Kate/Todd thing--are there any twelve-year-olds who are that considerate to their mothers during sensitive situations like that?--but it was still sweet. And it did drive home the idea that Megan was just kind of weirded out and pissed that she had to find out second-hand, rather than that she actually OMG WAS STILL IN LOVE with Todd. (Show, if you actually do that, I will be so, so disappointed. Even my expectations don't go low enough to make that look good.)

And now we have to wait until September for more. :( Then again, at least it was renewed! Yaaaaaaaaay!