Rizzoli and Isles Recap/Review: “Somebody’s Watching Me”

Serena Hope Hohenstein ‘17 / Emertainment Monthly Writer
This week’s episode found Jane in a bad mood.
Maura picks Jane up to go to work, but Jane is less than ready. She’s still putting on her clothes and wasn’t able to shower because there’s no running water in her condo. Instead of water, there’s a black kind of goo seeping out from her sink. As soon as the two friends are about to leave the condo, the landlord arrives and can do nothing but stare at Jane’s chest. This only fuels her mood further. Suddenly, Tommy arrives with Jo Friday, and after he agrees to keep an eye on the landlord, Jane and Maura exit the condo.
We then see the two in a coffee shop waiting for their names to be called. Maura’s name is called, and then about four others are called who all had ordered AFTER Jane. Jane can’t stand the wait and continues to be her cranky self. Finally, when she gets her drink, a woman and a man are in her way in front of the cream and sugar. The woman eventually responds to Jane’s increasingly louder “excuse me’s” by saying how rude Jane is. Jane is exasperated and just wants to get her day going. The two do the awkward dance to get past one another, but Jane bumps into the woman spilling her coffee all over the woman’s shirt. The woman continues to reprimand Jane as she apologizes profusely. Maura is able to pull her away, when, at that moment, the woman calls Jane a bitch. Jane tenses, but Maura gets her out of trouble and hands Jane her own coffee.
Maura and Jane arrive at the scene, where they are told that an old man is in a standoff with the police. Frost, Korsak, and Frankie inform the two that there is a dead man inside the house named Daniel who was a sanitation worker. The old man then comes outside holding a shotgun and even shoots. But Jane realizes something: He was only shooting blanks. She tells the police to stand down, and she, Maura, and Korsak approach the man. They are able to talk him down, and enter the house.  The man was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, but Maura is not sure of the murder weapon. And to make things more interesting, the power is out, and the old man (who owns the house Daniel was killed in) is a hoarder. Frankie and Frost are tasked with searching the basement, but are about as happy as they can be because a new female rookie cop is working with them, and they (hilariously) flirt shamelessly with her.
At the station, Mrs. Rizzoli and Tommy are watching a video of Jane spilling her coffee earlier that morning. It has gone viral on Youtube, and Mrs. Rizzoli can’t stand it. The video is even titled “Mean Detective Rizzoli.” She asks her son if there is any way to take it down, but of course, everything is permanent on the internet.
The interrogation of the old man begins with some difficulty as he is firmly against speaking with a man. Korsak leaves so the old man can talk with the “nice woman” as he calls her. A surprise to Jane, she’s not the nice woman, Maura is. With Jane in her ear, Maura questions him about his actions in his house. He tells them that stuff was disappearing from his basement and that people were watching him. He can’t explain it, so that’s all they are able to get out of him. He is then taken to a hospital psych ward to be checked out.
Back at the house, Frost, Frankie, and Korsak are met with an unwanted visitor in the basement. A neighbor of the old man brings the police lemonade, but of course the house is a crime scene, so the men tell him to leave. Before he does, though, the neighbor asks them to keep an eye out for an old skate that he let the old man borrow a while back. The boys say they will, and the man leaves. It’s a very odd interaction.
In the morgue, Maura tells Jane that there’s a honeycomb pattern on Daniel’s head where he was beaten. The indent is the shape of a baseball bat, but the pattern is unlike anything Maura has ever seen before. The two video call the boys to share the new information, and while on the call, Frankie and Frost share the news of the viral video with Jane. Together, she and Maura watch it and are disgusted. And to make it worse, later, Jane sees every detective in the bullpen watching it, too.
In a very funny moment at the house, Frankie and Frost find a homemade E.M.P. gun in the basement. They both eagerly want to try it and, although they hesitate, decide to go outside and shoot it to see if it actually works. The audience sees the new cop talking on her car radio as the boys shoot the gun into the air. Suddenly, the rookie’s radio goes out and the car starts smoking a bit along with another squad car on the street. The boys quickly start to head back in the house, but the girl catches them asking if they know what happened. They play it off cool saying it happens all the time and to call maintenance and they’ll take care of it. Being new, she believes them as the boys sprint back into the house.
In a hallway in the precinct, Jane and the old man have a heart to heart regarding his friend who was murdered, and his belongings that were stolen. Jane decides to help him by writing down all the things that the old man remembers being stolen, and in this moment, Maura is seen possibly recording this interaction. When they are done, the man tells Jane that she is a nice person, and Jane seems genuinely happier. Then, she gets called into the Lieutenant’s office.
My first question here is, how is he back so soon after all that happened in last week’s episode??? One would think he may be suspended for a little while because of his fight and his almost attempt on a man’s life! They don’t even acknowledge what happened previously, which I was a bit upset about, but life goes on! So, the Lieutenant calls Jane into his office and tells her that the woman who Jane spilled coffee on is filing police brutality against Jane. Jane is mad once again, and so is the Lieutenant, but there’s not much he can do. He says that the state will back her up since she was on duty, but they still have to investigate. Later that night, Jane is served papers at her condo. The woman is suing her for HALF A MILLION DOLLARS! No one can understand what’s going on, and everyone knows that Jane doesn’t have that kind of money. All that went into her condo. Jane is depressed.
Back on the case, Maura finds reinforced polymer in the victim’s head and asks Frost and Frankie to look for anything that fits the more narrowed down description she has of the murder weapon. While in the basement, the men find an ice skate that was used by one of the top hockey players in Boston history. They geek out for a moment, but then remember something: The guy who brought lemonade asked about an ice skate. The team digs into him and finds that he has sold lots of hockey memorabilia on various fan and auction sites. Is he the culprit? After interrogation, it is clear that he had no connection to the murder, but he was the one stealing all of the old man’s stuff. The boys arrest him for larceny and continue the search for the murderer.
In the bullpen, Jane is told that she wasn’t actually on duty when the incident happened. The spill occurred one minute prior to her being on the clock. Because of this, the state won’t back her and she will have to deal with the case herself. Maura talks to her best lawyer about the case, but he says it’ll be a hard case to fight. And it will cost a lot of money to have him on board. Jane feels hopeless for only a minute because she finds something that will help make it all go away. While watching the video, she sees that the shirt the woman was wearing is actually repelling the coffee, therefore she couldn’t have gotten second degree burns like she claimed. Korsak also notices that there was a fingerprint on the lens of the camera that is visible in the video. It was all a setup, and the team will find who did it and put that case to rest.
Immediately after the big breakthrough, Frost discovers the patent on the polymer. It was used for a rotor blade of a JFP drone. JFP is a company doing business in the area, and more specifically, in the old man’s neighborhood. AND! The head of the company, Jim, was at the crime scene and lied about where he lived. He claimed he lived in the neighborhood, but his address was actually twenty miles away, and in crime scene photos he is staring only at the house. The team then looks at what was in the old man’s pockets when he arrived at the precinct, and sure enough, it included a hard drive with the words JFP on it. This is what Daniel was killed over. The detectives call to see if they can talk to the old man at the hospital, but are told he was released and the team begins to panic. They rush to his house and find Jim ready to kill the old man, holding a shotgun to his head. Unfortunately for Jim, the old man had loaded the gun with blanks, not with real bullets, and Jim backs down because there’s no other way out. The old man is saved, and the murderer is arrested, but what happened with the video?
The results of the fingerprint test came back and the videographer is none other than Jane’s landlord. The detectives catch the two in Jane’s condo deciding what they will do in their new home. That’s right! The woman did all that just to get Jane’s condo because she didn’t want to live on the first floor anymore. And the landlord helped out because he had hooked up with the woman. The two are arrested and Jane has her home back.
In the closing scene, Jane and Maura are hanging out in Jane’s condo where Jane is still a little high strung about the viral “Mean Detective Jane” video. Maura pulls her aside and shows her another Youtube video. This one, though, is titled “Kind Detective Jane.” It’s the video Maura took of Jane and the old man in the hallway. And it has eleven views. Jane is grateful, but says it needs something to spice it up… like a rap of “B-b-b-bitch” like the other video had. The two laugh and Maura attempts to rap. It’s one of the funnier endings to a “R&I” episode and a showing of true friendship. I think this just be one of my favorite episodes of the series.