Yeah, a little late on this one. I didn't think I had a lot to say about it at first, but it turns out I lied.

The writers of Flashpoint have promised us specific episodes that focus on various team members this season. (I can't remember where I read that.) I think we can agree that Ed, being as he is the main character, is quite frequently the focus (I have no complaints about that.) I admit, I was wondering whether the season premiere could be considered the Spike episode as well as the Lew (*sob*) one. It's probably appropriate that Spike and Lew (*sob*) share an episode, but then again airings for the first two seasons have been so comprehensively messed up that what we saw as a premiere could have been meant for the season two finale. (Cripes, if that's the case I am some glad it didn't work out that way--I'd have spent the entire summer randomly bursting into tears.)

Ahem. Now, one might think that, as one of the other leads, Greg would also be the focus of a bunch of episodes. That is less true than you'd expect. He's the focus of most negotiating episodes, it's true. But that's not so much Greg as the job, and as I've said before, I worry about the fact Greg doesn't appear to have anything going on in his life apart from the job. I have this mental image of his apartment, and it's a cheerless place. Also, in the opening moments of Eagle Two, when Greg is trying to convince the team this last-minute overtime security gig is a good idea, and he says they'll be home in time to walk the dog and flashes the picture of what is, presumably, his dog? I bet it wasn't. I bet he doesn't even have houseplants.

Now, I have in the past come out unequivocally against the kind of cop show in which the main cop's personal life becomes the focus and we spend every waking minute watching him deal with his angst. It's not just that I have a fairly low tolerance for angst, being a person somewhat prone to depression in the first place who needs little excuse to wallow--I like to see characters, not get on with it, exactly, but at least show some signs of awareness of their problems and that they are at least trying to do something about them. I find that encouraging. And I like my cop procedural shows to be mostly about cop procedural stuff so I don't want to spend most of the time watching Main Cop Guy making a mess of his life. But I do like to have a feeling about the characters. Give me something to work with and you will probably not be astonished to learn that I'm perfectly willing to fill in the blanks for myself.

And not to make this entry All About Ed again, but that's what I like most about the way his character is written: even though we don't actually see him at home all that often, we're aware of home--Clark and Sophie are important off-screen presences. And Ed pays attention to what's going on around him, which is why we get these moments throughout the series of Ed taking something he's learned about himself or the world or whatever at work and applying it, like those calls home when he suggests doing something with Clark or lets him off the hook over a Dad Decree that Ed has realized is unreasonable. Or--well, there's that moment at the very end of Haunting the Barn, when Ed's in the garage looking at his secret stash of reminders of every time he's ever fucked up. (It kind of looks like the sort of shrine TV serial killers make of their trophies, only exactly the opposite.) And Sophie walks out, and Ed starts to close the cabinet door and then he doesn't, he lets her see it.

Sophie, incidentally, is pretty awesome even in her shadowy form. It's obvious she knew what she was getting into when she married Ed, so as long as he remains pretty much the same Ed she married they will probably be okay, which is why it's so encouraging to see Ed trying. Going back to Eagle Two again for a minute, remember Ed coming home at the end of that one? He's late, he's missed Date Night--twice, actually--and he walks through the house to find Sophie hanging out in that great hammock? As he joins her, remember her one question about work that day? "Did you save anybody?" In Ed's mind, he's not so much there to kick ass or nail the bad guy. He's there to come to the rescue, and she knows it, and I suspect understanding that probably helps a lot. Her tone as she asks the question is certainly understanding and affectionate.

Ed, for a heavily-armed guy who can look like a reptile when he needs to, is a surprisingly hopeful character.

But this is not an entry about Ed, and as it appears I have not yet recovered from my Beatles obsession of the summer (said Beatles obsession being one of the things that got me through the summer) I will close my remarks about Ed Lane by commenting that, in spite of an obvious eyelash deficiency, he's sort of the Paul McCartney of this situation--the guy who is essentially sane and who, despite fuckups and mistakes and moments of not getting it that bother him later, a guy who wants to be positive.

No, really.

Greg?

Greg is the Nowhere Man.

Remember Greg's question at the end of Exit Wounds, the season two episode about the hospital? "Ed's there for all of us, but who's there for Ed?" Wrong proper noun, and I suspect Ed knows it. Ed is at least learning to let other people be there for him, not team mates necessarily but at least, as we have observed, at home.

Greg, on the other hand, plays it close to the vest. How close? In the latest episode, we learn about an important personal relationship of Greg's that even Ed knew nothing about. And the really bizarre part is, yeah, actually, that's totally in character for Greg. The second episode of the series, you may recall, was the point at which Jules and Spike, who'd been working with Greg for some time, found out he had a child. Ed knew about Dean, but I would be willing to bet Wordy didn't. And then in season two, Greg was dating the woman with the son and nobody except Ed would ever have known about her if Spike hadn't run into them at The Lion King. (Spike was doing the uncle thing. You know he was having a much better time than he would ever admit, and you know he knew everyone else knew it too.) I fully believe the only reason Ed knows so much (comparatively speaking) about Greg's personal life is, he's willing to force the issue because he knows how lonely Greg is.

So this episode begins in a warehouse apparently filling with poisonous and/or flammable gas, with Greg tied up on the floor, and the rest of the team trying to find a way in.

Timejump backwards.

Greg is heading in to work when he gets a text from someone named Haley, saying she's in trouble and giving her location as what turns out to be a dodgy intersection. Greg totally should not be reading texts while driving, but he does, and then he calls Ed to say he'll be a little late. At this point Ed and the team are going over entry options for a warrant they are apparently serving later in the day. They've got a plan of the building they're going into, and Spike is arguing for one point of entry while Wordy supports another. Actually, that would be "Wordy--and the WHOLE REST OF THE TEAM." Sam's comment to Spike is "Give it up, Patton," and when Leah supports Wordy, Spike announces that she just has "a thing for Wordy"--which could be a pretty nasty thing to say, except he then tells Ed the same thing, in the same tone of voice, when Ed also supports Wordy's option. [Ed's response is "Who doesn't?"] At which point I stopped worrying about whether Spike has accepted Leah as a team mate, although I reserve the right to compose further fanfic on the subject if I feel like it.

Greg, in the meantime, arrives at the dodgy location. Whoever Haley is, there is no sign of her. A scruffy-looking guy in his fifties comes over, looking like the kind of guy who'd want to cadge a cigarette or bum some change. He's a skinny little guy, and the only remotely threatening thing about him is the elaborate cobra tattoo wrapped around his throat. (And just the thought of holding still for THAT...)

He tries to engage Greg in conversation, and then he gives every sign of keeling over as though from an overdose. Greg calls 911 on his cell, and as he is making the call a van pulls up behind him. Before Greg can react, the "OD victim" has popped up, and helps the two guys in the van clobber Greg and dump him in the van. Then he ambles calmly away, and Greg's cell phone is left squawking in the street.

There is a GPS on Greg's cell, which is active as long as it's on. Spike has very little trouble tracking it down--in the possession of an elderly female vagrant. Ed and Spike are polite to her and get the phone, as well as her account of seeing Greg hauled into the van, and a description of the guy with the snake tattoo.

Spike has no trouble getting into Greg's email, although he clearly doesn't feel comfortable reading it. Ed has no such qualms. A whole lot of the messages are from someone named Haley, unknown to anyone on the team. They are able to identify her as an eighteen-year-old kid (Wordy: "So, not a girlfriend." Leah: *gives him a look of "how old are you, Wordy?"*) who is connected to a ten-year-old sealed case file. The investigating officer was one Inspector Greg Parker.

Team: "Inspector?"
Ed: "Yeah, that was when he was in Homicide."
Team: "Homicide? Greg was in Homicide?"

Indeed he was, presumably before his personal life imploded. And when you think about it, for a guy with Greg's pathologies, Homicide would be about the worst possible fit. It occurred to me a while back that Flashpoint is more hopeful than your average cop show for at least one obvious reason: most of the time, everyone is still alive when the SRU arrives. In Homicide you get to be reminded of the worst possible things people do to one another. In the SRU, you can at least try to prevent them. Greg takes it hard enough when the team loses one. Imagine Greg in a situation in which, in a very real sense, you never, ever win.

So it turns out that Haley is a kid whose mother was killed in a shootout when the police tried to arrest someone at the house they were living at. We see a flashback of Haley's mother sending her to hide under the bed, and then gunfire, blood all over the poster next to the door, and then Greg leaning down to comfort her. (I can only assume someone was being arrested on a murder charge, if he was there already.) Apparently, Haley ended up with Children's Services but Greg stayed in touch with her. She has had her problems, including drug problems of her own and a relationship with a real loser, but according to her social worker Greg's been there for her the whole time.

Greg, in the meantime, is being held in an abandoned warehouse that doubles as a meth lab. Tyler, the taller of the two young men who kidnapped him is not pleased to learn that Greg is a cop. Apparently, his sidekick Kevin told him that Greg owed him money. Greg is doing his best to negotiate his way out of this mess, but the thing is, Kevin used to go with Haley (he is in fact the loser referenced above) and blames Greg for their breakup.

Kevin and Haley may have broken up, but when he sends her a message saying he needs her help she shows up as promptly as Greg did to the call for help he thought was from Haley. Kevin is a known meth head who has done time. And, he explains, he has learned something very interesting from the guy who was the arrest target the night Haley's mother died: who really killed her mother. Greg points out, quite reasonably, that the guy doing life is not exactly an unimpeachable witness. With what strikes me as a really touching naïveté, Kevin replies that the guy was a friend of his dad, and would not lie to him. No, the info is good enough for him, and he insists that none of the residents of the house committed the murder.

At this point, Greg becomes evasive.

In the meantime, the team has come up empty on the name of Haley's troubled boyfriend--he has no arrest record at all. Except, of course, as Spike points out if he's Haley's age then his record would be juvenile and sealed. But the social worker referred to him as one of a long line of meth heads, so Spike checks out his last name for possible family members with arrest records, and turns up what might be his dad: a skinny little guy in his fifties with a cobra tattoo on his throat.

The dad is staying at a flophouse which the team raids, and I saw bits of this sequence in the preview and... okay, last week I believe I said that if Ed ever beat a confession out of someone, I would probably never get over it. Let's just say that I was uneasy at this point, given the moment in the preview when Ed announces he is only asking one more time. Actually, let's just say I was holding my breath, hoping Ed was not going to do something that would force me to break up with him. I did remind myself that I accepted James Bond, in Quantum Of Solace, pretty much killing everyone in his path because he was out of his mind after the events of Casino Royale. It didn't help: Ed Lane is not James Bond. Morally, I mean.

So it was a big relief when Ed simply offered to bust everyone in the house except Snake Man, and let him explain to his friends why the cops gave him preferential treatment. This, I can handle. Ed is perfectly reasonable: "We don't want to give you a hard time, we just want our friend back."

Snake Man is a lot more scared of his own friends than he is of the cops--and if you'd seen his friends, you might agree--so he agrees to direct the cops to where his son is holed up. As you might expect, Snake Man insists the whole mess was not his fault. Slightly more unexpected is his insistence that his son Kevin isn't a bad kid, he's just been led astray by bad companions. It's... weirdly sweet.

Meanwhile, back at the meth lab, Kevin is insisting to Haley that he understands she's not going to take him back, but he thinks she deserves to know what really happened to her mother. According to his dad's old friend the convict, the shooter was Greg.

Haley doesn't want to believe this--in fact she would like nothing better than for him to deny the accusation and make her believe him. Instead, Greg talks about the fact he was pretty much in the middle of losing his entire life--in case you hadn't noticed the timing, Greg's wife left him in the fallout after this case--and in his mind Haley helped him as much as he helped her.

And yeah, you've noticed it's not an answer, right? Haley spots that as well, and draws the conclusion one would expect. And to be honest, I was having some trouble seeing a way out of this one myself.

Particularly when, since the team can't get into the sealed case record (getting the seal lifted is a long complicated procedure and they just don't have time) (no, nobody suggests that perhaps Spike could just break into it) Ed calls another detective who worked on the case and asks him for details.

First off, it was Greg who sealed the case file.

Greg, by this point, is tied up in a room with several open propane tanks and a timer that seems to consist of two stripped wires connected to an oven timer--one of the wires is fastened down, the other is attached to the timer dial, and when the dial comes around far enough the two wire ends will make contact and spark. At which point--well, propane fumes.

The doors are booby-trapped and the team is trying to figure out how to get in quietly and safely--they don't want to blow themselves up or warn the kidnappers. We've got Ed and Sam on one side, Jules and Spike on another, and Wordy and Leah on the third. The team hasn't found a solution to their problem when Tyler, who has panicked, bolts out the door and directly into the arms of Spike and Jules.

And if you think that's a less scary prospect than running into Sam and Ed... well, you haven't seen the state Jules is in.

Spike and Jules arrest Tyler and everyone else goes in. Leah and Wordy can hear Greg somewhere, thumping around trying to get loose. They end up "chasing echoes," as Leah puts it. And then Tyler tells Spike and Jules about the impending explosion, and we get Spike yelling over the radio for the others to get out now. This is as nearly panicky as I think we've ever seen Spike, and you know he's imagining him and Jules being the only ones left to go to the funerals.

Ed is perfectly calm. "We're not leaving without the boss." And he gets Kevin talking--Kevin might not be the nice boy his father claims, but he's out of his depth and probably beginning to realize this whole thing has gone too far. And Ed has a piece of information for Kevin and Haley: think about the poster by the doorway. Greg didn't kill Haley's mother.

Haley did.

And of course as soon as Ed says it, it all makes sense: the only way the poster could have gotten blood on it is if the person who fired the shot was in the room behind the victim. As a viewer, should I have gotten there first? Probably. But I find when I'm involved in the story, I don't try to figure it out. And in this case, I was pretty involved.

Haley's reaction is predictable: she goes into a guilty freakout. More surprising is the way Kevin comes apart. I mean, he genuinely thought he was doing something beneficial for Haley. If he had known he was going to drag all this out into the open he never would have done it, and if Greg didn't kill Haley's mum, he doesn't want to kill Greg. He's still apologizing when they stick him in the back of the patrol car.

The team rescues Greg and the next time we see him he's holding an oxygen mask over his face and looking pretty sick (among other things, he's gotten hit on the head and you can see the tear in his poor scalp, which speaking as someone whose dad has a hairline similar to Greg's frankly made me wince a lot.) Greg probably also looks sick because of the way Jules is yelling at him. You think Spike was the only one imagining another funeral? Think again. Jules points out that Greg is in fact unable to negotiate bullets back up the barrel of a gun, and maybe he thinks it makes sense to let someone kill him rather than tell Haley something he thinks she's better off not knowing, but here's a piece of news, Nowhere Man--other people need you and care about you and don't want to lose you. The rest of the team doesn't intervene but there is a distinct note of "you tell him, Jules" as they pretend not to listen.

Jules is absolutely right, but my question is, how much of Greg's reaction is Greg getting it, and how much is Greg simply accepting her tirade as another stick to beat himself with? Because based on Greg's previous record, the second option is at least as likely as the first.

[Oh, incidentally? The fire department has naturally been called out to deal with the potential gas explosion, and in case anyone out there still thought the show was trying to be coy about its location, the firefighters we see in the background are all wearing turnout coats with TORONTO in big reflective letters on the back. I wonder if any of them were old friends of Leah?]

The episode ends with Greg, head patched up but still looking shaky, sitting in the briefing room. (Of course he is. Why would he go home? What's waiting for him at home?) And Ed comes looking for him, because Ed is the one person who always, always comes looking for Greg, and Greg knows it. The trouble is, I have a feeling Greg thinks Ed does this because of Ed's good qualities, rather than because Greg deserves it. Ed doesn't say anything, and I don't think he touches Greg (Greg needs to be hugged regularly whether he thinks he likes it or not, and I suggest the team establish a rota), but the message is pretty clear: put it down, Greg. Whatever the hell it is. Leave it all til somebody else lends you a hand. "Somebody" generally meaning Ed, but perhaps Greg has noticed the entire team ransacked Toronto until they found him. That's probably not just because they don't want to have to break in a new sergeant.

You do wonder if there's some magic number of saves or rescues or whatever that Greg feels will make up for the mess he made of his life before this. Maybe he keeps upping the number every time he gets near it. I can't help wondering what losing Lew (*sob*) did to that tally.

I remember reading a couple of different mystery series in which I found myself thinking, "This main character would be a whole lot better off if she just went ahead and had the nervous breakdown she is so clearly moving towards." And in fact, when things came to a head the characters generally started to get better.

You might want to do the math on all the "I'm fines" yourself, there, Greg. That's all I'm saying. I would way rather worry about a fictional character than not give a crap about him, but… Christ, Greg. Please.