Crime Drama TV

I’d read an article saying that the 10/15 episode of Cold Case would have the viewer in tears.  Now I can be a very emotional TV viewer, last night’s episode didn’t do it for me.  I found it rather predictable.

 The Philly coroner is going through SID deaths in the 80s because studies are finding that some SID deaths are actually murders that went undetected.  Modern technology can help determine the cause in some of these deaths.

 Lilly Rush and Kat Miller are handed a case where an infant died.  Something isn’t right though, the child was wet when her father picks up the infant from the crib.  The team delve into his case by interviewing the infant’s now divorced parents and older brother.

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Nothing was obvious about this case.  The mother and father had a loving marriage until the baby girl was born prematurely.  Then she required a lot of care.

The first suspect is a Hispanic nanny who had lost her own son to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrom).  She now heads a SIDS support group.  The boy (now man) remembers the nanny trying to baptize the infant girl to “save her soul”.  However, the nanny has an alibi for that day.  She mentions the babysitter would slip cough syrup into the boy’s water to make him sleepy so that the babysitter’s boyfriend could come over for some sex.

 Focus moves to the babysitter who says there is no way she did it and that they should look at the father who was having an affair with his wife’s business partner.  Only he grew a conscience and broke it off… the business partner wasn’t particularly happy.

 The father is cleared of suspicion and the business parter is rather quickly as well.  She points back to the husband/father who was heard by his wife over the baby monitor saying “Did you hurt her?  What did you do?”  He confesses that he found his young son stood over the baby and she was wet and not breathing.  Lilly catches the fact that the mobile was turned on–the boy at that age couldn’t reach the mobile so it couldn’t have been him.

 This leaves the mother.  It turns out she was in the throes of severe postpartum depression.  She took the infant girl outside into the snow storm because it had snowed the night the girl was born.  The snow might cleanse them all.  Unfortunately, the mother falls asleep and the infant dies in the cold.

Something about this case screamed “the mother did it” all the way.  Even when they kept throwing other evidence out there, the mother still didn’t sit right with me.  So I wasn’t surprised at all when she was determined to have caused her child’s death.   Now why when they found the baby (she was still wet after all) didn’t the focus more on her body temperature?  Sure the nursery window was open, but I would bet that a hypothermia victim has a much lower body temperature than an infant wrapped in blankets inside a house with a window cracked open.  That didn’t set right with me.

 I do have one quesiton about another aspect of this night’s show.

Who is Ray?  Lilly’s cell phone keeps ringing - Ray is calling.  She finally takes the call and finds that Ray has been badly beaten and is in the hospital, so she goes to the hospital to see him.

Now I did miss last week’s Cold Case.  Instead of airing it as scheduled in Vermont, they aired the political debate between Bernie Sanders and Rich Tarrant.  So if Ray was featured in that episode, it explains the gap.  Otherwise, I couldn’t place Ray at all.