Words for My Enjoyment

The Procedural Cop Shows of My Dreams Have Stupid Characters

November 25th, 2006

Picture this.

A group of city cops are faced with a disturbing scenario. A woman’s body has been found in the alley behind their nighttime haunt — a bar where all the cops go to hang after a hard day’s work. Her body, it seems, was tossed from the attic window above the bar, and was dead before it hit the ground. Two of the the most intelligent cops (played by Grey’s Anatomy’s Isaiah Washington and actor Forrest Whittaker) believe that someone frequenting the bar is the murderer.

Little do they know, they’re instincts are correct…and the person at fault is a total idiot.

Forrest Whittaker does some snooping around the facility. He agrees with Isaiah Washington that if the murderer did indeed throw the body out the upstairs window, he might have bumped his head on the low ceiling as they were tossing the body out the window. This means, of course, that there might be some skin or DNA flake remnants left on the ceiling area. If they could just do a quick sweep of the area, they might be able to find the evidence they need to catch the criminal.

Isaiah Washington, although annoyed he didn’t come up with the idea, agrees to help Forrest.

Meanwhile, downstairs — one of the bar patrons seems to be getting nervous. He has no name, but everyone knows him — he’s a washed up cop who got kicked off the force and now spends all his time getting liquored up here at the cop’s bar. He’s not too pleased with I & F’s current exploration of the upstairs area of the bar, and people around him are starting to notice it as well. Could he have had something to do with the woman’s murder?

Upstairs, I & F have found something extremely suspicious.

There, on the low ceiling right at the upstairs window, a small rubbing of skin and hair. Brown hair! Well, it isn’t long before the rest of the cops downstairs at the bar drag our unnamed ex-cop upstairs so he can be interrogated by the giddily-evil Isaiah Washington, who quickly announces that our unnamed ex-cop potential criminal is obviously at fault. (He apparently can sniff DNA skin evidence and immediately tell you who it belongs to.) And what do you expect…after some man-handling and threatening looks — ex-cop criminal admits that he did it.

But why?

“I’ve fallen on hard times,” he begins. “If you hadn’t noticed, I got kicked off the force. Shoved to the curb. Removed from the equation. Then the bills started to stack up and I didn’t have money to take care of my kids. Before long, I was hungry, wandering around down near the docks when I noticed a body floating in the water. I fished out the body and ate it. I ate it all.”

Isaiah Washington and Forrest Whittaker are stunned. But then Forrest Whittaker’s clever character realizes that this is a total lie. “If you ate her, then how did we find an entire body out in the alley!?”

Ah-HA!

The ex-cop, criminal fake-eating floating woman-body guy sits for a moment. Completely confused. Dumbfounded. These damn cops are just too good! He stammers for a minute and then let’s out the real reason behind the killing. “I came up here to look at the city lights when I caught her looking at the city lights and it was my thing and she absconded my city light looking and so I pushed her out the window to get back at her.”

Of course, clever jaded Isaiah Washington knows that can’t be true. “For you can’t see the city lights from this window,” he tells him. “All you can see is the brick wall of the adjacent building.”

Da..da..DUM!

Once again, the clever clever intelligent smarty-pants detective cop guys are so way ahead of our ex-cop stupid killer down-on-his-luck guy. He can’t believe it. Two perfectly good excuses and he’s been bested at every turn. He figures he’ll try just one last time and throws out a whopper: he knows absolutely nothing about what happened and they can’t prove a damn thing and that DNA isn’t a conclusive piece of evidence.

Isaiah and Forrest stand for a moment, contemplating. They pull each other off to the side and that’s when the real surprise occurs. “He just may have a point,” says Isaiah. “DNA isn’t a conclusive piece of evidence.” But Forrest won’t have it. “That’s hogwash,” he says. “DNA is so too a conclusive piece of evidence.”

Off to the side, our ex-cop, fast-talking DNA-knowing criminal pipes up: “DNA is so not a conclusive piece of evidence.”

Everyone stands around for a moment and then some cop we haven’t heard from yet in the entire dream decides he wants his SAG card so he says, “Aw hell guys…remember when we all used to be friends? Can’t we just put this all behind us and grab some beers?” And then everyone agrees, laughing, as they pat each other on the back and head downstairs for a night of drinking, darts and old stories.

Yes, the procedural cop shows of my dreams sure do have stupid characters.

Posted under Dreams, Forrest Whittaker, Isaiah Washington, Stupid Criminals, Television, Virtual Murder. |