That’s the first question that comes to mind, but anything about the series is on-topic, sez me. Will Brenda be fired? Will Fritz reach the end of his saintliness? Was the depiction of Brenda’s reaction to
her mother’s death
in last week’s episode sexist?
It’ll be interesting…
I’m fairly certain it will be Gabriel, since the producers seem intent on torturing Brenda as much as possible and he’s the person on the squad she’s closest too, and also the person who most often disagrees with her ethics. Not to mention the fact that Corey Reynolds is notable for his absence in the previews for Major Crimes.
I put Pope up there as a joke. It makes no sense for him to be the mole, as it would be trivial for him to broom Brenda out anyway.
Taylor only cares about Taylor. He’s come very close to a major advancement or two. His ambition has never been bound by personal relationships. Other people at the same or lower level are to be undermined to achieve his goals. Brenda getting sanctioned doesn’t hurt him, unlike many of the others.
Do we know if Raydor knows who the mole is? She uses the mole’s info, but that by itself doesn’t mean she knows the specific source. So, what happens to the mole when the show becomes Major Crimes and she takes over?
Why is everyone against Brenda. Since she does such a good job?
Gabriel has the lawyer girlfriend who he said has been advising him. This also seemed like a set up for a future reveal that he’s the mole.
Plus, I don’t think that he is a cast member in the spin off “Major Crimes.”
Well, she has probably committed Felony Murder at least once, and broken her police duties on two occaisions I can think of by deliberately getting suspects killed.
Because she’s savage and ruthless and sends people to their deaths?
And she’s a really horribly bad person. Fritz should never have married her, and he should kill her before she drives him insane.
I should mention – I love this show. I think it’s one of the best detective shows ever. And Kyra Sedgwick is fantastic as a really horrible person who doesn’t have any real recognition of how horrible she is.
I am really going to miss this show.
Um, what’s your point?
She isn’t ruthless, though. She has plenty of compassion for some people; it’s just that there are just as many people for whom she has no compassion whatsoever.
I once made a similar same point to my older brother, who introduced me to the show. I think you’re overstating it, though; she does sometimes realize what an utter bitch she is. If I recall aright, immediately after her wedding (I mean the very end of the wedding episode), she confessed to Fritz that she realized how much nicer he was in general than her.
As to Monday’s episode: Though I predicted Gabriel’s involvement, I had forgotten about this girlfriend, so was, ah, “pleasantly” surprised by that twist. It was a much better move than having him be the mole.
She’s committed multiple serious federal and state felonies, probably.
(A) That doesn’t prevent her being ruthless. Ruthless is defined as being capable of using people you nominally care about about.
(B) There’s rather an objection to her doing these things while a serving police officer. If anyoen else had done the exact same thing, she would hound them night and day until they were put away.
(C) She’s merely cruel to the very people who support her. She will happily arrange for people’s murders if she really doesn’tlike them, as long as she can justify it to her own conscience. Of course, she doesn’t really have the courage of her secret convictions, and obsesses over actually killing someone herself.
Whoosh.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
From Merriam-Webster:
having no pity : MERCILESS, CRUEL a ruthless tyrant
Brenda isn’t ruthless. She has plenty of compassion for her victims and occasionally even for a perpetrator. Consider her reaction to the young girl held captive & gang-raped by several men, one of whom she killed to escape; not only did she refuse to turn the case over for prosecution, she was offended by the suggestion that she might. She’s felt compassion for every member of her squad at one time or another, most often Gabriel (the only one she regularly addresses by first time).
What Brenda is is relentless. Once she starts something she keeps at it until it’s done. During an investigation she has tunnel vision; she’s only barely aware of what going on around her outside of that. And yes, she is also (often) selfish and (strategically) rude. But she is far from lacking compassion. When Sanchez’s younger brother was killed, for instance, she went out of her way to protect him from the consequences of his actions in trying to find the killer.
(B) There’s rather an objection to her doing these things while a serving police officer. If anyoen else had done the exact same thing, she would hound them night and day until they were put away.
(C) She’s merely cruel to the very people who support her. She will happily arrange for people’s murders if she really doesn’tlike them, as long as she can justify it to her own conscience. Of course, she doesn’t really have the courage of her secret convictions, and obsesses over actually killing someone herself.
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I’ll allow the my use of the term ‘savage’ was over the top rhetoric, but ‘ruthless’ was not. Brenda will do pretty much anything, and use pretty much anyone, immediately and without second thought, to get what she wants. And if she can’t get a conviction against a killer, she will figure out how to get him killed. To me, the idea of single minded determination and action is a better description of ruthlessness than any about how you treat your friends differently then your enemies.
I wasn’t contesting the “savage” characterization, actually. But Brenda does have compassion for persons other than her friends. She feels for victims and their families; she feels even for some technical perps, like the girl who killed one of her rapists.
I’ll stand by calling her relentless rather than ruthless. If she believes you have committed an actual murder, she won’t stop until you’ve been punished. But if she were ruthless, she wouldn’t have cared about the little girl I mentioned upthread. If she were ruthless she would have let Gabriel resign on Monday’s episode. She’d have simply suspended Sanchez when he was having problems after his brother’s murder, and after his shooting.
I will add that Brenda is frequently morally myopic. And at no point did I deny that she is a horrible person overall, albeit with great wheels. 
Good call.
I loved The Closer and I’ll miss it. Suspenseful crime drama, plus a (mostly) true-to-life romance showing Brenda’s softer side. At first, I thought the southern accent overdone and put on simply to make the suspects think she was a silly, inept southern gal; but over time I came to appreciate her. Her supporting actors were very good also; they each had something to complement the series, and each one had personal issues that made them seem like real people. (However, I’ve wondered about Daniels; she didn’t have much of a role in any episode, and then disappeared altogether.) I loved the Provenza/Flynn relationship which provided laughs.
Major crimes: I’m watching, and it’s obvious that Capt. Rador is quite different from Brenda. But just as I gave Brenda time to grow on me, I’m watching Major Crimes with the hope that the writers will develop the Capt. Rador character that will grow on me. I noticed that she does not go out to every crime scene, as Brenda did, and delegates more. Hubby is ex-police officer and pointed out things that law enforcement agencies do not do – such as the head of the unit going to the crime scene. Okay, I get that – tv is entertainment and you can’t count on it as being true-to-life. But the “big star” and executive producer gets to play whoever he/she wants to. Capt. Rador may be more realistic.
Loved “The Closer” & although I enjoyed all the supporting players, it’s just not the same without Brenda. Love that character. I wonder if she would be criticized so much if the character were male. Has this ever been discussed?
To be fair, at times Brenda did use the Southern accent for that very purpose; likewise her oversize purse and her youth (relative to the three lieutenants on her squad, that its) and her lack of intimate knowledge.
I’ve heard that complaint before and I think there’s some truth to it. That said, I think that Brenda was simply a bad manager in some ways; she just got away with it because she was a genius as a detective.
I’ve been enjoying the retool, Major Crimes, and I like the character of Sharon Rayder, but I’ve still found myself thinking that Brenda would have solved every case quicker and more deviously, and that she could easily have adapted to the emphasis on getting plea bargains. In fact I think she’d have preferred it (after some initial grumbling) because it would have increased her control over an accused’s fate.
I don’t think she was a bad manager at all. She treated her people pretty fairly and reasonably well.
But there was something … pathological about her need to “win”, if that’s the right term. She would knowingly and deliberately send her suspects into situations where they would very likely be killed (which she also knew) if she couldn’t get the legal system to take care of them. In fact, she would do things to pretty much guarantee they would be killed.
It is a good question if the criticism would be the same if the character was male. I’m failing to recall any male cop characters who did the same as leads in a TV series. Can anyone come up with a parallel?
Oh, I agree that she was a good leader. A great leader, in fact. She came into the LAPD under difficult circumstances with a squad uniformly allied against her, and turned them all into her boosters, including the one specifically there to undermine her.
But being a manager involves dealing well with your peers and superiors as well. Brenda sucked at that.
I wouldn’t call it quite pathological, as it didn’t apply to every situation – just the murderers who most aroused her sense of righteousness. It’s just that, when you come right down to it, Brenda was a cowboy. Or maybe a knight-errant. She was just born in the wrong century.
Brenda’s crime-fighting style is not unlike that of Jethro Gibbs on NCIS (though Gibss is probably closer to his crew than she, appearances to the contrary). Gibbs doesn’t get as big a ration of shit because NCIS isn’t half as serious as The Closer, even though Gibbs has canonically committed cold-blooded murder and Brenda has not.