I don’t normally watch “Without a Trace,” but I had just come back from my parents’ house, and was hanging around my girlfriend’s place before going home. It was either this show, or the news. I hope that tonight’s episode was unusually bad, because I feel cheated. All the evidence that was presented to us on-screen pointed toward the mother as the guilty party.
First, the creepy janitor guy saw the mother being abusive toward the boy. Second, there was the flashback with the racist grandfather. That sent up a huge red flag in my mind. I understand her not wanting him involved with the boy, but still, she extorted money from him, and hid the money from her husband. That was a very, very, very suspicious thing for her to do. Third, there’s the fact that the pick-up guy ditched the transmitter only a few blocks away, suggesting that someone warned him about it. (Kidnapping-for-ransom schemes almost always end disastrously. Anyone stupid enough to think that they could pull off such a thing is probably too stupid to check for a hidden transmitter.) Lastly, the mother had an abortion, which she also hid from her husband.
While all these clues were popping up, we had a number of false leads (the possibly pedophilic janitor, the white supremacists, the gun runner) which kept the cops busy chasing dead ends. So who turned out to be the bad guy? Some dude who talked to the cops for about a minute early on, saying nothing of importance, and was nothing more than a minor character witness until the last two minutes of the episode. Terrible, terrible writing. The conclusion did not flow from the evidence we saw. As I said, the path seemed to lead directly to the mother. This conclusion was made all the more likely in my mind because the cops were completely ignoring the mounting evidence against her, setting up an “Ah Ha!” moment when one of them finally put it all together. But that moment never came.
Up until the last-minute twist, I was imagining a scenario like this: the mother regretted having a child. She wanted her old life back, the life she enjoyed before the kid came along. Using the “college fund” the grandfather provided, she hired a guy to abduct and kill her son. The ransom money was meant to be the balance of his payment. Shooting the husband was not part of the plan, but of course by this time she couldn’t do anything but keep her mouth shut and wait for the investigation to peter out. In the ending I was expecting, the cops would catch the kidnapper, who would immediately roll over and rat out the mother as being the person who hired him. Money from the college fund (his up-front payment for the job) would prove the link between mother and kidnapper. I think that would have been a far more satisfying and dramatic conclusion than the cheap Scooby Doo ending we were given.
What do you guys think? Were you disappointed with this conclusion? Is this typical of “Without a Trace,” or are other episodes better?