NBC gave Chase a break last week, so it’s been too long since we’ve been able to come together to discuss the ongoing adventures of U.S. Marshal Annie Frost and her team. But fear not — it appears that we’ll have plenty of chances to come. The network has picked the show up for a full season.
In this week’s episode, entitled “The Posse,” our heroine tracked down a vigilante who was pretending to be a marshal himself. There was a lot of talk about how the guy was short, about how that had led him to be bullied a lot growing up, and about how his “Napoleon complex” helped explain why he’d gone off on a murderous rampage.
The last episode’s will they/won’t they romantic question marks were only partly addressed. We watched Annie wake up with her dog next to her in bed, not that incorrigible rake Bounty Hunter Ben. But our suspicions were confirmed that Daisy’s bedroom eyes did indeed lead her and Luke into the bedroom. They woke up together at her place, and it was apparently the first time, since Luke didn’t know whether she had a spare toothbrush he could use.
The vigilante bad guy, Bob McGraw — a failed cop who had passed himself off as a marshal while working in a small-town sheriff’s office for several months — started the episode by gunning down two people on a country road near Waco. While Annie and her team raided his mother’s townhouse — and Jimmy taught us a valuable lesson about the proper type of firearm to carry when one is raiding a townhome. (Don’t opt for the 9 mm. Walls are too thin) — McGraw hunted down a pedophile who was working an ice cream truck near a playground in the town of Meridian. He shot the guy, as well as a bystander by accident.
By the time Annie’s team got there, McGraw had moved on and taken up with some Minutemen (those guys who fancy themselves the rightful protectors of America’s frontier). “We’ve got to secure the border, or this country’s going to hell in a tortilla basket,” one of them says. McGraw deputizes this new “posse” as “special deputy U.S. marshals,” a distinction that the group of fellows gets way too excited about. He hires a moving truck to carry them down to Laredo where they tie up a bunch of illegal aliens in the back of a resale store. (They’re actually in a shop in Seagoville.)
But that whole enterprise is merely a trick that McGraw has concocted to lead Annie Frost in the wrong direction. He leaves the Minutemen before the marshals arrive and heads to Houston, where he waits inside Annie’s spectacular loft apartment for her to come home. (We now know that our lovely crime-fighter hangs her hat in the former West End Marketplace building.) When she gets home, he gets the drop on her, handcuffs her, and steals her gun and badge. After he makes his escape, she commandeers a passing station wagon, and we’re treated to a car chase through the Cedars neighborhood, with downtown Dallas towering prominently in the background. (They pass a number of points of interest, including the intersection of Powhattan and Peters streets, with Reunion Tower clearly visible behind them. Then they proceed down to Akard.)
McGraw manages to elude Annie by fooling local cops into stopping her, and it’s only after returning to talk to the sheriff for whom McGraw had worked that the marshals figure out that their fugitive is looking to bust the criminals who had escaped justice during his time as a fake lawman. With this tip, they track him to the apartment of a suspected murderer. (This too was supposed to be in Houston, but it’s actually in a building on Belleview Street, again in the Cedars. But when Annie chased McGraw onto the roof, they were miraculously a few blocks away, on top of South Side on Lamar. Both spots are close to where the earlier car chase took place.)
Anyway, Annie finally shot McGraw, who remained proud of his fake law enforcement career to the end because he’d gotten the suspected murder to confess that he’d killed a girl. All he had to do to accomplish this was hang the guy upside down over the side of his apartment balcony. McGraw wasn’t killed by the bullet that struck his chest because he was wearing a bulletproof vest, of course.
The only thing missing from this episode for the hardcore Chase fan was romantic intrigue. Unless you count the subplot about the congressman who was hanging around the marshals’ office, trying to get Luke to take a job in his office. He might have been making some bedroom eyes at the rookie marshal.
So what’d you think of Annie’s loft? Do you like her interior design taste, including the longhorn skull on the wall? Why’s her dog named “59”? And can you afford a place that size on a government salary?
