“New Tricks” is a BBC television
series about a London police department that looks into old, unsolved crimes.
It’s called “New Tricks” because the three detective inspectors are retired
police officers, old dogs learning new tricks. Their boss is Detective Superintendent
Sandra Pullman, whom they call Guv.
This week’s episode was about the
unexplained death of a rising young tennis star, whom I’ll call Cathy because I
can’t remember her name. She fell from the balcony of her sixth-floor apartment
after losing a match. Someone wants the case reopened; Cathy’s death may not
have been a suicide after all.
Reading for this course and reflecting
on movies and TV dramas is opening my eyes to things I’ve never noticed. For
instance, TV detective dramas, because they’re about uncovering the truth of a
crime, are highly moral spectacles. They’re like medieval morality plays, which
dramatize the battle between the forces of good and evil in the human soul. In
the genre of detective dramas, there is a pattern: truth is uncovered one
particle at a time until a complete picture of the crime emerges and the
perpetrator is sent to punishment.
In the sad case of Cathy, there was
an accumulation of evils. Her father was a gambling addict. He abandoned his
wife Victoria and his daughters Cathy and Jess when the girls were six and one.
Victoria sent first Cathy and then Jess to Nick Hoyle for free tennis lessons
when they turned seven. On Cathy’s fourteenth birthday, he initiated a sexual
relationship with her. She wasn’t the only one. In Cathy’s last match she
played opposite her friend Fawn. The mothers of the girls…. Well, I’ll cut to
the chase. Cathy throws the match to save her father, who otherwise is in
mortal danger due to gambling debts. She tells Fawn about the affair with Hoyle
and says she wants to stop because it’s wrong. Then, in an argument with her
mother, her mother accidentally pushes her off the balcony. What I’ve left out
is the number of people who are invested in these young girls for reasons of
money.
In my post on Monday, I wondered
whether every movie had a turn of dialogue that operated as a sort of fulcrum in
the story. Come to find out that Aristotle thought of this first. He calls it
anagnorisis, which in Greek means recognition. Cuddon writes that anagnorisis
is “the moment of recognition (of truth) when ignorance gives way to knowledge.
According to Aristotle, the ideal moment of anagnorisis coincides with
peripeteia, or reversal of fortune.”
Sandra Pullman and Det. Insp. Jerry
Stanley descend on Fawn as she practices alone in a tennis workout room. Fawn
wants the truth to come out and answers all their questions, until her mother
arrives and tells her to stop talking. Her mother is afraid that the scandal
will wreck Fawn’s future as a tennis star. Fawn says to the detectives, “I
don’t know what to do.” She is caught between two goods, truth and obedience.
Jerry, who has a grown daughter and worries—in spite of the show’s hints that over-ambitious
parents can be harmful—that he didn’t push his daughter enough to develop her
football (soccer) talents—says, “Do what you think is the right thing to do.”
Jerry is on the side of right conduct. Fawn overrides her mother’s objections
and tells them everything she knows. It isn’t the last word, but it is the
turning point in the fortunes of the investigation.
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