Spoilers

“The Snake Lady”

A dead body. Suicide or homicide? How does a snake play into it?

Another mystery in Rome, Wisconsin that the Sheriff’s Department has to solve. But can their motives be trusted?

A woman is found dead in her home and the initial appearance is that of suicide. However, her husband, Brian, is confident that she would never have killed herself. He wanted to blame her sister, K.C., who has several pet snakes and thus dubbed ‘The Snake Lady.’

Problem… Maxine started to have feelings for Brian, to empathize with him over his situation leading to Kenny to call her out on it and tell Jimmy.

The case went through several final answers, from suicide to accidental shooting to possible murder. Poor Carter had to report each change in the case to the media which mocked him horribly over the changing case and Carter’s constant comments of being ‘nearly’ deputized.

The mystery of this episode is well done and is one of the tropes of Picket fences. There are a ton of twists and turns among the show’s mystery cases and this is no exception. Everything does come out nicely done and worked as a solution.

Again, we get conflict between our characters developed by the plot. In this case, Maxine and Kenny, who had a lovely encounter with one another last episode over Thanksgiving, immediately had their partnership tossed in the grinder.

By the way, Kenny is one damn fine shot.

The only drawback of this episode is that we never got to hear, “Douglas Wambaugh for the Snake Lady!” No Wambaugh or Judge Bone this episode. Perhaps Wambaugh is taking this episode to spend more time with his wife after last episode’s issues.

One more thing, Brian had grabbed Kenny around the throat and pushed him against the wall, and I am not sure how he did not get charged with assaulting an officer. Kenny was fully in control of the situation though and wound up hitting Brian with the handle of his gun. Still, Brian should have faced charges. “Douglas Wambaugh for the police assaulter!”