Spoilers

E1: “Survival of the Fittest”

E2: “Systematic Abuse”

I kicked off the third season of Picket Fences with the first two episodes. They start it off with a murder case over a sixteen year old girl named Susan. A drifter named Brian Latham had tried to pick up the girl and is arrested for the crime.

When they could not find the girl, Kenny, who had found a cross among Brian’s things, went in to see Brian and asked him to help direct the police to a place where the body might be. Kenny asked him to help, Catholic to Catholic. Brian told Kenny that he could check a pond.

Susan was in the pond, wrapped in a tarp. Wambaugh tried to get the body thrown out as fruits of a poison tree, but Judge Bone, in a surprise ruling, decided to allow the evidence anyway.

Episode two focused on the trial itself, with Littleton and Wambaugh battling in court. The show does a great job of showing the trial, with all of the testimony.

It felt clear that Brian Latham was the guilty party. There was nothing that led us to doubt that. Until the final scene that is. When Brian had been found guilty, he spoke to Kenny and told him, Catholic to Catholic, that he did not kill Susan.

What a cliffhanger. There was no question that he was the guilty party. The show went to great lengths to show that. The glances that Brian made when Wambaugh was coaching him on his testimony seemed obvious that he was understanding what he had to do.

And then… like a bomb… everything we knew about the case was flipped on its side. There was some top line writing involved here.

There was one laughable moment. The trial was being broadcast over local TV and they showed a group of boys in what looked like a locker room including Matthew watching the trial. They were arguing about what they thought of the case. This was silly. No group of 5ht graders (I think that was what Matthew was) are going to have a TV tuned in to a trial in the locker room. That scene pulled me out of the story.

Otherwise, this was a great couple of episodes that kicked off a major story for the third season.