BODY OF PROOF: And When We Say Devil, We Don’t Mean Nancy Grace

If there’s anything Body of Proof has taught me, it’s that I never, ever, ever want Megan Hunt to get angry at me. Or Kate Murphy. Actually, I’ll just stick all of this under the same umbrella of “I fear strong, independent women with tempers. And I hope they can be bought off with delicious cookies.”

Sympathy for the Devil (which aired on Jan 17) is one of the strongest showings of Body of Proof to date. The case is one ripped from the headlines: the victim of the week is a flimsy facsimile of Casey Anthony, recently declared not guilty of murdering her daughter Caylee. Tina Stone, acquitted of the murder of her five-year-old son, Simon, is the victim this week. In addition, the judge that granted Stone’s acquittal is Judge Joan Hunt, mother of Megan and up for reelection. So before we even finish digging up the body (and there is a body that has been buried alive), this case is personal.

Another complication comes in the form of Sheila Temple (guest star Marcia Gay Harden), overeager reporter for the law news magazine show, Temple of Justice. Temple is out for a good story—and blood, judging by how quick she is to smear anything and anybody involved in the Stone family case. The episode is framed as though viewers are watching the case through an episode of Temple of Justice, which looks like it could genuinely be airing on Court TV (unlike the real Nancy Grace, though, no nip slips here).

Bud is solo on the case, as Sam is at a wedding in Harrisburg. The body of Tina Stone is discovered by a jogger in a construction site. Rain the night before has washed away signs of the killer…but not the blood on the out-in-the-open backhoe that leads Peter to conclude Tina must have hit her head (Peter is my least favorite character on this show, but I will try to give him as fair of a shake as I can). Ripped underwear means Tina was likely sexually assaulted, too.

The minute the media finds out Tina Stone is the victim, the real circus begins, up to and including news choppers. Megan and her team patiently extract Tina with paintbrushes a la archaeologists so they can get her back to the lab and the examination can begin. It should also be noted that Megan is wearing cute boots in this scene—just for the record.

Once the body is examined, it’s a matter of gathering up the usual suspects to come and explain things like bruising around Tina’s neck, a gash on her leg, and contusions on her lower back. First up: Tina’s mother, the sympathetic Ruth Stone who must be escorted from her car or else she’ll get eaten by the mob. She paints a very human picture of the flawed Tina. Next: DNA results from the rape kit lead them to Chris, the father of dead Simon and Tina’s high-school boyfriend. He claims he put the bruises on her (she liked it rough), but that he didn’t kill her. His alibi is that she dropped by his place for sex and when he woke up, she was gone.

Results from the lab tell them where Tina went: there’s a foreign substance in the gash on her leg that Peter un-ironically and instantly recognizes as something they use on boat windows. All because his dad wanted a boat. Because Peter was adopted since his dad wanted a boy and then his parents couldn’t afford it. Let’s all share in his manly pain for a moment.

Anyway, man-pain session mercifully brief, they find the boat at a marina about a mile away from where Tina’s body was found. Twist: it belongs to one of the prison guards, Tanya, that befriended Tina. Tina purportedly ran to her after sleeping with her ex; Tanya gave her a friendly cocktail of a couple of sedatives…and then proceeded to lock her in with a combo lock. It doesn’t take much for Megan and Peter to realize that somebody else was in the boat at some point, and dandruff on the pillow puts them right in front of the camera with Sheila Temple herself.

Now begins the fun part. I mentioned earlier that I love Dana Delany, and this episode gives her the opportunity to cross swords with quite a few people. First up: Dr. Ethan Gross, usually quite sympathetic and funny. Today, however, he’s unhappy that they’re having to stand up for an acquitted killer, and in his defiance becomes rather belligerent, not taking as much care with procedure and talking back to Megan.

The next foe is Sheila Temple herself, whom Megan faces off with a few times. Marcia Gay Harden is a wonderful actress, and to see her con Bud in this episode and chase down any leads she can—morals be damned—is amazing to watch. I know several reporters just like her. Her plan here was evidently to convince the prison guard to lock Tina in the boat so that she could get an exclusive interview; too bad Tina freaked and broke through the window, gashing her leg in the process. B-Roll from her footage—and a very fun legalese back and forth that I’m sure had many lawyers groaning—sends Megan and Bud off to investigate a red herring.

With all leads panning out to nowhere, it’s back to what Megan does best: studying the body. She struggles with a misplaced kidney and fractured rib—and discover that Ethan has screwed up processing the body and the organs. And then comes the dressing down of epic proportions. You do not screw with Megan Hunt’s case. I’m a little surprised that Ethan even tried (see first paragraph if you’re puzzled as to why). Yes, Stone was acquitted on a technicality, but all signs point to her killing her five-year-old and dumping his body in the river. What happens when the person on the operating table has allegedly performed despicable acts and has gotten away scot-free? According to Megan Hunt, you do your job.

The thing that amuses me about the Ethan storyline is that he’s doing exactly the same thing that led to Tina being acquitted of her son’s murder in the first place. Megan makes the throwaway line about the prosecution failing to submit evidence that they lost, and you get the feeling that Tina’s case was also lost—because Joan was required to do her job, just like Megan is here. It’s one of the neater parallels set up throughout the episode.

The other parallel I liked comes into play in the final arc. Thanks to Ethan finally sorting out the evidence—after an awesome talking-to from Kate Murphy (does he realize how lucky he is? That stunt would have led to other techs being fired. And holy frijoles, Batman, he gets to work for 7 of 9!)—they track down the type of car that would have dumped Tina at the crime scene, and figure out that Tina would have suffered from a very sharp deceleration. To me, this means that somebody forced her to take a long walk off a short cliff, but apparently deceleration is also the thing that happens when you stop a car really, really fast and your mom puts her arm out to stop you from getting hurt.

And that is the parallel seen here: when a voter gets rowdy with Joan and Megan at the booths, Joan does the same move to protect Megan, which makes Megan realize that Ruth, Tina’s mother, was the one to take Tina to the construction site. When they get to Ruth’s house, she seems to know it’s over. She requests to see her daughter (that she inadvertently buried alive) so that she could confess everything: she figured out Tina had killed her son, but the death itself was accidental. Tina hit her head on the backhoe and fell and she wasn’t moving, so Ruth covered her up.

Other Things I Noticed But Didn’t Fit Into My Narrative:

• It’s nice that the show remembers Megan’s roots as a brain surgeon; it was fitting that one of the first things she wanted to do was dissect Tina’s brain to see if there was something there causing the behavior. Write what you know, or, I guess in the terms of surgery it would be slice what you know?
• This is the second week in a row without Lacey. Not complaining, but it did seem interesting that they cast Megan in the daughter role rather than the mother one.
• I didn’t really talk about him in the recap/review, but Wendell Middlebrooks is one of my all-time favorite people thanks to this show. The man makes me giggle like nothing else; I hope he has more to do next episode. His scaring the reporters back into the elevators is a scene that should be watched on a loop.
• One of my favorite things about Megan is that she’s such a classy dresser. You can watch a great video on the fashion of this episode on the ABC website.

Overall Rating: 9/10

Body of Proof airs 10/9c on Tuesdays on ABC. The next episode is called Love Bites and doesn’t have an air-date yet. I’m hoping it’s to do with either puppies or vampires.