BODY OF PROOF: Shut the Freezer Door!

So this recap is over a week late. I know a lot of people don’t watch Body of Proof, which makes me sad because it’s a well-acted hour of TV that includes snappy dressers and snappier comebacks. The fact that this recap is so late is pretty much inexcusable. Does that mean I don’t have an excuse? Of course not. It’s just a lame one. Want to hear it?

Okay, here it is: I went down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and spent more time collecting beads than I did thinking about Megan Hunt. I watched this episode with two friends before I left. Friend the first watches Body of Proof, but calls the characters by the actors’ names. Friend the second, despite having excellent taste otherwise to debate Castle and Chuck with me, has never seen an episode of Body of Proof. They also talked a lot and I missed a great deal and didn’t have a DVR so I couldn’t rewatch until this week. For this, I must do penance. You can leave the best penance ideas for me in the comments.

On to the recap!

Ryan, Delany, and the crew freeze for their art!

Our episode starts in a restaurant kitchen. I love kitchens! They’re for fight scenes! Rather than a fight, however, a young woman named Natalie unloads boxes on a dolly, muscles open a freezer, drops a box, touches a counter-top—and goes flying through the air, making me wonder if there was an invisible ninja kicking her in the chest. Her flight does not end well: not only does she land in a freezer, said freezer is occupied by a dead body.

Peter and Megan show up to explain: it was a live wire, not an invisible ninja. Aw, shucks. Maybe next time. Peter’s supposition is that the killer was helping them out by freezing the crime scene, but Megan and her fabulous shoes are quick to kick that puppy of a theory. The fact that the body has been frozen means that simply thawing it out will cause the body to decompose faster. So Megan tells Peter to get “an art gallery” worth of pictures of the crime scene. The team will have to get creative this time, which is cold comfort at best (see what I did there?).

Okay, so the rundown: the body is Joe Sanella, owner of Sanella’s. The suspects: wife Maria (Frea’s friend: “Oh! Her! She played…oh, I forgot, she was the mother on that one show, which show was it—” Frea, while looking at unopened IMDB app on her phone, “Don’t know what to tell you.” Sometimes Frea is mean). Maria’s brother Henry Pedroni (a Voyager reunion! Robert Picardo!) founded Sanella’s with Joe years before. Natalie, who didn’t get kicked in the chest by an invisible ninja. Anthony Pedroni, Henry’s son. And of course, there’s the delightfully sleazy Annabelle Kip (Azita Ghanizada). Oh, yeah, Anthony has a wife, too. She’s important. Got our round-up? Okay, let’s see how lost I can get before I just give up and tell you who did it.

First lead: Peter and Bud (flying solo without Sam) use Luminol to deduce out that the crime happened outside the freezer. They find bloody footprints leading away from the crime scene, up stairs, and…into a bathroom where Henry is frantically washing away blood on his shoes. You can see the shock and the finally. An open and shut case! on their faces as they gaze into Henry’s startled visage.

Only: it’s not. Megan uses her brain science to recognize signs of dementia in Henry, making him an unreliable witness and a possible murderer. A single drop of blood on Joe’s pants tests positive for the sickle cell anemia gene (more commonly found in African-Americans) and points the finger at Natalie, but she claims that she cheese-grated her own finger the week before and Joe helped clean it up. She also reveals something important: she couldn’t move up in the ranks because this was a family restaurant and she wasn’t family. Anthony, Henry’s son, has the opposite problem: he never wanted the restaurant, but with his father ailing, he moved back from California to help run things.

Henry Pedroni (Picardo) and Maria Sanella (Donna Pescow)

Twist! They can’t figure out the cause of death because there are three or four of them. They do figure out that Joe was clubbed with a meat grinder, but there’s petechial hemorrhaging on his eyes and eyelids (Google tells me that this is a common sign of asphyxiation), and his body is bright red, which, Peter helpfully narrates for the audience, is symptom of hypothermia. This man is a Smorgasbord of medical mystery! In addition, they have to do their work in a temperature-regulated cold room in the morgue, meaning they all get to work in parkas. Megan pulls something from Joe’s airway: a bit of sausage with interesting bacteria growing on it.

Team Megan and the doomed Sanella in the coldest room in the Morgue!

Okay, this is twisty, so here’s the breakdown: the sausage Megan found blocking Joe’s lungs had the Terminator of bacteria growing on it. This bacteria cannot be killed, even by the lab accidentally radiating one of the cultures. Ethan corrects everybody that they don’t call it the Terminator, they call it Conan, and it’s all Arnold to me anyway, but that, and the fact that Henry also mistakes Megan for Alice, enables the team to discover that it’s not their prime suspect Anthony that killed Joe. It’s his wife, whose name I can’t remember and isn’t listed anywhere, so we’ll call her Mrs. Anthony, who was at the organic farm where she picked up the bacteria. Got it?

Mrs. Anthony got the specs from Sleazy Annabelle Kip and tried to convince Joe to sell the place. Joe, however, gave her a harsh bit of reality: she would never fully be part of the family. Mrs. Anthony lost it, clubbed Joe on the back of the head with a meat hammer, heard Henry coming, panicked, dragged him into the freezer where she held her hand over his mouth to keep him quiet after he started choking on the sausage. He inhaled the bacteria, bled a lot, and then ultimately froze to death. Got all of that?

The good thing is, this story has a happy ending for everybody else. Megan figures out that Henry doesn’t really have Alzheimer’s but instead an excess buildup of spinal fluid applying pressure on his brain. Of course, her usual (lack of) charm (despite Kate’s awesome warnings) means that she butts heads with Maria first about Henry’s diagnosis. But a simple 45-minute shunt surgery and the Doctor—er, Henry is good as new and ready to run Sanella’s with his sister Maria, freeing Anthony not to work in the restaurant that drove his wife to murder. So…yay?

Oh, right, there’s a B-plot, but it involves Peter, so I’ll sum up quickly. The agency Peter hired to find his birth parents located his father. Dani persuades him to meet his father, who’s lived in the area the whole time, for drinks. The meeting doesn’t go well, but Peter does find out that he was a teenage pregnancy and his birth mother died of complications the day after, and he gets her picture. It’s closure of a sort, even if Peter does passive-aggressively blame Dani for pressuring him into going. Shut up, Peter.

And now that I’m done, I’m hungry for Italian food. Anybody else?

Body of Proof airs on ABC at 10/9c on Tuesdays. Frea’s recaps…air sometime later than that.