Ep. 6.06 The Dealer

[TVFan]

LILLY AND THE TEAM INVESTIGATE THE 1981 CASE OF A MISSING SINGLE MOTHER AFTER HER BODY IS FOUND IN THE TRUNK OF A CAR, ON "COLD CASE," SUNDAY, NOV. 2

Lilly Rush: Kathryn Morris
Scotty Valens: Danny Pino
Lt. John Stillman: John Finn
Nick Vera: Jeremy Ratchford
Will Jeffries: Thom Barry
Kat Miller: Tracie Thoms
Donna D'Amico '81: Frankie Ingrassia
Bruce Donnelly '81: Todd Cahoon
Mikey Thompson '81: Peter Dobson
Marisa D'Amico '08: Kim Director
Paula '08: Susan Giosa
Paula '81: Melissa Strom
Marisa D'Amico '81: Natalie Dye
Oscar Anderson '81: Arye Gross
Sanil Hindocha '81: Ronobir Lahiri
Frank Wilson '81: Andy Comeau
Mickey Thompson '08: Kevin Dobson
Bruce Donnelly '08: John Callahan
Esteban '81: Alejandro Patino
Oscar Anderson '08: Richard Portnow
Sanil Hindocha '08: Ajay Mehta
Frank Wilson '08: James Shanklin

WRITTEN BY: Greg Plageman (Executive Producer)

DIRECTED BY: Chris Fisher

[Naj]

I'm unlocking this thread. Please do not vote in the poll or begin discussion until after the episode has aired.

[socceroos]

The Amazing race seems to be running late what time is cold case going to start

[SamIam]

cold case started on time

[longislanditalian2]

Hmm, I was somehow very bored with this episode or impressed. To me this was just a filler episode.

[Electrophile]

It was good. Not bad, not great. Just good. I actually found myself losing focus while watching the episode, because there was nothing significant to hold my interest. Donna was a likeable person but no one else was. I thought the beginning was just awful and the end was boring.


The music is what saved the episode and upgraded it from okay to good.

[SamIam]

I gave this episode a good. I just watched it and i really liked it. The one thing im kind of bummed abut is that they haven't had much about the detectives' personal lives or as much emotion in the past couple epidodes. The murder was mostly about work. There wasn't much that held my interest. No drama. Maybe next weeks will be better.

[coldfan74]

Boring. Sorry.
But I have to agree that the music choice was excellent.
What memories. I did like the flashback effects..faded saturated tone to give that early 80's feel.
All my old photos at that time have that same coloration.
and Vera was hysterical in this one
Journey has the best soundtracks for everything

"One Small Step"'s preview looked like a good one. Looking forward to it

[Electrophile]

I will say the one part of the episode that had me half-laughing was Vera's interrogation of Mickey. I thought he made a very convicing used car salesman and you could almost see in Mickey's eyes, Vera was playing his old tricks right back on him. It really reminded me of the opening scene when Mickey was having a sales meeting with the staff; the same mannerisms, the same language.....it was pretty good.

I thought the likening a police interrogation to selling a car was pretty apt, once they broke it down. You can see how in both cases, you're trying to sell something and hope the other person blinks first.

[SamIam]

i liked the interogation too. vera's so good at getting stuff out of people.

[socceroos]

Boring episode, did not like it at all. I am going to rewatch last weeks episode to try and get rid of the disappointment of this weeks episode.

[stonecold44]

Maybe it's just me but I liked this one. The beginning, where they had a sales meeting was right out of Glengarry Glen Ross when Alec Baldwin used many of the same lines.
I agree about the music. I love music from that era and if I count right, that's 3 Journey songs used as closing themes; Schadenfreude (Don't Stop Believin'), Baby Blues (Open Arms) and this one. All episodes from 1981-1982.
What kept my interest might have been the parallel to Glengarry Glen Ross. And Nick's interrogation was just hilarious. It also didn't hurt that the actress that played Donna was very attractive, even if she looked older than a 22 year old.
Watch this clip:

[Electrophile]

For me what made the episode so lackluster was the lack of drama.....there was no sitting on the edge of one's seat, no surprise twist, finding out who the killer was ended up being a little anti-climactic and it fell short. At least for me.

I could understand why Oscar killed Donna, he was jealous that she was out there making money and he was stuck washing cars and even worse, a car that he had already sold to someone, she sold to someone else without knowing. I can see how that would have hurt him. But that whole ending scene that showed the murder was just flat IMO.

[boxman]

If you live in Philly or been to Philly, then it's probably obvious to you that the show doesn't always film here. But you gotta love how they drop some durn accurate Philly names.

Elmwood, the location where Donna's body was found, is a neighborhood in Southwest Philly, not very far from Philly Intl Airport. It's where a lot of both new car dealers and auto junk yards are located.

I'm not sure if the "Wawa on Ridge Avenue" was ever a Goodwill, but it definitely does exist. "Wawa" is the name of a Philly-area convenience store, very similar to 7-Eleven. "Wawa" is named after a small town to the southwest of Philly, which gets it's name from the Native American name of a goose that is common in the area. "Ridge Avenue" can be considered the "Main Street" of Roxborough, a Northwest Philly neighborhood.

Cars and anything Automotive tend to connote criminality in this series, so it's nice to see them continue with this symbolism in Season Six. Not only was the victim's body found in a car, but Donna was also murdered in a garage area with a tire iron, and the auto dealership was a hotbed of sleazy criminal activity.

This is also one of the only episode I can recall where they actually had several actors speak with the "Philly Accent" to some degree or another. Did any of you find it hard to understand and follow? I'm curious of what people thought about the accent, especially you European fans.

ETA: Oh, and Cadillacs! Like in this episode, if you ever find yourself magically transported into Cold Case World, stay away from Caddys! Throughout this series, that brand of automobile tends to have negative, tragic consequences for it's drivers and people who stand near them. ;D

---

I have to rate this one as an "okay" episode.

I have pretty much always owned used cars. As a guy who fixes his own vehicles, I'm actually very familiar with the junkyards on and near Passyunk Avenue, near Elmwood where Donna's body was found.

One of the things that's going on in this world is that commodity prices have skyrocketed. As a result, none of the junkyards like to keep older cars anymore. If a car is more than say 15 years old, it goes to the metal crusher because the recyclable steel and iron is more valuable than the salvaged used parts. I just know from experience that a car from the 80s is hard enough to find in a junkyard, and a car from the 70s is nearly impossible to find these days. As a result, the whole premise of this case just felt implausible.

I also thought of the Caylee Anthony case in Florida. Wouldn't a decomposing body in a car trunk simply have stunk? I'm sure in the first several months of the murder, someone would've both noticed and wondered about it. After all, it's not too unusual to hide a dead body in a car trunk....

Another thing that was a little annoying to me was all the handheld camera filming in the flashbacks. I'm not really sure why all that was necessary. For me it made the fast-talking salesmen even more harder to follow with the shifting visuals.

I still loved the performances of all the guest actors, both the past and the current characters. They helped to keep this episode afloat for me. And of course, the Vera interrogation was excellent. Still, in the end I didn't feel that the episode really meshed.

[coldfan74]

Boxman:
Yea i was going to ask if those accents sounded authentic
i noticed they were "trying" but not being a east coast dweller..i have no clue how bad or good it was

[Electrophile]

I don't think they do a good enough job of making it sound like the show is set in Philly. Every now and again they'll trot someone out with an accent, but for the most part.....the characters/actors sound like they could be from anywhere. It's obviously going to be hard to find Philly born and bred actors to play the parts in every episode, but couldn't they have a dialect coach on hand or something?

I do cringe when I hear actors attempt a Chicago accent. That one is very unique and unless you're from there (like me), you'll never hit it right.

[irishkale]

This was an OK episode. For me, it was sorta flat in the first half, but got much better in the 2nd half.

The flaw I think in the first half was that they went into too much detail involving the nuts-and-bolts of how the various scams worked at the dealership. It became WAY too confusing to try to follow who did what, who was involved in what, etc. It just required too much to keep track of. I think that's where alot of people (myself included) begin to tune out. It became more of a mathematical thing than an emotional thing.

An episode that handled this much better was "Greed" (ep 1.20); we weren't told how the various stock or investment scams worked, we just were told that people "lost all their money." I didn't need a degree in finance to understand the episode, I just needed to know the emotional weight of the consequences.

Also some of the dialog was difficult to understand! Whether it was the accents of the salesman, or the lingo, I just couldn't figure out what was going on in some situations (i.e. the check-writing guy? What? huh?)

In the 2nd half, the episode became much more interesting to me, starting with the "piano revelation." Although I might have to deduct a point or two for the painfully overused "my-mom-deserted-me-too" line from Lilly. There was also a very poignant scene between the victim & her daughter sitting at the piano that I thought was really good. The actress "Frankie Ingrassia" who played the victim was really really good in that scene.
The Vera interrogation scene reminds me why I love Jeremy Ratchford . I liked the commentary from the shrewd salesman who compared his high-pressure techniques to those of the detectives.

The supporting cast was great (arye gross and Richard "Howard Stern's Dad" Portnow.) I liked seeing some indian actors too.
I thought the ending scene with Oscar 2008 (Portnow) was really great... He was sort of doing the Death of a Salesman thing where he tries to keep a chipper attitude all the while he's slowly turning to mush inside.

It had its ups and downs but I think the episode finished stronger than it started! So I have to give it a rating of "Good."

[cellogal]

Didn't love it, didn't hate it. The music was really awesome, which surprised me; I don't usually go for music of that era, but I found myself really digging it.

Vera's interrogation rocked, and I like how Lilly was able to reference her past without getting all angsty about it. She was simply using it as a common thread to connect with Marissa. Well done.

I agree with those who have said that there was too much sales jargon; I got confused with the various scams and found it kind of hard to follow. I got the gist of the case, but it would have been nice had I had a clue what the salespeople were talking about.

I pegged Oscar as the doer right away simply because Arye Gross was the only actor I recognized from anywhere. Also, he was the only one I didn't immediately hate, leading me to figure that there'd be some sort of heated confrontation at the end for some fairly innocuous, yet completely understandable reason and then, inexplicably, he'd whack her upside the head with a conveniently-placed blunt object. Kinda took away the suspense.

[Naj]

I was so bored with this ep I went to bed around 9:30. I know that's early but it felt like 10:30 with the time change. I will try to watch the rest of it today.

[Collider]

This, for me, was the first 'weak link' episode of the season. Up till now, even the episodes that I've not been enthralled by, or which have contained elements I didn't like, still have an underlying watchability... but this one just did nothing for me.

Which isn't to say there was anything particularly bad about it (though, for some reason, Lilly seemed to revert back to the Lilly that irritates me and makes me want to throw things at her, so that might have had something to do with it, too) - it was just outright bland and forgettable.

That said, there was one highlight definitely worth noting - Vera's interview with Mickey. This season has been really strong with interview scenes so far - every episode thus far has thrown out at least one stand-out interview (except Wednesday's Women, which was just so awesome throughout, you can't really single out any interview moments)... and this one was no exception on that score. For me, that interview outright made the episode watchable. Fabulous writing, fabulous delivery, fabulous acting.

Oh, and the music. BRILLIANT song choices throughout, and it gets about a zillion bonus points for ending with Journey. ;D