“Owned” – aired on May 6, 2018
Written by: Jill Abbinanti
Directed by: Doug Aarniokoski
Grade: 4 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
“Owned” is a refreshing episode in terms of its narrative structure when compared to previous episodes of Instinct. We still have a central crime to solve and two B stories that center on developing our leading duo’s characters. The difference comes in the form of two extended-flashback scenes in the episode’s first act, and of other previously recorded public clips of the victim dispersed throughout the hour. Writer Jill Abbinanti and director Doug Aarniokoski – both members of Instinct’s production team – make use of these tools to show developments in the past that are relevant to the rest of the episode.
The first 12 minutes of “Owned” unloads a large amount of information at a frantic pace. Not only do we get introduced – visually or by name – to almost every character of importance to the hour including the victim, but we also meet Lt. Gooden’s fiancé David Wu (Stephen Sable) and a potential love-story candidate for Lizzie named Steve (Charlie Semine), a mechanic from Jiffy Lube. We also discover that Dylan is completely clueless about sports and the concept of fandom, as opposed to Andy who is a genuine sports fan.
The victim’s name is Abby Wright (Kate Arrington). She dies when car flies off the bridge and lands on the road below. As we begin to piece together the elaborate backstory leading to her death, we learn that she was the owner of a professional basketball team named the New York Hudsons and that our Lt. Gooden knew her and her husband Russell (Peter Hermann). In fact, Abby and Jasmine were close, long-time friends. Abby used to be an outgoing, successful, confident woman who felt at ease around people, until the last few years during which she slowly began to develop anxiety in public situations and became withdrawn. The numerous death threats and hate mail coming her way, because she is moving the team to Las Vegas, only served to exacerbate the situation. Jasmine also informs Lizzie and Dylan that Abby had stopped communicating with her during her decline.
Aarniokoski’s first-rate directorial skills come in handy in the beginning of the episode, as we get a glimpse of possible suspects in the long “earlier in the afternoon” flashback scene that takes place during an annual charity auction party held for Abby.
In the crowd, there is “Tomahawk” Sarkeysian (Rodney Richardson), an attention-seeking, controversial podcaster who, by his own admission, sneaked into the party with a waiter’s uniform. Jasmine also spots a suspicious looking man carrying a gun but loses sight of him. He turns out to be a P.I. named Yuri Minkus (Lev Gorn). Russell hired him to “protect” Abby but did not tell her because she had rejected the idea of having bodyguards.
IMDB has Lev Gorn’s character listed as Uri Marshak but Dylan and Lizzie pronounce his last name Minkus, the same as how it appears in the subtitles. In his profile screen momentarily shown in the precinct, his name is Yuri Minkus. If I am looking for accuracy, I am going with the police records, never mind the fictional nature of this precinct. The actor Lev Gorn also plays one of the most compelling and salient recurring characters on TV, The Americans’ Arkady Ivanovich. Instinctcontinues to impress with its ability to attract quality actors to appear in guest-starring roles.
The cleverly edited first ten minutes of “Owned” oscillates between Abby’s flashback scene and the one centering on the sports-related dialogues that Dylan and Andy had earlier in the day. This is helpful for the viewer because of their distinct natures. The “earlier that afternoon” flashback from Abby’s party bombards us with faces and sentences pertinent to the crime portion of the hour. Thus, the low-keyed, character-growth-oriented nature of the Dylan-Andy dialogue allows us to cool down and properly absorb the narrative.
There is also the present, where Dylan, Lizzie, and Lt. Gooden are examining the crashed car and trying to make sense of Abby’s death. The moment of the car flying off the bridge and crashing is brought to screen in a very brief, but terrific sequence, making me wonder why Instinct and other procedurals shows do not engage more often in brief glimpses of action shots. Nothing like a one-second shot of a car flying off the bridge and crashing to get your adrenaline going, especially if it’s as well-shot as this one.
By the time we get to meet Steve, the Jiffy Lube mechanic, twelve minutes have gone by and nothing felt rushed despite the fairly complex nature of the central crime. It is possibly one of the best starts to any episode of Instinct, and I add “possibly” only because I clearly remember the delightful conversations between Whoopi Goldberg’s Joan and Alan Cumming’s Dylan in the early moments of the first two episodes.
Steve and Lizzie, at Jiffy Lube, appear to be interested in each other from the first moment they meet and Dylan, of course, notices the reciprocal attraction and forms a smart-ass smile on his face. When Steve momentarily goes away, he tries to talk Lizzie into going on a date with him. Lizzie, not deviating from what we know of her character so far, pulls the “still grieving” card in a failed attempt to hide her interest. Dylan ain’t buyin’ it.
When Steve comes back, Dylan decides to “grease the wheels” as he calls it. He literally asks Steve, in front of Lizzie, and if he is single, specifying that he is “asking for a friend.” Apparently what Dylan calls “greasing the wheel” is actually one of the most pre-pre-teenager-ish, let-me-set-you-two-up moves in the history of corny fix-ups. It works, of course, even though the average age of the three people involved in the scene must at least be around late 30s, because we are in the arena of procedural TV shows and we need this B story to continue so that it can be used for character development.
Lizzie’s date with Steve fails because she worries about work and behaves awkwardly. The “hot mechanic” – as Dylan calls him – is ready to leave before they even finish their food. The plotline leads to some intimate conversations between Dylan and Lizzie during which the former shows that he genuinely cares for the well-being for his partner. In case you have not read my reviews of previous episodes, I have consistently maintained that the synergy between Lizzie and Dylan is the most notable asset of this show. Cumming and Novakovic once again shine in the scenes involving just the two of them.
The other star deserving of high praise is Daniel Ings who portrays Dylan’s husband Andy. Outside of the two leads, Andy has benefited from character development more than any other character so that may also help Ings’s cause. I cannot say the same for Naveen Andrews and Sharon Leal who continue to be underused. Julian was not in this episode, which would be fine if it were not for the fact that he has not appeared in three episodes so far, and in the four that he has, it has largely been in limited roles and closed-spaces, except perhaps in “Flat Line.”
While Cumming and Ings light their scenes up, the premise of the disaccord between Dylan and Andy in this episode pushes the boundaries of plausibility. It took until now for Dylan to initiate a meaningful dialogue with Andy on his confusion about his husband’s love of sports? They have been married for a year and the extreme gap that exists between the two men with regard to interest in sports has never come up as a discussion topic?
Furthermore, how could Dylan, whose lifetime passion is the science of human behavior, never cared to investigate the behavior of sports fans? He says some story that about needing to believe that sports were “a waste of time” when he was growing up, but none of it explains the utter unfamiliarity of the adult Dr. Reinhart, who has written a best seller about abnormal behavior, with the disposition of a group consisting of millions and millions of people. And his husband Andy, the emblematic sports fan, did not trigger an interest either? Oh-kay!
Perhaps, people in the writing room thought that it would come across brilliant to have Dylan solve the murder through one of his blue-hued epiphanies while observing a brawl between sports fans about whom he is otherwise clueless. Maybe, they wanted to increase the irony factor… or something.
Speaking of the blue-hued epiphany, it was possibly the most ambitious – and outrageous – one in the seven-episode history of Instinct. It featured some never-before-seen professor – played by Philip Hoffman who has guest-starred elsewhere on TV – lecturing about the effects of hypoxia on patients. It lasted 16 seconds and that is all Dylan needed to solve the cause of Abby’s death, after the investigation had resulted in nothing but dead ends and the team stood basically where they began, as Jasmine attested halfway into the episode.
Only a couple of minutes later, Dylan would have another epiphany (non-blue-hued this time) to mysteriously uncover bunch of key information and figure out that Russell had been choking Abby for years. We need not ask how Dylan put it all together in the same way that we need not ask Star Trek characters to explain their technobabble. We just know that he is Dylan, and he can. It’s just that what started out as a very promising, well-planned crime plot got reduced to a quick, ham-fisted resolution at the end.
The last scene is another wonderful Reinhart-Needham dialogue, except that this time, for a change, it is our detective that takes our resident genius by surprise. He urges Lizzie to contact the “hot mechanic” again, apologize for her behavior during their first date, and ask him for another chance. Much to his shock, he finds out that Lizzie is a step ahead of him and her “Mm-hmm” followed by “Not so uptight” in a birdy voice is one of the “Lizzie highlights” of the episode.
Last-minute thoughts:
– Tomahawk suffers no consequences for his irresponsible podcasts bordering on hate speech?
– Abby’s car coincidentally scraping Tomahawk’s parked car out of hundreds of cars parked in the streets of New York surely qualifies as an advanced case of contrivance within the realm of TV-show scripts.
– I have not talked about Yuri much in my review, but any show could use more of Lev Gorn. Chalk one up for Instinct’s writers for leaving the door open for a possible Yuri comeback in a future episode.
– Nice scenes of interpersonal dynamics in the precinct = Effective world-building tool for an episodic crime show.
– Lizzie puts Russell under arrest by herself. Isn’t she supposed to be accompanied by another officer at least? No, Dylan does not count!
Until next episode…