Xantar

Was that David Anders sitting at the OxFam table?

OT alert: I don't know if the writers actually understood the science of what they were saying, but they were actually correct. Your typical paternity test looks for matches at 20 sites. Each of those sites has two values (because DNA comes in pairs). One value comes from the mother and one comes from the father. For this baby, they probably looked at the 20 sites and figured out which of the two values at each site comes from the mother (since they have her DNA available too). At this point, they now have 20 values that can only have come from the father and nowhere else so they must match exactly (sometimes you get only 19 matches due to mutations, but anything less than that is very unlikely). However, it's much harder to establish sibling relationships this way because siblings don't inherit DNA from each other. They inherit DNA from their parents, and they probably inherited different values in those 20 marker sites. It gets even worse when you're trying to establish a half-sibling relationship. If the lab only has the DNA of the two siblings and not the DNA of their common parent, the lab would have to check a few hundred or a few thousand marker sites and then use statistical analysis to figure out the likelihood that the two samples are siblings. [/biology nerd]

I was background watching this while doing other household chores. What exactly was the mom's health issue? And during the confrontation with the police, why did the killer keep saying, "Mom nearly died!" as if the victim was somehow to blame for that?

I'm sorry to all the William Devane fans out there, but President Heller doesn't merit a silent clock. The death of a President is no longer shocking on this series. Neither is a character sacrificing himself in order to save other people's lives. And in this case, he knew that his mind was going and he didn't have much time left anyway. This all played out exactly the way I thought it would at the beginning of the episode. To me, the silent clock usually conveys terrible sadness and the idea that the heroes have lost (e.g. the death of Teri Bauer or Ryan Chappelle). In this case, it's true that Heller died, but his side also gained quite a lot in the bargain. In all honesty, the only event that I think would merit a silent clock now is the death of either Jack or Chloe. Maybe Audrey, but it would depend on how things stand between her and Jack at the time. But President Heller? Sorry, but no. They spent the entire episode foreshadowing it, and his death played out exactly according to everyone's plan including his own.

I don't know anything about the Canadian legal system, but if it's anything like the American one, then the answer is no. An insanity plea is actually very hard to get away with and has very specific requirements. The killer essentially has to be delusional and have no understanding of what she's doing. This killer clearly knew that the victim was a guy who put her husband in jail, so that right there kills an insanity defense. Of course, in TV-land anything is possible. If this were a real life case, though, what I would find really interesting is what happens with the daughter. Under normal circumstances, she would have a slam dunk case against the city to get damages for wrongful death. However, she's a minor child, so the decision to pursue a lawsuit would have to be made by her guardian. Which her mother no longer is. Ok, but Vega also said that Angie has a twitch, and they haven't been romantically involved. I get how inappropriate it would be to make a comment based on intimate personal knowledge, but this was something that one could have figured out just from being Angie's partner for a while.

I figured out the motive pretty quickly on this one. I'm really starting to think the structure of this show isn't going to work in the long run. When we already know who the killer is, it can be hard to make the episode interesting when the motive is also pretty easy to figure out. The only thing I didn't see coming was that the killer's husband died in prison. Which, by the way, means I have zero sympathy for the victim. I understand the murder is not justified, but as the killer pointed out, he took the law into his own hands just as much as she did. He probably destroyed more lives than she ever will. You could even argue that she prevented future tragedies like her own from happening. As I said, murder is not justified. But I hope the writers weren't expecting us to have any sympathy for the victim just because the good guys kind of knew him. As far as I'm concerned, he was scum. I didn't quite understand why Angie got so worked up about Cross mentioning her twitch. Was she saying it was an inappropriate discussion of an intimate detail? To me it just seemed like a correct read of her mood: she had a theory. Her partner also said that she has a twitch. What's wrong here? It just appeared to me that she overreacted which is not a way to endear me to the character.