S01.E11: The Sauna at the End of the Stairs

[Chicago Redshirt]

37 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

Can Cody's lawyer make a case that Cody thought his mother's life was in danger, and, at 15, he would not have considered notifying the police? Or even that his family would not brook his reporting it? 

Keeping in mind that I'm an attorney but not a criminal justice attorney and I have not done specific research on this or any other topic and the law can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, my from the hip thoughts are:

Assuming for discussion's sake that the event happened basically as Morgan hypothesized and Cody confirmed, I would think that Cody's attorney would have a couple potential lines of defense with mixed likelihood of success(should Cody allow him to pursue them at trial): 

Defense of others: For this defense to work, a reasonable person in Cody's position would have to think that his actions were necessary to prevent imminent harm to another. I do not think this defense would fly because at the moment Cody killed Barry, Mom was safe downstairs with the family and Barry did not pose an imminent threat to her. The law generally doesn't allow you to use a threat that may come days, weeks, months later as justification for taking actions now.  

Defense of self: similar, but in this instance, Cody would assert that Barry beat him too. It likely would fail for the reasons defense of others would fail. That said, Cody can single-handedly say what led to him doing it. If he wanted to, I'm sure he could spin a story where he only threw the hair drier in the shower after Barry attacked him or something, and maybe get a jury to believe him. 

Imperfect self-defense/defense of others: This is essentially what you are talking about: that Cody thought that Barry posed a threat to Mom that could not be dealt with other than through killing him. It gets the label "imperfect" because it is not strictly true (on the facts that we know them) that Barry posed such a threat.

Temporary insanity: Cody was so messed up by the scene caused at dinner, the persistent abuse of him and/or his mom, the subsequent confrontation with Barry that he couldn't help himself/didn't know right from wrong, etc. (there are slightly different tests for what it means to be temporarily insane). I don't think this defense is viable in that he immediately was able to embark on the coverup he did.

Youthful offender: At 15, Cody was too young to be held to the standard we would hold an adult to and deserves mercy. (I originally typed "merci," French for thanks, which is probably true too, lol). This is really a defense in support of a lighter sentence rather than acquittal and would likely come into play. Hence, the 3 years for a crime that for adults is probably 25 to life.

Jury sympathy/nullification: Occasionally jurors do not follow the letter of the law but do what they think is right. Even though there's not much argument against the notion that Cody intentionally planned to kill his father, killed his father, covered up the killing of his father, stayed silent while his grandfather was at risk for being convicted of the killing of his father, jurors may decide to acquit him just because they feel he has suffered enough or because Barry had it coming or any other reason.

Reasonable doubt: This would be the trying to say the state hasn't met its burden with its circumstantial evidence and the confession. This would involve trying to get some explanation for why the confession shouldn't come into evidence or Cody recanting in such a way that a jury might believe the confession was invalid and the circumstantial evidence is not enough. This seems like a non-starter to me. 

Edited January 30 by Chicago Redshirt

[shura]

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It is weird that Soto was so blase about the footage being deleted. The best explanation being that the writers threw in the thing about the video footage to cover up a perceived plot hole and/or offer a clue (I suspected Cody when told he had piqued MIT's interest and knowing that the murderer had to have some level of comfort with tech to delete footage).

Yes, she did actually say “the family said the footage was deleted 🤷‍♀️” and that was it, wasn’t it?  As if it’s not at all crucial in a murder investigation to find out who deleted the video of said murder and why and under what circumstances.  This is why, assuming that the initial investigation was at all competent, I am thinking there must have been a reasonable explanation that did not involve anything nefarious.  What that might be I have no idea, and the writers probably didn’t think it through, either.  Honestly, the story would have worked just fine without having this mansion equipped with security cameras everywhere, even if it didn’t offer an extra clue.

[possibilities]

The plan was to make the death look like a heart attack, but once the coroner found the broken neck, I'd think someone would wonder how his neck got broken, whether he died sitting in the sauna OR if he died of a heart attack. 

[iMonrey]

You can spin this any way you want, to me it all amounts to a lot of hand-waving and excuses for formulaic writing. Not atypical for a network procedural, but not true to life in any real sense of the word. 

The show relies on the appeal of Kaitlin Olson, and I do think she's an appealing lead, but the show itself just isn't very clever. A police chief might in fact listen to something a consultant had to say, but not allow her to put on this grand display with the entire family present, in their own home, pontificating and hypothesizing and pointing fingers while everyone just sits there in silence like they're watching a play unfold. It's absurd. It felt like they were doing one of those Murder Mystery dinner parties and Morgan was playing the part of Sherlock Holmes. 

I know they can do better than this, not all the episodes up to this one have been this silly.

[shura]

2 hours ago, possibilities said:

The plan was to make the death look like a heart attack, but once the coroner found the broken neck, I'd think someone would wonder how his neck got broken, whether he died sitting in the sauna OR if he died of a heart attack. 

The broken neck was not part of the plan, and it only happened when Cody panicked and decided to move the body for no good reason.  If Barry had broken his neck in the shower after having his “heart attack”, the ME probably could have explained it by the fall in the shower.  As it happened though, they found a broken neck in someone who died sitting in a sauna with no sign of falling down, that’s what triggered a murder investigation.

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, shura said:

The broken neck was not part of the plan, and it only happened when Cody panicked and decided to move the body for no good reason.  If Barry had broken his neck in the shower after having his “heart attack”, the ME probably could have explained it by the fall in the shower.  As it happened though, they found a broken neck in someone who died sitting in a sauna with no sign of falling down, that’s what triggered a murder investigation.

The two potential problems with this are:

1. Would slipping in the shower be enough to cause the type of break in the neck that occurred? Maybe, maybe not. I would tend to think that the actual break was greater than could be explained by a simple slip and fall in the shower (the force of falling, say, 6'), since the corpse fell at least one story (say 20') and possibly more. But maybe a break is a break is a break, or maybe the coroner would not think twice about it once it seemed like it was a heart attack/slip.

2. The outlet caught fire, which the kid wasn't expecting, and it would basically eliminate the "heart attack" story.

Which I guess I'm belatedly only now thinking that it would have been way smarter and easier for the kid to just be like, "OMG, I smelled smoke from the bathroom and found Dad like this with this hairdryer in the shower. I guess he decided he couldn't stand being outed as a wife-beating *** and electrocuted  himself out of shame" than to do the scrambling around.

[shura]

38 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

2. The outlet caught fire, which the kid wasn't expecting, and it would basically eliminate the "heart attack" story.

Oh, you think the body was burned by the outlet fire too?  Maybe, I don’t remember if anybody said anything to that effect.  If it wasn’t burned, then, as someone pointed out upthread, there was no need to move the body from the shower.  Just leave it there and go switch out the plate.  This way, whatever bones break, it really happened during the fall in the shower, everything looks like it would had he really had a heart attack.

Instead, the fire makes the kid panic, he dumps the body in the laundry chute, causes a fracture that cannot be explained by natural reasons and overcomplicates things in general.  And still has to go switch out the plate.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

8 minutes ago, shura said:

Oh, you think the body was burned by the outlet fire too?  Maybe, I don’t remember if anybody said anything to that effect.  If it wasn’t burned, then, as someone pointed out upthread, there was no need to move the body from the shower.  Just leave it there and go switch out the plate.  This way, whatever bones break, it really happened during the fall in the shower, everything looks like it would had he really had a heart attack.

Instead, the fire makes the kid panic, he dumps the body in the laundry chute, causes a fracture that cannot be explained by natural reasons and overcomplicates things in general.  And still has to go switch out the plate.  

Sorry, we may have gotten signals crossed. Presumably the body wasn't burned by the fire. All I was saying was the fact that the outlet scorched would have (at least in Cody's mind) point to the outlet/hair dryer/electrocution causing the death rather than a simple heart attack. 

Dumping the body might have been a panic-born move, or it might have been a clever one. He may have come up with the plan to fake the sauna death instead of heart attack death instantaneously. Dumping the body means Cody can switch the outlet plates more leisurely -- given that beefy Karadec wanted help moving the bed to get to the outlet, I tend to doubt that 15 year old Cody could have quickly done without risking being caught with Barry's corpse still in the shower.  If anyone comes upon the dead body while Cody's doing all the plate switching, it will potentially incriminate him. As in, how come he didn't hear Barry dying?  Also, Cody didn't have necessarily any reason to really expect the neck might break.

[Sarah 103]

 

23 hours ago, gibasi said:

Were they trying to go for a Knives Out vibe? 

I would say yes. Also Knives Out is a new version of a very old idea. It's the classic country house murder which goes back, I want to say a century. Maybe this says more about me than anything else, but I would have name checked Agatha Christie before Knives Out.  

 

[shura]

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

Dumping the body means Cody can switch the outlet plates more leisurely -- given that beefy Karadec wanted help moving the bed to get to the outlet, I tend to doubt that 15 year old Cody could have quickly done without risking being caught with Barry's corpse still in the shower.  If anyone comes upon the dead body while Cody's doing all the plate switching, it will potentially incriminate him. As in, how come he didn't hear Barry dying? 

For some reason I assumed that Cody dealt with the fire and the wall plate switching before he came down to play Monopoly and use the remote and all that.  I think that there is a greater risk that someone will discover the body in the basement in that laundry hamper while Cody is waiting for midnight to move it to the sauna and do all that leisurely plate switching than in leaving the body in the running shower and closing the door - nobody’s going to walk in on that (unless they get the idea to kill Barry in the shower too, I suppose).  He hid the fire pretty well no matter when he did it, nobody found out about it until Morgan.  It didn’t have to negate the fake heart attack.

I do like the idea that the body sustained some burns in the fire and that made Cody think of abandoning the heart attack plan and sticking it in the sauna to burn all over.  That would make a lot of sense.  We should write for this show.

[LisaM]

On 1/29/2025 at 9:01 AM, shapeshifter said:

This episode was written by the grandchild of Columbo and Jessica Fletcher, right?

I kept expecting a reveal that Heather's bruises were not inflicted by Barry, but once Cody convincingly confessed, such a reveal would have been too dark for this show.

Regarding Cody being tried as a minor, I thought some L&O episode stated that could not be done if the murder was covered up so long by the now-adult? But this is California, right? So maybe different rules. Or I'm remembering incorrectly.

Who played Barry? I kept thinking he looked like Raphael Sbarge.

TJ Thyne from Bones.

[tv echo]

Cody using his smarts to cover up the murder, like using the remote to change the TV channel to make it seem like Barry was still alive during dinnertime, shows a level of calculation that makes me think that, if he got away with this murder and got past his guilt, he would eventually kill someone else in the future for some self-justified purpose.

I liked the who-dunnit aspect of this episode, but I prefer it when the police also contribute to solving the crime and don't just stand around like dummies while Morgan lays out the crime in painstaking detail. I usually like her deductive ability but found that it stretched credulity in this episode.

[peachmangosteen]

The kids and their relationship with Morgan is probably my fave part of this show and it's the only time I actually enjoy Morgan tbh so the episodes without them are always my least faves and this one was no exception.

21 hours ago, iMonrey said:

And the show is giving Morgan far too much power. I get that it's the basis of the premise but it's getting out of hand.

This. I actually hate cops lol but the fact that they literally never solve any of the cases and it's always Morgan is really annoying. I don't understand how they could even function before she got there. I don't think the show realizes they're making the actual detectives look so stupid though.

[shapeshifter]

13 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

…given that beefy Karadec wanted help moving the bed to get to the outlet, I tend to doubt that 15 year old Cody could have quickly done without risking being caught…

Was it implied that the brothers (Cody's uncles?) may have orchestrated the cover-up of evidence when they were "upstairs" for “Half hour, maybe”?
If so, could this mitigate Cody's culpability, and support a Temporary Insanity or Murder in the 2nd Degree charge?
Maybe it wasn't Cody in Barry's bathrobe with the liquor bottle? Could it have been one of the brothers? 
I'm not sure about Agatha Christie, but Jessica Fletcher would have revealed all these details.

[seacliffsal]

There were a lot of holes in the plot, but one that bothered me and I haven't seen it mentioned is that it two both Morgan and her partner to move the bed to look for the wallpaper plate, so how was the grandson able to move the bed quickly, silently, and by himself?

I also thought there was going to be more to the abuse story as Barry denied doing it and that maybe there was going to be a bigger story.

[shapeshifter]

1 hour ago, seacliffsal said:

I also thought there was going to be more to the abuse story as Barry denied doing it and that maybe there was going to be a bigger story.

Yes. We got to see horrific amounts of bruising on Cody's mother's arms in the flashback to 10 years ago when her sleeve caught fire and had to be ripped off. But there didn't seem to be any documentation of the abuse, which would could undercut any legal excuses for Cody's actions.

 

1 hour ago, seacliffsal said:

it [took] both Morgan and her partner to move the bed to look for the wallpaper plate, so how was the grandson able to move the bed quickly, silently, and by himself?

This could support my theory of Cody's uncles being involved.

[SoMuchTV]

2 hours ago, seacliffsal said:

There were a lot of holes in the plot, but one that bothered me and I haven't seen it mentioned is that it two both Morgan and her partner to move the bed to look for the wallpaper plate, so how was the grandson able to move the bed quickly, silently, and by himself?

I guess I can give that one the benefit of the doubt. If he had enough time and knew nobody was coming, he could scootch the bed an inch at a time on each side enough to get access to the outlet. But when Morgan & company were inspecting, they wanted to move it fast. Or, and this is the case with some of my beds, you can just move the mattress rather than the whole bed frame to get access to the wall. 

I'm more hung up on why he put the wallpaper cover on the outlet, rather than just leaving it uncovered or maybe scraping off the wallpaper before putting it on. 

[possibilities]

I also figured he could have crawled under the bed instead of moving it.

But it was just flat out stupid to keep the scorched cover at all. He should have gotten rid of it entirely. He could easily have left the cover off the one in his bedroom, and bought a replacement later.

Also, nobody noticed and remarked on the lack of wallpaper on the bathroom coverplate, when he put the plain one on there? The family and the help would both have noticed it no longer matched.

[AnimeMania]

11 hours ago, possibilities said:

Also, nobody noticed and remarked on the lack of wallpaper on the bathroom coverplate, when he put the plain one on there? The family and the help would both have noticed it no longer matched.

Lots of possibilities, how many people at the house that night, actually lived in the mansion, the bathroom/dead man's bedroom in question, was it a main (regularly used) bathroom/bedroom or a guest bathroom/bedroom.

Edited February 1 by AnimeMania

[gibasi]

In 10 years no one noticed the wall Plate? And they all acted like the murder happened yesterday so the house would still be exactly the same. Ridiculous story.

Kaitlin Olsen carries the show and even she couldn't make this episode work.

 

[Tachi Rocinante]

I enjoyed it, but I guess I'll be the shallow one.

What the hell did Nasim Pedrad do to her face?? She has that "aging escort" look that doesn't work for anyone.

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 1/31/2025 at 6:44 PM, seacliffsal said:

There were a lot of holes in the plot, but one that bothered me and I haven't seen it mentioned is that it two both Morgan and her partner to move the bed to look for the wallpaper plate, so how was the grandson able to move the bed quickly, silently, and by himself?

 A few possibilities to patch up (some of) the holes:

1. Karadec (and by extension Cody) could have moved it by himself, but was being lazy/wanted Morgan to put some sweat equity into her wackadoo theory because he's a curmudgeon/was tired after toting Ida Perp around a bunch/was going for quickness/efficiency.

2. Cody was operating with a lot of adrenaline/desperation so it was easier for him to move than otherwise.

3. 10 years ago, a different, easier to move bed was there or the bed was positioned differently allowing the switch to happen. 

In terms of the sound, scooching it a little bit slowly could be done more quietly.

 

Edited February 2 by Chicago Redshirt

[krankydoodle]

On 1/31/2025 at 9:01 PM, shapeshifter said:

We got to see horrific amounts of bruising on Cody's mother's arms in the flashback to 10 years ago when her sleeve caught fire and had to be ripped off.

I thought this was going to turn out to be staged or something because the way the scene played out seemed off.

Keith David (and Garret Dillahunt) was wasted in this episode, but I loved his frames.

14 hours ago, Tachi Rocinante said:

What the hell did Nasim Pedrad do to her face??

The actress seemed familiar but I was surprised to find out it was her when I checked the credits.

[Yeah No]

19 hours ago, gibasi said:

In 10 years no one noticed the wall Plate? And they all acted like the murder happened yesterday so the house would still be exactly the same. Ridiculous story.

Kaitlin Olsen carries the show and even she couldn't make this episode work.

The family probably never noticed it because the bed was only moved by the cleaning or other service people.

I also don't see why Cody couldn't move the bed himself. A friend  that used to do work for my husband and me around the house was only 5'6" and I saw him move a heavy bed like that. Maybe not in one move, though.

My bedroom looks pretty much just as it did 10 or more years ago. When people get older their houses don't change that much, especially bedrooms.

Although I agree with you about this episode being a bit ridiculous.

Edited February 2 by Yeah No
"my husband and me", not I, LOL.

[Irlandesa]

On 1/29/2025 at 12:06 PM, luna1122again said:

I've seen him in lots of dramas (Justified, Dead to me, etc) and he's excellent, so I just don't understand why he's largely being wasted here. Checking his Wikipedia page, he's on two other series right now, so maybe that's it. I dunno.

I'm glad you mentioned feeling like Dillahunt's being wasted.  I think he's a versatile and dynamic actor so for him to be basically background doesn't make a lot of sense.  Maybe it's building for him to be some kind of big bad but they've basically portrayed him as clueless and incompetent but not enough to get comedy or drama out of the character.

[KaveDweller]

On 1/30/2025 at 12:03 PM, iMonrey said:

This was a far-fetched TV arrest. This isn't the kind of thing that gets resolved in an hour. And the show is giving Morgan far too much power. I get that it's the basis of the premise but it's getting out of hand.

It isn't the kind of thing that get resolved in an hour, but the TV show is only an hour. They want to give resolution to the viewers and don't have time to show all the details. They also can't really jump ahead weeks in the timeline, because they want the next episode to start right after the first. 

So we get things like the cop summarizing how he'll get off easy because he's a minor, even thought she wouldn't really know that for sure. Cop shows do this a lot.

On 2/1/2025 at 5:34 PM, gibasi said:

In 10 years no one noticed the wall Plate? And they all acted like the murder happened yesterday so the house would still be exactly the same. Ridiculous story.

It was ridiculous how they assumed things would be exactly the same, and that it did seem to be exactly the same. I think if Cody hadn't confessed, they wouldn't have been able to charge him for that reason. But it is also possible people in the house did notice, but didn't say anything because they wanted to protect whoever in the family killed Barry.

[UnknownK]

On 1/29/2025 at 12:51 PM, SoMuchTV said:

Whenever he turns up, I feel like he’s on the wrong show. Probably because I’ve mainly seen (and loved) him in comedic roles, like on Raising Hope and Sprung. So I keep thinking, where are they going with this character? Is he supposed to be a buffoon? A bad guy?

He plays pretty much anything, and I remember him in Justified, Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles, and Fear the walking dead (not comedies).

I think he is a very good actor who probably signed on for a small part in the event the show was renewed he could play a bigger part down the road as needed. Or he is just friends with a producer on the show and did him a favor.