SWAT Episode 14
Previously on SWAT…
Let’s recap from last week’s episode, Jondo is taking a break….yeah that’s pretty much it. They decided to end things, for now, because it was best for the department and the changes Jess and Commissioner Plank were trying to implement. With her career and reputation on the line, Hondo pretty much made the call for both of them. We also saw Street become the scapegoat in a situation that is much bigger than him and the city of Los Angeles. Oh, one more thing, SWAT took down yet another dangerous criminal. Is it just me or does it seem like they. just. cant. lose?
Catch up on last week’s recap for Episode 13 ‘Fences’ here!
Stay Liquid…
With the episode starting off highlighting an intense flashback of a warehouse raid, you know things are about to get good. The team enters and searches an abandoned warehouse for a man named Harwell aka the Vanity Killer. This guy goes around snatching up rising stars, tortures, and then ultimately kills them.
After the team searches the building, for what seems like an eternity, Luca finally finds the hostages. He finds a girl, Keri, along with a man tied and nailed to a pillar.
On the other side of the warehouse, Hondo and Buck avoid some strategically placed trip wires and stumble upon a crap load of C4. Oh, and Harwell holding a detonator.
Harwell threatens them and they decide to evacuate the team before the whole place explodes. Buck gives the order to Luca, which means he has to leave the man behind, but not before he promises that he’ll be back to help him.
Now, I don’t know about you, but any cop show ever where they promise a victim something, never ends well. Once those words left his mouth, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
Sure enough, after Luca gets Keri out of the building safely, he runs back towards the building to keep his promise.
BOOM!
The entire building explodes, killing the hostage and Harwell.
or so they thought…
Fast forward to present day
Luca and Street are at a local farmers market, scouting out the vendors, enjoying the sunny day when Luca suddenly sees a ghost.
The man that should have died in the warehouse explosion, two years ago.
Harwell is alive.
After Luca informs Hondo on what he saw, he goes to visit Keri, who is now out of the spotlight and in a boxing gym teaching self-defense classes.
It seems like a lot of victims who survived the same situation as Keri, often turn to learning and teaching others how to defend themselves from those real life threats.
…Fill The Gaps
Once Luca tells her what’s going on, he brings her to the station to make sure she’s safe just in case Harwell goes looking for her. Back at the station Hondo dug deeper into Luca’s intel and found the GPS route on the truck Harwell was driving. Narrowing down a possible location, Hondo and Luca decide to go alone to see if their hunch is right. On the way, Luca expresses his feeling about Harwell being alive the entire time.
Just waiting for the day he’d see him again.
After going into the building near Harwell’s truck, they find a photographer waiting for an up and coming celeb, Lance, who’s a no-show and says no one can find him. Hondo and Luca exchange the look of looks.
Luca was right!
Things are getting intense now. Anyone else on the edge of their couch?
So now they know Harwell is alive and hiding out somewhere with at least one victim. What now? They head back to their main source of intel, Keri. He tells her everything they know so far and asks for her help on any specifics she can remember. She relives the worst day of her life saying everything she recalls.
You know when cops say, “Any little detail may help”, well they definitely don’t lie about that.
Keri says she remembers there being a lot of gas station food wrappers everywhere. This plays a vital role in narrowing down the possible locations of where Harwell might be. Hondo finds Lance’s phone in the alley where Harwell ditched his truck and it’s only safe to assume that they both left in Lance’s car.
Since his car doesn’t have a way to track where it’s been and the license plate readers throughout the city haven’t scanned it either, they head back to Harwell’s truck GPS data. Junk food is how they end up narrowing down a location where he and the victims are being held.
I just have to say I love snarky characters and the gas station attendant is everything.
We see Harwell tossing a zip-tied Lance down a flight of stairs into what looks like a cold dark basement to join his other victim.
By the way, I didn’t notice it before, but is that Damien from Mean Girls!?! After doing a little investigating of my own, Google told me that it is him! What the what?! He’s clearly still mad about not getting his pink shirt back.
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Moving on…
Harwell is shown torturing his two victims.
Deacon, that sneaky little snake, is disguised as an electric city worker outside of Damien, ahem I mean Harwell’s house, “checking up on his power”. Judging by the cameras and intercom system Harwell has, along with the previous encounter S.W.A.T. had with him, this guy is not playing around. The team kills the power to his house, cutting the wires to each camera they pass during their search.
What’s that saying? Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. SWAT is just that. I love these scenes where every move is just swift and precise.
The power eventually comes back on and the place is set up with boobytraps everywhere. Between the loud disorienting noise that one of them inadvertently sets off, to the gas emitting from the vents. With Deacon finally disabling the noise and Chris handling the gas situation, the rest of the team is able to breach into the basement saving the two hostages. Lance tells Hondo that Harwell escaped through a secret tunnel but Hondo’s main concern is helping them. Elsewhere in the house, Luca walks into a room with a bunch of C4 wired up.
Hondo wants the team to evacuate. Deja vu anyone?
Luca is dead set on not letting this guy go again. He and Chris are starting to back out of the house when Luca accidentally steps on and falls down a trapdoor, leaving him face to face with Harwell. An intense fight breaks out between the two but ultimately the good guys win. S.W.A.T., once again, catches another bad guy.
Oh Captain, My Captain
Let’s talk about this whole, Jess getting threats thing. First her car and now actual letters threatening her if she doesn’t back out of the reform changes for the department. Here she is, trying to make everyone’s lives and jobs better and yet this is how they repay her?
Despite the backlash she’s been receiving since the proposal leak, Jess has been showing that she is more than capable of handling herself under pressure. She addresses the entire S.W.A.T. department and gives the culprit a choice, come forward to handle it one on one or else it becomes a big problem.
“I became a police officer because I believe in what that stands for. I know most of you feel the same, most of you would have no tolerance for something like this.” – Jess
Hicks, even though he also disagreed with her reform proposals, launches a full investigation to support her. Turns out the forensics team picked up a print. Jess and Hicks know exactly who it is.
A S.W.A.T. officers….WIFE?! Rocker, a member of Mumford’s team, drunkenly expressed his frustrations about Jess and her proposals to his wife. She then took it upon herself to type up a threat letter. She thought she was helping.
Not smart! Major offense threatening a police officer.
Instead of punishing Rocker and his wife, she empathizes for their situation and agrees to forget it ever happened if they promised not to interfere in the future.
I have to say, I think Jess without Hondo is much better at getting her job done efficiently and politically. She’s much more abrasive and is definitely sticking to her guns about the changes. She’s a powerful female lead and I would love to see more of it.
Where’s Buck?
Amidst the fake death of a psychopathic killer and Jess receiving threats, Buck is MIA. Hondo stops by his place to check up on him but he is nowhere to be found. He puts the only person who knows Buck better than him to track him down, Street. Since Buck arrested Street’s mom, back in the day, for killing her husband, he and Street got close. He’s always looked out for him and Street will do anything to repay the favor.
When he finds Buck, he can clearly see how depressed he is. Buck tells him that he lost a bunch of money in an investment. The same money he intended to send Raymont, the innocent bystander he accidentally shot during the first episode. Ever since then, Buck has been trying to come up with ways to show his remorse by doing anything he could, including risk his savings. Hondo and Street decide it’s best for Buck to talk with Raymont, this way they can both move on peacefully.
Final Thoughts…
This episode was definitely intense. Starting off with the flashback building suspense, I really like the way it was written and portrayed. The story, from start to finish, kept you wanting more. In the end, the team gets the job done and everyone goes home in one piece. Besides them flawlessly meeting their goal time and time again, there were some other issues arising.
Jess continuously being under a threat for one. No matter what they throw at her, she is not backing down. I like that a female role is not the damsel in distress. Jondo being on hold means that she can concentrate on doing her job to the best of her abilities with no distractions. I am interested in seeing what the future holds for Jess and her reform proposals.
Buck being a complete mess, on the other hand, not so great. To be honest, the entire time I was wondering why they went all the way back to the first episode. It felt like they were beating a dead horse unless they have intentions of bringing Bucks character back into the picture. If not, then maybe just leave what happened, in the past. How did you feel about it?
SWAT airs on CBS every Thursday 10/9 central.
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