Last episode, we found out Lucy Lawless’s fashionable curmudgeon (her costumes are phenomenal this season) hated Christmas. This episode, we open with her hating on summer. To cheer her up—after a muted flirtation about being on an ice cream date—copper Rawiri Jobe gives her a case: a bride dying at her own wedding, allergic to bees, and stung.
Rich kid groom Reef Ireland is convinced his dad, Stephen Lovatt, killed his fiancée. She’s the only one who made it to the aisle; all his other girlfriends took a payoff. In addition to Lovatt, who screams guilty, there’s Shavaughn Ruakere as the suspicious wedding planner and Jaime McDermott as one of Ireland’s exes, who appears to still be in the picture. Olivia Tennet plays the victim’s business partner, who’s tried to save her but someone tampered with the EpiPen. It’s a tight mystery—script by Jodie Malloy and Paul Jenner—with some amusing investigation scenes, particularly for Ebony Vagulans and Tatum Warren-Ngata.
Warren-Ngata still isn’t much of a character with Vagulans around, but—once again—no one’s much of a character this season, no one except Lawless. The two sidekicks go off and have an adventure, leaving Lawless to interview Lovatt and Ruakere multiple times, and it works out… it’s just different. It’s not really an ensemble, but since Lawless doesn’t hang out with the sidekicks outside the occasional coffee or apartment-based scene, it feels a lot more like one.
We also get a lot more character development for Lawless, who bonds with groom Ireland, talking about her own wedding and giving some long-delayed backstory. But to an absolute stranger and non-recurring guest star; in other words, while the audience is getting to know Lawless’s character better, the other characters are not. It’s a shift.
So while everyone does get good material, they rarely get it in the same scene as one another. It almost feels more like a Covid season than the previous one. This season’s only got four more episodes, and even though there’s been Vagulans’s mystery trip and some other threads, it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a season arc. With more character moments for Lawless than usual.
We’ll see.
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