TV is the New Reading

‘The Closer’ just keeps getting better and better

Three episodes into the fourth season of “The Closer” and it’s my favorite one so far.

They hit the ground running with their season opener in which Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson faces a new public relations challenge along with a super-scary archnemesis.

This continues the excitement of all the season openers so far. In the pilot episode, Brenda had to solve a crime where the victim didn’t seem to actually exist. And in the second season opener, she had to negotiate the investigation of an apparent cop killing while most of her fellow officers still refused to trust or work with her, despite the loyalty she’d built up on her team.

The third season opener found Brenda and her team documenting a grisly crime scene – one of the first times “The Closer” has focused on forensics, which made it an unusual episode. It was also one of the most heartbreaking, tearing two families apart as the intrepid Brenda pursued her case.

In other episodes, she has encountered some suspects she hasn’t been able to close on – that’s where the title of the show comes from: Brenda is a closer, a detective so skilled in the art of interrogation that criminals with anything to hide find themselves helpless to resist telling her everything. As she points out in the pilot episode, “As hard as a secret is to uncover, it’s even harder to keep.”

Rogues gallery

She’s come up against some nasty ne’er-do-wells she hasn’t been able to actually charge with a crime, because they’re not specifically guilty of the crime she’s investigating. But her rogues gallery includes an Army-trained sniper vigilante who got away after executing a serial killer; a wealthy layabout, Dennis Dutton, who abuses his girlfriends – possibly to death; and perhaps the scariest yet, Bill Croelick, a serial arsonist who is out on a technicality. In fact, he’s successfully sued the prosecution in his case for falsifying evidence against him. But he’s incredibly guilty. His modus operandi is forcing triple grain alcohol martinis down his victims’ throats and torching them from the inside.

He’s so obsessed with fire he made an appearance at Brenda’s crime scene in the fourth season opener, a wildfire raging through southern California. While a top suspect for the blaze and the murder involved, Croelick’s close personal relationship with fire actually ends up helping the investigation.

Not before it potentially destroys it, however, when a reporter assigned to follow Brenda and her team around tracks Croelick down independently and interviews him, tipping him off to the nature of the case they’re building against him.

The reporter, Ricardo Ramos, makes a second appearance in a case that straddles a homicide Brenda’s investigating and an international drug case her FBI agent fiance, Fritz, is pursuing.

Oh dear.

Between the strain this puts on their relationship and the fireworks between two team members in Priority Homicide, the fourth season is off to an exciting start.

“The Closer” airs at 8 p.m. Mondays on TNT.

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