Saving Grace: 2.7 ‘You Are My Partner’ Review
Original Air Date: August 25, 2008
Ham, Ham, Ham!
Whoever wrote the official TNT description for “You Are My Partner,” Saving Grace’s second-midseason finale, must have been as drunk as Ham is at the very beginning because there’s no mention of Bobby at all, let alone his recent disappearance into an undercover role. Despite the customary crime woven into the plot for good measure, this episode was all about Ham and the cop’s continuing spiral downwards following the death in the Middle East of his Marine younger brother, Ralph.
The crime of the week, an especially hateful and typically twisted one, revolves around the brutal rape and murder of Mexican Rosie Carreo. A skinhead named Hubert Montrose Cordan, aka Smash, brings her to a local hospital after he finds her body by a dumpster outside the white power joint he works in, and the OCPD squad initially believes he’s responsible for her death.
Not so. The racist just stole her wallet, but he had a shred of decency that forced him to hand Rosie over to a nurse when he realized she wasn’t quite dead. The real culprit turns out to be a smug chief lobbyist named Hank DeFranco with too much confidence in his cleverness.
An attendee at a B-listers party in the home of politician Ricky Burnell, the sponsor of anti-illegal immigration legislation, the supposedly upper-class DeFranco turns out to value Rosie and her life even less than skinhead Smash. After luring Rosie, a server at the party, to her death by offering her a ride home in his BMW, he rapes her three different ways, strangles her, and then dumps her in racist territory to throw the law off his scent.
Ham’s storyline is equally difficult to swallow, although for very different reasons. Lacking sleep due to nightmares about his brother and looking dirtier than any employed adult ever should, Ham somehow is allowed to continue working. He tells his boss Kate Perry the job is the only thing keeping him from going off the deep end.
But in real life, his badge and gun would have been taken away ages ago until the completion of a long, hard round of grief counseling. That’s the one aspect of this episode that ticks me off, namely the suggestion that any sane police commander would allow a cop as obviously stressed-out as Ham to continue working after the recent death of a close family member. That’s ludicrous.
Earl is worried about Ham, as is Grace, although Ham repeatedly pulls her toward him, only to immediately push her away again. He eventually hits rock bottom when he passes out in the squad room from lack of sleep, and Grace calls his older brother Nick to come watch over him after she removes the fully stocked arsenal of weapons from his house.
Ham finally gets some much-needed sleep. Yet, when he wakes up to find Grace sitting nearby, he tells her he’s going to take some time off from work, and after returning, he wants a new partner. Grace is understandably devastated, but I really get Ham’s reasoning. He explains he wants the distance because Grace touches him in a place he can’t control. He needs her too much and doesn’t have the strength for her now.
The scene is a moving ending to a fantastic, if harrowing, episode. We’ll see what happens next when Saving Grace resumes its second season in March 2009.
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[...] spent time with the cops from Oklahoma City Police Department, it was the midseason finale “You Are My Partner.” Bobby, recently and unexpectedly gone undercover, was nowhere around, and Ham dropped the [...]