This week on Life, Charlie and Ted went back to prison. Well, it was as close to prison as you can get. And it felt as real for them as for the students who were part of the college prison experiment. One of the inmates even killed a guard. Yup, that’s pretty real.
Students were paid $83 a day to stay in the basement of a building on campus. The professor who was running the experiment randomly chose who would be the guards and who would be the inmates. Then, they dressed up in their uniforms and played the parts. The guards roughed up the inmates and the inmates were terrified of the guards. On top of everything, the professor built in blackouts so about twice a day, the students would be in complete darkness for 60 seconds. It was during one of these blackouts that the harshest guard, D, was murdered.
Crews and Reese appear and all of the kids are sitting, waiting to find out what happened to their fellow student. They start interviewing the kids and most of them are normal, everyday students who volunteered because they were being paid $83 a day and getting credit for the experiment. There was a kid, Will, who was very even tempered. He seemed to be the one inmate that the guards couldn’t get to. Very reminiscent of an imprisoned Charlie Crews. Maybe that’s why Crews took to him so much. He was cleared when the security tapes showed he was in solitary, which was an old piano crate, the entire time.
There was also a kid who Crews and Reese wanted to be the murderer because he was such a tool. Tate seemed promising because he was very volatile when they interviewed him. On top of that, he shared the same fraternity tattoo that the murdered student had. Sounds a little fishy, right? Crews and Reese quickly discover, though, that Tate was a fake. He simply befriends his fellow guard because he was weak and the dead guy was strong. Still, Tate was able to incite a prison riot during his interview. He started chanting, “us and them,” meaning he was part of the good guys and they were the bad guys. During the riot, one of the students even escaped.
She was easy enough to find and she was also the biggest break in the case. Turns out she went to her boyfriend’s house to confront him and the girl he was cheating with. She was stuck in a cell for the past five days so how did she know all the cheating was going on? The professor had interview tapes of each student and she mentioned her boyfriend during hers. But he was the only one with the tape, right. I mean, it would mess up the ‘experiment’ if anyone else was privy to this information. You guessed it. The professor is not as unbiased as he appears. He snuck each of the inmates’ files to D and told him to use the files to break each of the prisoners. Charlie was in fine form after he heard that. He even had the professor arrested. Oh, but the guy never locked any doors or anything so the kids could leave at any time. So he was innocent, right? He didn’t do anything, right? Whatever, off to jail you go is what I say.
The professor didn’t sneak in and kill the guard, though, so who did? Crews and Reese still don’t have a murder weapon and it looks like no one’s near the room when D was killed. There can’t be too many places to stash a weapon in a prison and there is a funny smell. What is that? Burning plastic? Low and behold when Crews pulls off an Exit sign, there’s a small, bloody, plastic shank hidden inside. So now there’s a weapon and you could say that the motive is really only from the inmates’ side. One of the other guards said that they were really hard, particularly on Will. They showed a picture of her boyfriend cheating to the girl inmate who escaped. They put the claustrophobic inmate in solitary more than others. And the only one they couldn’t break was Will, which is why he got the harshest treatment. They don’t even tell us how bad, just that it was always during the blackouts. This was a brilliant move, by the way, in terms of writing because my imagination is going to the darkest places without a direct idea of what was done to Will. Anyways, all fingers point to Will but he was locked up in solitary. But wait, didn’t the professor say he didn’t lock any doors? Guess who’s not so cleared anymore.
Before he gets taken away, Charlie tells Will to imagine he’s somewhere else in the world when he’s on the inside. After all, who better to get advice from than an innocent man who was in jail for ten years? Speaking of Crews and jail. That tap he put on Jack Reese’s car paid off. He heard the conversation between Jack and the mystery man when Jack was threatened with, “there were five, there could be four.” And Crews remembers something. An article about Jack and five of his cop friends mourning a sixth cop. But that was so long ago, back when Jack was still young so what could it have to do with Crews? No answers tonight but the article does go on the conspiracy wall behind Charlie’s closet so we’ll find out soon enough.
Brilliant Crews and Reese work but sadly, for all you Captain Tidwell fans out there, let’s protest until they give him a better storyline and a more believable attitude. I mean, really, what kind of Captain, even one from New York, is so one dimensional? Please, give Donal Logue (Grounded for Life, Knights of Prosperity) more to work with because he’s worth it.
