And the alternative, what if they were exactly like the real cases that inspired them or, the Law & Order Approach:
The Harmful One: ...yep, same as above. I honestly think this was the plan all along before they dropped Anna Gunn's character. Hence the hinted arc about her brother rotting in a Thai prison from the pilot.
Well, let's blame Anna Gunn's post-BB unpopularity and Sinise's need for a bigger spot to shine.
Bookend quote: Being a king means not to be wealthy. It means not bullying others. - Chulalongkorn the Great
Real case: The British Backpackers Murders of Koh Tao
Love Interrupted: The couple is abducted by a Mexican Cartel. In Mexico, not Belize, obviously. Maybe they can use peaceful Mayan farmers as earlier suspects (would have probably need to move the episode to Yucatan or at least continental Belize). The Cartel is also led by a psycho who fancies himself a voodoo+Aztec mashup priest and sacrifices rivals and random people alike, so maybe they can also include a friendlier Cartel as suspects that is actually horrified by the bad guy's methods and wishes that he only decapitated people like them.
Bookend quote: He who follows the path of the heart is never wrong. - the Popol Vuh
Real case: Adolfo Constanzo and the Narcosatanists
De Los Inocentes: Oh, they find that one of the guys working at the hotel is a rapist who has raped tourists staying there before. But, he isn't really the killer this time. It really is the husband. They leave him rotting in a Mexican jail and take the children to live with their grandparents.
Bookend quote: No good marriage has ever ended in divorce. - Louis C.K.
Real case: Bruce Beresford-Redman
Harvested: This one was as close as it could be and still involve Americans so I'll leave it the same. Because I don't think they'd come to investigate a transplant racket that preys on poor Indian people only.
Bookend quote: Man is useful to man, because his body is a marvellous machine and his mind an organ of wonderful efficiency. But he is a spirit as well, and this spirit is truly known only by love. - Rabindranath Tagore
Real case: The Gurgaon Kidney Transplant Racket
The Ballad of Nick & Nat: It's basically Starkweather and Fugate if you replace Fugate with Aileen Wuornos and throw them in Cuba, which I suppose was the idea (Cuba is 50 years behind America in everything, including criminals). Hard to see how it could change.
Bookend quote: Revolution is a fight to the death between the past and the future. - Fidel Castro
Real case: No point doing this here, right?
Citizens of the World: Some younger and/or less wise tourists get kidnapped by Al-Qaeda's Maghreb branch or one of its affiliates in post war-torn Timbuktu, Mali. Then they get rescued by the French. Oof. Nope, let's make it USAF. Then they can use a helicopter. Yes, USAF.
Bookend quote: The purpose of an artist is to witness life and Timbuktu. - Abderrahmane Sissako (yep; better make those tourists photographers or filmmakers)
Real case: The Rijke-McGown-Gustaffson kidnapping
Denial: The guys get thrown inside a police van with 30+ protesters and all get gassed to death together, Auschwitz style. Wow, did that final scene hopeful about Egyptian democracy just get a little more complicated. Maybe the Egyptian cops realize they screwed up and leave the American dead guys somewhere else hoping common criminals/islamists/whatever get blamed instead. And the widow is actually trying to help them until she turns up dead in a ditch.
Bookend quote: A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial. - Philo of Alexandria
Real case: Police Colonel Amr Farouk - could be combined with the Giulio Regeni murder for the early part of the episode
To be continued
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eljuma_1
8 years ago
The Lonely Heart: Since this episode's premise basically was "what if Pepe le Pew was a serial killer", there is hardly something more to do.
The show's bookend quote was probably the best in the first season.
The Matchmaker: A bunch of Muslim American girls are lured online to fly to Turkey and then Syria, where they will become ISIS sex slaves. Yes, lured by a woman.
Bookend quote: Show's still works.
Alternatively: I watch over you betimes to protect you from wild beasts in human form. - Ignatius of Antioch
Real case: Amira Abase, Shamima Begum and Kadiza Sultana; Sabina Selimovic and Samra Kesinovic
Whispering Death: A sucker with a rape/strangle fetish lures insecure people over the internet, weeaboos included, by convincing them that they should kill themselves painlessly with his help. Then he kills them in a slow, painful way because that's what he actually gets off on.
Bookend quote: To the ears of one possessed by the God of Death, reason and objections seem like so many idle complaints. - Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Real case: Hiroshi Maeue
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eljuma_1
8 years ago
And to end Season 1:
Iqiniso: The unsub is a psychopathic serial rapist who lures, rapes and kills young women because one dared to report him to the police once and he spent 6 years in prison.
Bookend quote: A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons. - Desmond Tutu
Real case: Moses Sithole, the ABC Killer
El Toro Bravo: There is only one killer, and it's the village idiot. And the police knows it's him from the beginning, but not because he's from some "good family" or because they don't want to disturb some priest, but because they need to have actual evidence that he did it to get a warrant or arrest him. Meanwhile, the FBI spents half the episode trying to worm itself into the police's investigation and then screws up everything by going to the press, tipping the suspect and making him flee. Thankfully, he's captured only a few days later and confesses everything.
Bookend quote: Manolete, Manolete, why did you get in when you didn't know better? - Spanish proverb
Real case: The murder of Denisse Pikka Thiem
Paper Orphans: They never discover where the little girl went, but the evidence increasingly points to the parents being guilty in some way. However, it's only the local press who reports this. The foreign press gets caught in the parents' tale and sides with them, throwing constant *beep* on the country and investigators.
Bookend quote: This could be remade anywhere and the quote would change accordingly. But I think there is one that sums the real case behind perfectly:
The Englishman falls on the ideas and customs of other nations like a lump of granite in the water. That is why he remains, in the countries where he has lived for centuries, a foreigner. - José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Real case: The disappearance of Madeleine McCaan
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