In the first episode, Brenda is heading into the interrogation room to question a secretary who’s a potential witness in the murder of a mysterious unidentified female when she learns the secretary has a record: arrested in a demonstration in front of Planned Parenthood office. “Oh, brother,” mutters Brenda. Pro-life! Yeah, they’re always trouble.
Later, it gets worse. Not only is the secretary pro-life, she brags about being a good Catholic girl, living with her mom, leading to the implication that she’s, you know, a damn virgin! Keee-rist!
But it turns out that Little Miss Perfect isn’t the only one with a record. The vic had one too. It turns out that the MUF was a lesbian who showed up at an ACT-UP rally packing a .44 Magnum and ended up wasting a guard.
OK, break time. How many lesbians ever participated in an ACT-UP rally? And of those, how many showed up with a .44 Magnum? And how many of those ending up shooting someone? Surely the answer has got to be zero, or less.
So why are the producers of The Closer totally trashing lesbians? Well, they’ve got a plot to write, and the way you write them these days is you start off with a seriously lurid corpse, almost always a young chick, in this case stripped naked, hair chopped off, head bashed in, and shot in the face with a .44 Magnum.
That’s where we start. Working back from that, we invent a murderous, Magnum-packin’ lesbo (OK, that’s wrong, and The Closer lets us know that) who, to conceal her identity, takes on the appearance of a man and ends up having a semi- but not entirely platonic affair with “his” secretary, this totally repressed Catholic chick, who, when she finds out she’s been tonguing another chick, loses it, kills her ex “boyfriend” and then strips and mutilates the corpse so that no one will cop to the fact that her boss was actually a babe. Which is what repressed Catholic chicks do when they end up kissing a girl, because they are, of course, all repressed lesbians.
So, according to The Closer, there’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian (though murder is probably a bad thing), but repressed lesbians should 1) lose the “good Catholic girl” thing and 2) not murder the chicks who are trying to help them get in touch with their inner lesbosity.
Afterwords
The photo of Brenda plays off of one her endearing characteristics that make her so much like the rest of us—a sweet tooth. The stills for this show are remarkably lame. Hey, when you’re a hit you don’t need to be nice!
