SGRoA: Blood Ties, S1 E18: Drawn and Quartered

Fun Fact: when I was in school, first learning about the constitution - so, like, maybe 1st or 2nd grade? - I knew what being drawn and quartered was, but didn't know that "quartering" was also giving someone a place to stay. So little 7-year-old me was mightily confused by the amendment that protects us from having to quarter soldiers. Like, yeah, I sure hope we don't have to, damn. Were the British so brutal that everyone wanted to chop people up?!

Oh, well, I mean, nothing about Britons makes me think otherwise, actually, so....maybe I was on to something?

Let's get on to this recap!

Vicki and Henry are doing a little PI B&E in order to plant bugs in some guy's office. Henry invites Vicki to a fine art show at a gallery: he has a piece in it, because the show is about the dark side of humanity.

Cut to the gallery: The curator (? I know fuck all about galleries) is leaving a message for someone about showing up to hang the pieces for the show. He says it's his own fault for thinking the other person would keep a promise for once, and he looks vaguely like my friend Brian. Shout out to Brian!

He gets off the phone and starts looking at the paintings, going to hang them himself, I assume. He puts one on the wall. It's a big canvas of a house that looks like a bigger version of those Scary Stories illustrations, and it has a window with dangling feet in it - a suicide, one assumes. He says the guy in the painting had no reason to swing: he didn't have to deal with Maya, the elusive phone interlocutor. He goes out of the room, and someone - something? - walks past the camera behind him. He goes by the painting again, and the legs are gone, and then so is Brian.

alas, poor Brian, we hardly knew ye

Henry shows up at the office the next night, only now it's not to collect Vicki for the show, it's to have her start investigating Brian's disappearance. Guess the picture guy dumped the body, too!

Apparently, Maya is Brian's girlfriend? And, like, far be it from me to police people's identities, but Brian was super gay, so that's surprising. Maya also has an occult symbol tattoo, and she and Vicki admire each other's ink. Bet Maya's isn't as active as Vicki's.

Maya is... not a good actress, or is super sketchy, I can't tell if it's purposeful or not. No eye contact, Henry says she's a friend, but she's spacey and self-centered, too hippy-dippy to even have had anything she was doing the night before except "opening herself up to the universe". Because this show is chockablock with horrible assholes, I have no idea if I'm supposed to like or trust her.

this gif is to Blood Ties was professionalism was to Forever Knight

Vicki and Coreen head to the show, which is going on anyway, mostly to nose around and ask questions. Coreen is excited: she loves "hanging out with artists". Vicki tells her that makes one of them, and Coreen should "go be pretentious, or whatever it is they do".

Henry's piece is a comic-style panel of Vicki killing...something, I can't tell what, with two handguns. A smarmy little character starts chatting her up about how Fitzroys don't go on the market very often, and he's already bought it, and how Maya was planning on dumping Brian. (His name in-show is Jude, but nah, Brian.)

Coreen is also being chatted up by a smarmer, this one younger and more threatening - definitely a whiff of "nice guy" on this one. But Coreen also has better things to say about the art. Most of it is trying too hard to be dark, to fit the theme - but this painting of a house, now, that understood the assignment. The legs are back in the window, and Smarmy No. 2 is the artist, of course.

Mike and Dave find Brian sitting upright, in a chair, on a street corner. Wallet's still on him, even.

Henry is wearing some industrial-grade guyliner, and Vicki and Coreen have discovered that basically everyone hates Maya, and Coreen has discovered a bunch about Smarmy No. 2, aka Tyrone. Who also hated Maya. The only person who doesn't hate Maya seems to be Henry, who insists she's a friend. He met her a couple months ago, and she "experiences the world directly" so as not to "censor" herself, and that's "admirable".

Maya shows up with yet another guy, looking very distraught about Brian's disappearance, and Henry hurries off to talk to her. "Friends," says Vicki, "riiiiiiiiiiight." She also notices that the symbol Maya has as a tattoo is in the corner of Tyrone's painting. She turns to get her camera from the coat check, and runs into Mike, here to notify about Brian.

The main trio go down to Mohadevan's office, where Henry is a bitch to everyone because he likes Maya for whatever reason, and believes she didn't kill anyone. Which, like, literally no one said she did. Seriously. Mike asked her where she was, and if she fought with Brian, that's it. 100% super standard shit. But noooooo, it's some plot from Mike, and Vicki HAS to prove Maya didn't do it!! Jesus, Henry's acting like he's 12 or some shit. Vicki says she'll find the killer, Mike tells her to keep Henry on a leash, and Mike and Henry both leave without talking to Mohadevan at all.

Vicki, does, though. Brian drowned. In paint.

the 10th doctor looking confused, with the caption "What?"

Henry mojos Maya about Brian. She had spoken to him before the night he died? or on it? It's unclear, but she was cheating on him, and he found out, but she never came back to the gallery, so.

Henry and Vicki meet to... have a fight about Maya, apparently. I think it's supposed to be an update on the case, but Henry's all "she didn't do it, I mojo'd her" and Vicki's all "well, everyone thinks she's a cheating bitch, so there's that" and then there's some dialogue about whether Maya told Henry she's a cheater that I can't parse. You actually have to make the subtext make sense for that, and these are Blood Ties writers, so...

Vicki interviews Maya next, and again, it's like 3 lines of dialogue that don't add up to people being absolute cunts to each other. Maya admits to cheating, Vicki wants a list of her lovers, Maya balks, Vicki says she'll be nicer than the cops about it. Smarmy No. 1 comes in to pay for his artwork and to sexually harass Vicki about "nailing her to his wall". Gross, but what this show is best at: angrily spinning its wheels.

Vicki is convinced Maya is lying, for no clear reasons.

I mean, sure, why not?

Coreen says she should ask Tyrone, because of the coincidence of the symbol, and because everyone Henry's involved with seem involved in black magic.

Maya fucks Smarmy No. 1, and if I didn't know it was Tyrone's weird painting, I might assume he was our killer. This is an awfully big part for this show. Maya kicks him out just after the deed, though, and expects him never to speak of it. He wants a relationship, but accedes to her wishes.

Tyrone and Vicki are calling Maya Enid now, for some reason? Did the editor lose track of the two lines of dialogue that explain the double name to us? Must be a bitch of a job, editing everything into less-than-five-minute scenes where absolutely nothing happens. I'd get confused, too. Tyrone says he knew Enid better than he knows Maya, but he knows Maya was cheating. Vicki wants to look at his work-in-progress, but he refuses, and then asks if Coreen would want to go to a Warhol show, and Vicki tells him to call the office. She leaves - after asking ONE question she already knew the answer to - and Tyrone reveals the WIP: a blank canvas. Huh.

We are just about halfway through, and I have no idea what's going on, except that Maya is a cheater. Yeah, yeah, dead Brian, haunted painting, but, like... the entire investigation to this point has come up with the clue that sluts are bad. I just... I wish they wouldn't give me any good episodes at this point, you know? It would be easier than this week on/week off nonsense that I've been getting. Sigh. Let's continue.

Smarmy No. 1, whose actual name is Angus, goes back to the gallery, yet again, to actually pick up his painting. But wouldn't you know it, ol' Legs Mahoney is wandering out of his frame again. To steal a bit from the lovely YouTuber Pushing Up Roses, "Well, this guy is dead."

Angus is also found in a chair, upright, on a corner. Oh, wait, Mike says it's a parking lot, ok. They notice the lipstick on him - sluts bad! - and head off to the morgue.

Vicki and Coreen are looking up the symbol on Tyrone's painting and Maya's tattoo. Protection from demons. Coreen runs off to her date with Tyrone.

Like, y'all, I am not shortening these scenes at all, this is all that's happening. It's like a music video didn't take its Adderall. Like, I am partly ADHD and this is killing me. Killing me! Just stick with one thing for five full minutes, I am begging!

for you to be decent at your jobs

Mike stops by the office to tell Vicki about Angus. Same deal: lungs full of paint, the chair, yadda yadda. Assistant saw him heading to the gallery to finalize a deal - and Mike makes a weird little gesture with his fist, like fist bumping the air? to indicate the deal was fuckin a slut. Hey, you guys, did you know sluts are bad?

Vicki says she knows, she was there, but... she wasn't? The show seems very clear, that Angus left Maya in broad daylight, and even though Mike says time of death was in the afternoon, it was obviously nighttime when Angus was in the gallery getting killed? Vicki can't be the 2nd-to-last person to see him alive if we're to believe the way the show has laid out this timeline and I AM GOING TO RIP MY FUCKING HAIR OUT because you know we're just supposed to go along with Mike's timeline and completely ignore what we just fucking watched with our own eyes.

I didn't know a nearly 20-year-old television show could gaslight me, but here we are.

ANYWAY. Apparently what we're to believe is that Angus told his assistant where he was going, went to the gallery, sexually harassed Vicki, fucked Maya, then went back into the main portion of the gallery and was murdered by Legs. Despite like a whole day passing between when we saw him with Maya, and when he turned up dead. That was all in one morning. Fine.

Mike has found that about 6 years ago, Maya - then known as Enid Wyman - stabbed her boyfriend with a palette knife and called it performance art. He suspects that the paint in the lungs is just her signature evolving - she just keeps making people into artistic statements. Not a bad theory, I just hate everything going on now. Mike wants to bring Maya in for questioning, but he asks Vicki to be on Henry watch, because Mike has to make a federal case out of everything Henry does, and Vicki just always goes along with it.

So Henry is hanging out at the gallery, Maya telling him stories about her mom, for whatever reason. She makes a move on him, but he says no, then has to mojo her so she won't think of him that way anymore.

sluts!

Mike and Vicki show up to take Maya in for questioning. Mike says she can go with them, or he'll get a warrant, and I don't purport to be an expert on Canadian justice, but a warrant? for questioning? Sure, Jan.

Henry gets mad about it and puts his hands on Mike, because we absolutely cannot have a scene where these two get along. Vicki wrangles, Maya goes downtown, Henry insists she's innocent.

Coreen and Tyrone are having some pizza or something at Tyrone's place. He tells her about his muse, an artist named Franklin who no one's ever heard of, who said that one must sacrifice everything for art, anything other than art is a distraction. So money on the table: Franklin is Legs, killing people who aren't arty enough. My other theory is that it's the weird monster thing that Maya keeps putting in paintings, but that makes less sense to me, since it's Tyrone's painting that holds Legs in the first place. But with this show, who knows?!

Ohhhhhh, I see. Henry is the toothy guy in Maya's paintings, because he knew her mom, but her mom couldn't handle the fangs. So, not the killer. Also why Henry's so sure she's not guilty: he knew her when she was little, loved her like a daughter. He's just being paternal - which he could have let Vicki know at any time. Be for fuckin real, Henry. Open your mouth and TELL PEOPLE THINGS. Made Up Drama, I'm telling you, it's all stupid MUD instead of an actual plot.

They do some research on the crime scene - well, where the bodies were dumped. Turns out, the parking lot is owned by Edward Franklin - Tyrone's muse.

Franklin was a weirdo, left behind only a manifesto and a blank canvas, hanged himself. Coreen and Vicki put together that it's probably a weird killer, possibly connected to Franklin. They go to Tyrone's place and Coreen distracts while Vicki looks under the tarp, but it's an actual painting - because Tyrone has moved Franklin's blank canvas off the easel. But Franklin has plenty to say about how Tyrone shouldn't have trusted Coreen, and I am so annoyed we had to spend all that time learning sluts are bad instead of getting to see Tyrone interact with his weird ass "muse" of a demon painter! This would have been so much better!

Tyrone says he is willing to sacrifice everything, and starts painting over Franklin's canvas, ending up with a portrait of Franklin in a noose. The painting moves.

We are in the last 10 minutes. Henry and Vicki lie to Coreen and go to Tyrone's to slash all his canvases - but oh no, Tyrone has already left to give the haunted one to Coreen! They call, but Tyrone hangs up the phone and Franklin comes out of the painting. Henry and Vicki come back just in the nick of time, to destroy the canvas and therefore Franklin - but not before he sucks Tyrone into the demon realm or whatever with him.

They burn the painting in a montage of everyone from the episode under "epic" music, and finally, another horrible episode in in the books.