“Major Crimes” is generally not the most serious show, as it often introduces a dose of laughter in each of its episodes, despite the rather serious overall theme. And yet, occasionally the show decides to take a darker turn – and when it does that, its writers usually go all out and seriously make their fans think about what they’re seeing. Season 4 of the show just started recently, but it’s already going pretty hard in some aspects.
The story in the most recent episode 2 was pretty emotional and focused primarily on Sanchez. His return has had an impact on many people, and everyone is trying to deal with it, including himself. Actually, Sanchez seems particularly eager to deal with the situation caused by his return.
We saw Sanchez joining the team during their high-speed pursuit of a psychiatrist, and this was initially shaping up to be a pretty regular episode, nothing out of the ordinary for the show’s default structure. However, it eventually becomes clear that Sanchez hasn’t really recovered from his problems, and his past still haunts him, though people around him have no clue what’s been going on with the character.
Therapy isn’t always effective, and Sanchez still seems completely unable to deal with the anger boiling inside of him. He ends up revealing what he has been dealing with for the last sixteen years to the other detectives in a beautifully written scene which brings a tear to the eye, and we finally get to know what he has gone through as well.
Fans have been speculating a lot about what the character could possibly be experiencing, but nobody was even close to guessing this, it seems – his story really is a lot more tragic than most were guessing, and it’s obvious that he has gone through a lot.
The episode has been, overall, pretty heavy on the emotions, hitting quite hard in some spots. Sanchez was revealed to have this truly tragic past, the murderer of the episode has had to deal with losing his daughter to suicide, and Rusty had to finally face the fact that not all kids end up making it alive on the streets.
Sometimes even street smarts aren’t enough to save one, as the smartest ones are taken first in some cases. And in the end, it was pretty obvious that the writers of the show were paying a lot more attention on the emotional aspects of the story than the actual murder. Still, the show needs this from time to time, even just as a reminder to its viewers that it’s a serious story and not quite lighthearted.