Psych: This Episode Sucks

So Lassiter is in a bar, swilling Jack Daniels and trying to unwind after a rough day, when a gorgeous blonde named Marlowe (Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy herself) sidles up to him and starts flirting outrageously. They bond over their mutual love of Clint Eastwood. While Lassiter orders another round, she slinks off to the ladies’ room… and slips out the window and disappears, leaving him devastated.

Shortly thereafter, a young man named Hamilton Dean is murdered by a hooded figure in a dark parking lot. In the morning, Juliet, with Shawn and Gus in tow, examines the crime scene. Hamilton’s body has been drained of blood through puncture wounds in his neck and both wrists, which leads a delighted Shawn and Gus to conclude he was attacked by a vampire. When a hungover and morose Lassiter arrives at the scene, he notices that Hamilton is clutching a necklace identical to the one Marlowe wore the previous night.

Lassiter heads to a local haberdashery shop, which, in one of this episode’s many moments of sheer brilliance, is named Bling Crosby. He talks to the young clerk (Van Hansis), but it’s a dead end: The necklace is a popular item, and there’s no record of past sales.

While investigating Hamilton’s murder, Juliet and the boys hit a gloriously decadent/campy/ridiculous vampire bar. Shawn is dressed as Tom Cruise’s Lestat from Interview With the Vampire; Gus is kitted out as Blacula (Shawn: “No one remembers Blacula, except for us and Quentin Tarantino”). Juliet grills the vamped-out bartender about any suspicious recent happenings; he tells them about a suspicious call he received from a customer looking to purchase a pint of blood. And hey, the bartender is played by Corey Feldman! Excellent. I’m pretty firmly pro-Feldman. He’s only got a quick cameo, but he looks good and does a fine job, which is great to see.

(Digression: Tuesday night, I was at the Duran Duran concert at Madison Square Garden, which, as you might expect, was pretty much nectar for my Eighties-loving -- and very specifically Duran-loving -- soul. Anyhoo, the opening act was the Neon Trees, whose video for their song “1983” features a cameo by Feldman, in character as Edgar Frog from The Lost Boys, which is very cool.)

Lassiter finds Marlowe’s address by pulling one of her fingerprints off the face of his watch. He arrives at her house and demands to see her necklace, which she produces without a fuss. When he grills her about her whereabouts at the time of Hamilton’s murder, she claims she was sitting in the parking lot outside the bar, silently watching Lassiter.

Juliet traces the call the mysterious blood-seeker made to the vampire bar, and discovers it came from Marlowe’s house. She and Shawn and Gus show up and surprise Marlowe and Lassiter. Since Marlowe has an alibi for Hamilton’s killing, they figure the call must have been placed by one of Marlowe’s three male roommates: Eddie, Jake, and Lucien. (Shawn and Gus and Juliet, all in unison: “Where’s Lucien?”)

Juliet interrogates Lucien at the SBPD headquarters. It’s Buffy’s Tom Lenk! Thus bringing the number of vampire-centric guest stars to three! Lucien also has an alibi for the murder: He was working at King Putt, the local mini-golf course. Suspicion turns to another of Marlowe’s roommates, Ed. During their search of the house, Shawn noted that Ed had an appointment at the local blood bank. Shawn and Gus drag Juliet along to investigate.

Whilst they’re all at the blood bank, a mysterious cloaked figure smashes a refrigerated case and steals a supply of blood, then escapes, leaving a press-on fingernail behind.

Once more, suspicion falls on Marlowe, who is now missing one of her fake nails. Juliet, Shawn and Gus, plus Henry and McNab, show up on Lassiter’s doorstep and interrupt his romantic evening with Marlowe (braised elk loin and candles shaped like hand grenades are involved). Another search of Marlowe’s house uncovers a supply of stolen blood in the freezer. She confesses to the blood blank theft, claiming she’s been selling it on the black market, but insists she’s innocent of Hamilton’s murder.

Even though Marlowe is now in police custody, a man named Ron gets attacked in the parking lot of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Bagels (Psych writers, you are on fire this episode) by a cloaked figure, who tries to steal his blood. While questioning an injured Ron at the hospital, Shawn looks at his medical chart and discovers Ron, like the murdered Hamilton, has O-negative blood, which Ron’s doctor (erroneously) claims is the rarest type. Okay, Psych writers, I’m going to have to retract what I just said about you being on fire, because that was a rookie mistake. People with O-negative blood types are universal donors, which makes it a highly sought-after type, and it’s certainly rare, but it’s not the rarest.

Ron’s doctor goes on to say that only about two dozen people in Santa Barbara have O-negative blood. Huh -- about six and a half percent of the US population has O-negative blood, actually, so unless there’s a grotesque statistical anomaly here, that means the population of Santa Barbara is… what, around 360 people? Anyway, the doctor brings up a list of the O-negatives, which Shawn covertly scans -- Marlowe’s brother Adrian is on the list.

Shawn (wildly) deduces that Adrian has Von Willebrand disease and thus needs frequent blood transfusions. Hence, he’s been stealing blood from all possible donors. Lassiter also has O-negative blood, which is why Marlowe attempted to seduce him in the first place; genuinely attracted to him, she was unable to go through with draining his blood, which is why she deserted him at the bar.

Adrian, who turns out to be the clerk from Bling Crosby, bursts into Lassiter’s house, chloroforms him, ties him to a chair, and prepares to drain him. When Juliet, Shawn and Gus arrive, they discover Lassiter has already easily overpowered and arrested his assailant (Lassiter: “I’ve slowly and methodically been building up a tolerance to chloroform over the past fifteen years”).

And Lassiter visits Marlowe in jail, where they bond some more over Eastwood films. Unable to come straight out and verbally express his feelings for her, Lassiter holds a sign up to the glass separating them: It’s a heartfelt note explaining that he’s willing to wait six to eighteen months for her.

Fine stuff. Plenty of Lassiter is never a bad thing, and when it’s combined with some fun guest stars and the sharpest script of the season thus far, it makes for one of the strongest episodes in a long while.

Lassiter-based awesomeness:
It was a Lassitercentric episode, so there were a bunch of gems. Here’s the cream of the crop:

Bartender: What’s your poison?
Lassiter: Humanity.

In answer to Marlowe’s request to tell her more about himself: “I’m somewhat recently divorced, I believe there’s no little to no room for interpretation when it comes to the United States Constitution, and I have an unusually high threshold for pain.”

Upon learning that Marlowe really does have feelings for him: “The only thing that compares is the rush I felt when I heard Chuck Norris speak at an NRA convention in Aberdeen.”

Awesome Eighties reference:
Juliet complains that she feels like she’s babysitting Shawn and Gus.
Shawn: That makes you Elisabeth Shue. Gus is Keith Coogan.
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Psych: Last Night Gus

So the entire Psych gang, including eccentric coroner Woody (Kurt Fuller), hangs out a bar to celebrate the retirement of an old duffer named Jim from the Santa Barbara Police Department. Shawn orders a round of shots for everyone, and the next thing you know, he’s waking up in the morning at his desk in the Psych offices, wearing a shower cap, a strange pair of sandals, and a bling-y gold chain. Gus is passed out on the floor, and Lassiter and Woody are zonked on the couch, improbably spooning. Lassiter also has a black eye; his gun, which is missing three bullets, is submerged in the fish tank.

And no one has any memory of the night before. Cue the Hangover tribute episode!

The gang tries to piece together the events of the evening. Shawn’s phone has a video of everyone at the bar, hanging out with an unknown man in a Hawaiian shirt. Lassiter’s car is missing; Gus’s car is (poorly) parked outside with a ginormous dent in the hood.

The man in the Hawaiian shirt is found floating in the water, dead from three gunshot wounds. Gus’s phone is in the man’s pocket, and Shawn’s shoes are found near the body. The dead man’s phone contains surveillance photos of a middle-aged blonde woman (whom Shawn describes as “Terri Garr-esque”). Urine tests reveal that Shawn, Gus, Lassiter and Woody were all drugged, presumably at the bar. Shawn has a fuzzy memory from the previous night of a man staring at a couple of attractive women; theorizing the guy might’ve intended to drug the women and simply slipped the stuff in the wrong glasses, Shawn drags everyone over to the bar to interrogate the bartender.

The suspicious man turns out to be the bartender’s boyfriend, who was presumably not at all interested in drugging the women. At the bar, Gus is accosted by a gorgeous young woman (Jessica Lucas), who kisses him enthusiastically and thanks him for the great time they had last night. Gus is pleasantly flummoxed by this.

Next stop: A doughnut shop, which showed up in the dead man’s photos. The cashier recognizes the whole gang instantly. He shows them security video, taken the previous night, of Lassiter crashing Gus’s car into Bobo, the store’s beloved doughnut mascot, then getting into a fistfight with an unidentified man. Shortly thereafter, the body of the man who scuffled with Lassiter is found in his car down the block from the donut shop. He’s identified as Scott Williams, the husband of the blonde woman in the photos, Gloria. Shawn deduces that the dead man in the Hawaiian shirt was a private detective, hired by Scott to keep an eye on Gloria.

Meanwhile, Henry wakes up in a hotel room, minus his pants and with no recollection of the previous night. He calls Shawn in a panic. When Shawn arrives to help his dad, he discovers that Gloria Williams is a guest at the hotel -- Henry had been helping the private investigator track her down. When Shawn, Gus, Lassiter, Juliet and Henry search Gloria’s room, a leaky gas pipe causes an explosion. They all end up diving from the second-story railing into the pool below to avoid getting blown to bits.

And then rapper/former MTV VJ Ed Lover randomly shows up at the SBPD and takes his bling-y gold necklace back from Shawn.

Shawn recognizes one of the men photographed with Gloria Williams from a wanted poster in the SBPD: Leroy Jenkins, wanted in connection with thirty-seven armed robberies. His nearest relative is Lilly Jenkins… the gorgeous woman Gus hooked up with last night.

Unaware of all this, Gus entertains Lilly in his apartment. She drugs his drink. A gun-toting Leroy arrives and demands that Gus give him the private detective’s phone with the incriminating photos. Leroy killed the detective and Scott Williams when their investigation into Gloria’s infidelities threatened to expose him; Lilly drugged the gang at the bar last night in a botched attempt to retrieve the phone and erase the photos. Lassiter, Juliet and Shawn burst in to save Gus from Leroy; a messy gunfight ensues, which ends when a blissed-out Gus whacks Leroy over the head with a bowl of taffy.

Well, huh. I’m curiously neutral-to-down on this episode -- scenes mysteriously vanished from my brain as soon as I was finished watching them, and I really can’t recall any big standout moments, much less think of anything remotely witty and/or insightful to point out. This is curious, though: After I finished watching, I headed over to IMDB’s Psych page, as is my habit, to make sure I had the correct spellings for the names of guest stars, etcetera. IMDB is somehow under the impression that this episode guest-starred Corey Feldman, Tom Lenk, and Kristy Swanson.

I assure you, it did not.

I can only assume we’ve got an upcoming Feldman-Lenk-Swanson extravaganza in the works, and that, my friends, will be something to remember.


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Duranalysis: Sing Blue Silver, Part Two

Onward and upward! Let’s pick up where we left off in Part One, which, upon reflection, was a little short on gratuitous references to John Taylor’s jaw-dropping beauty. The above screengrab was chosen to rectify this oversight.

In Atlanta, the boys attend a banquet in their honor at the headquarters of one of the tour’s big sponsors, Coca-Cola. The event chairman spontaneously calls upon John to make some off-the-cuff comments. Always ready to add a fun chaotic element to any situation, a somewhat blurry John takes the stage and cheerily declares his preference for Pepsi.


Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s neither Coke nor Pepsi in John’s glass.

So after the show, Nick sits down with a couple of the lighting guys to hash out the problem with the overly-dark stage. The lighting guys -- you know, I really wish Sing Blue Silver had done a better job of identifying all the various staff and crew members running around, so I could refer to people by name and/or title -- do their best to placate him. They’re obviously treading delicately around their wee dainty 21-year-old millionaire pop-star employer, and thus their responses come across as a bit condescending: “You’re bright up there, I thought, so it is a psychological thing, too… Problem is, all night long we were taking readings with meters and stuff, and you’re the brightest one on stage 90% of the time.” Nick -- totally calm, totally polite, totally intractable -- goes straight to the heart of the matter: “But I couldn’t actually see.”


While this is taking place, Roger waltzes in front of the camera and, oh gee, his pants appear to be sexily unbuttoned.


Roger Taylor: Stealth exhibitionist.

The boys go on a tour of an FBI office/museum (are they at Quantico? One of the field offices? A bit more information would not be remiss here), where they’re treated to a lecture about the Bureau’s past accomplishments. The Durans all display varying degrees of polite interest and/or mild ennui. Except for Andy, who’s mesmerized. Andy is a heartbeat away from abandoning this whole guitar-legend-in-the-making business and embarking on a bold new career as a G-Man.


No. No. Jesus, no. FBI agents, mark my words: No matter how much they plead and whine and beg and bat their pretty eyes at you, do not let the gaggle of hyperactive, accident-prone pop stars handle your guns.


New Orleans: Nick and Julie Anne stroll around Bourbon Street, where Nick receives an impromptu tap-dancing lesson from a young street performer. I appreciate Nick’s moxie, but his dance skills have not noticeably improved since the “New Moon on Monday” video.


It’s the home stretch of the tour. Irrepressible prankster Simon feigns a broken arm during rehearsal.


Afterward, he reveals the charade. The Durans find it uproarious. Well, sixty percent of the Durans find it uproarious, anyway -- Nick is nowhere in sight, and as for Roger…


Yeah. Not too hard to tell what he thinks of all this.


Okay, this part is sort of ghastly: During the last leg of the tour, John had some kind of accident in his hotel room that resulted in a badly lacerated foot. The exact cause is still shrouded in mystery, but let’s clear our brains of speculation and accept John’s explanation in an article in the April 1985 issue of, ahem, BOP magazine (“John Taylor: ‘I Nearly Killed Myself!’”): “I had been dancing on broken bottles without realizing it and I had to have 20 stitches in my foot.” Dancing on broken bottles! Could happen to anyone! After that, John was in no shape to prance about the stage, but they couldn’t afford to cancel the gig and reschedule the very expensive shoot for the Arena concert film, so… well, here’s a quote from Andy’s memoir about how they got John ready for the show:

“In the end, John had to be fired up at both ends. The doctor gave him huge amounts of morphine in the foot. Then John took pharmaceutical cocaine through the nose to keep him awake. It was the only solution; otherwise, the morphine would have knocked him out.”

I was originally going to remark that you can’t tell the difference between the performances where John is uninjured and the performances where he’s tripping balls to take away the crippling foot pain, but then I started sorting through screengrabs, and…


Yeah. Yeah, you sort of can.

Backstage after the final concert, an emotional Simon and John and Andy all mash themselves together into one big, clingy, sweaty, meaty, tear-soaked mess.


Once again, Nick is nowhere to be seen (teary, sweaty, shirtless group hugs are not, repeat, not his scene). Roger glances at his hugging bandmates, then opens a beer and sacks out on a nearby couch, looking like he’s had quite enough of Duran Duran, thank you.


And that’s pretty much it. Entertaining stuff. It’s strange: As glamorous and exotic as they all seemed during this time, for all the weirdness that came with their monstrous fame and fortune -- the drugs, the egos, the excesses -- they still basically come across as a bunch of nice kids. Kids with great bone structure and awesome hairstyles and flashy wardrobes, sure, but nice kids nonetheless.
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Duranalysis: Sing Blue Silver, Part One

Duranalysis is back! Let’s take a look at Sing Blue Silver, Russell Mulcahy’s 1984 documentary about the 79-day North American leg of Duran Duran’s 1983-1984 world tour. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the rarified lives of the band on the road, which seemed to consist mostly of performances and photo ops and interviews, to say nothing of endless hours spent moving from gig to gig in limousines and private planes. And being screamed at by teen girls. Oh, lordy, plenty of screaming teen girls. It’s a hoot.

There’s far too much material here to go over everything, but I’ll try to spotlight some of the highlights. Here we go:

The tour kicks off with a press conference, in which Andy gets the ball rolling when he gives a cheeky, innuendo-laden response to a soft-lob question (“When did you learn an instrument?” -- you can sort of guess where Andy takes it from there). The remaining Durans follow his lead and chime in with naughty replies… until it’s Roger’s turn. Being naughty and cheeky is not in Roger’s wheelhouse, at least not during a blasted press conference. He looks panicky and embarrassed, until Andy jumps in and bails him out (“Roger needs two hands for his!”).


Props to Andy for bringing the awesome throughout this entire documentary. While some of the Durans appear to be fast running out of enthusiasm for life on the road (hi, Roger!), Andy’s clearly in his element.

Showtime! The Durans cease their green room hijinks (helium-sucking and general chaos-making) and head for the stage. Except for Nick, who refuses to abandon his terribly important game of Galaga for something as trivial as a live performance. A member of their inner circle (who surely has a more important function than Official Nick Wrangler, but he’s never identified by name or purpose, so I have no clue as to his identity) comes up behind Nick, grabs him around his tiny chest, and lugs the wailing pixie off toward the stage. The enduring weirdness of Nick Rhodes continues to be a source of great joy in my life.


I won’t dwell too long on Sing Blue Silver’s excellent performance scenes, of which there are many. Both the video for “The Reflex” and the Mulcahy-directed concert film Arena (An Absurd Notion) were filmed during this tour, so if you’ve seen either of those, you know what you’re in for. Because it will become relevant later, I’m just going to quickly point out how Nick is off in his own little corner of the stage, surrounded by his synthesizers and sundry equipment (including his then-state-of-the-art Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which came complete with a light pen and monitor). For parts of the show, he’s standing in total darkness. Anyone who thinks Nick is going to sit back and quietly accept this situation is unfamiliar with the ways of everybody’s favorite high-maintenance pixie.


This is Roger’s special post-performance ritual:

1. Walk directly in front of the nearest camera.
2. Whip off shirt.


Why, thank you, Roger. Much obliged.


Backstage, the boys are introduced to Mike Davis and Marcus Allen from the Raiders. This is worth seeing for: a) the fetishistic sight of leggy knockout John Taylor in a football jersey, and b) the shots of Andy and Nick playfully roughhousing with each other.


B) is significant in light of Andy’s memoir (Wild Boy: My Life In Duran Duran), in which he depicts his relationship with Nick as an unbroken series of snubs, slights, shouting matches, passive-aggressive bitchery, icy silences, and hurled pork pies. I don’t doubt Andy’s account -- I’m sure it was all of that -- but from what we see throughout Sing Blue Silver, their dynamic was more complicated than simple mutual animosity. Unless they’re keeping up an elaborate masquerade for the cameras, Nick and Andy seem to genuinely get a kick out of each other. They even appear to be -- brace yourselves -- buddies. It’s cute.


Hotel room interviews. This is what John Taylor looks like when he first rolls out of bed.


Disgusting, isn’t it?

The boys have some free time in New York, so Nick dons his best French Foreign Legion hat, grabs his best girl (future wife Julie Anne Friedman), and strolls off on a magical adventure down Fifth Avenue. Much of the tour takes place in cold, wintry cities, which provides Nick with the opportunity to sport an amazing array of outerwear: crazy hats and scarves and bulky layered coats with huge padded shoulders.


Andy, meanwhile, hoofs it to the nearest pool hall and has himself a fine old time playing billiards. We don’t get to see how the other Durans enjoy their downtime, but I’m betting Roger’s day involved a locked door, an unplugged phone, and earplugs.


The tour continues. Another city, another performance. Nick is still plunged in darkness, and seriously, I’m half-convinced at this point that someone’s just screwing with him. And who could blame them? It’d be fun to mess with Nick’s head. Muck up his lighting, leave him groping around for his keyboards in the darkness, then sit back and wait for the fireworks.


(A quote from Simon, taken from a 2003 Tatler profile of Nick, about his bandmate’s legendarily control-freaky nature: “He's very analytical and that can be a pain in the arse. He cares about everything, and I mean everything. He feels it's his business to choose my socks and underwear.” Along those same lines, here’s a quote from Nick, as related in Steve Malins’s Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography, as to why he’s the scourge of lighting directors everywhere: “I’m horribly particular about colours. The arguments I’ve had with lighting designers about shades of magenta…”)

Backstage, Nick goes full-tilt Norma Desmond about the lighting: “It’s so depressing, that black stage. It’s terrible. Horrible. Vile. It’s got to go. I kept looking at it all through the set. Horrible. Horrible.” In the background, his bandmates quietly get snockered, as though the thought of getting through one of Nick’s tirades cold sober is too much to bear (Roger’s thousand-yard stare is especially poignant). Andy backs Nick up on the lighting situation: “It’s turning me to drink. I never usually drink.” This is what I mean about Andy bringing the awesome.


While the boys get ready for a shoot with famed photographer Francesco Scavullo, Simon ruminates on the dangers of getting undressed when journalists are in the vicinity: “‘Cause if you take your trousers off in front of people, they’ll write things like, ‘Simon Le Bon wears yellow underwear,’ and they’ll accuse you of having chubby legs and a gut.” This is in reference to a cover story on the band in the February 2nd, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone, in which journalist James Henke writes, of seeing Simon sans pants, “It was not, frankly, a particularly awe-inspiring sight. Le Bon, you see, is no John Travolta when it comes to physiques. Not a slob, just slightly chubby legs, a little bit of a gut.” Oh, ouch. Knife to the heart! Not that anybody should ever lose sleep fretting about long-past blows to Simon’s robust ego, but it’s hard not to wince at that.


Especially considering how whippy and lean he was in 1984. “Bit of a gut,” nothing doing.


There’s too much goodness here to be contained in a single blog post, so Part Two will continue in the next section.
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Psych: Shawn Rescues Darth Vader

Hey, Psych is back for a sixth season! Good news. There’s a comforting sameness to Psych -- it’s only occasionally great, but for the most part, it’s pretty darn entertaining. While this isn’t one of the great episodes, it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour.

The episode opens with a tuxedo-clad Shawn slinking about the rented mansion of the British Ambassador, who’s been staying in Santa Barbara while trying to clear an English exchange student, Colin Hennessy, of charges of strangling his girlfriend to death. The charges were recently dropped, so the Ambassador is throwing a celebratory bash, which Shawn is in the middle of crashing. Shawn and Gus, it seems, were hired by a bratty neighborhood kid to break into the mansion to retrieve a mint-condition 1978 Darth Vader action figure (complete with double-telescoping lightsaber), which the Ambassador’s twerpy son had stolen. To avoid getting caught by security guards, Shawn ducks under the Ambassador’s bed… and finds the strangled corpse of a young woman.

(And that’s it for the Star Wars theme. A few quick jokes about the prequels, a “Luke, I am your father” gag, and that’s it. A pity -- Psych usually does so well at taking pop-culture topics and running away with them. Remember the episode-long homage to the entire John Hughes oeuvre? I was expecting something similar here, but no. Life, it is full of disappointment.)

Unwilling to confess to sneaking into a diplomatic residence under false pretenses, Shawn slips out of the mansion, then convinces Lassiter and Juliet to return with him to investigate, claiming he’s had a psychic vision of the dead woman.

Lassiter, meanwhile, is still in a deep, angry snit over last season’s discovery of Juliet and Shawn’s affair. Never one to suffer a snit in silence, he straps Juliet into a polygraph machine and tries to get her to confess to the relationship. Juliet is having none of this.

(Hey, speaking of Lassiter: My friend and fellow aficionado of 1980s pop culture, Alex Albrecht, just directed a short Voltron-themed film starring Tim Omundson. It’s very cool. Watch it here. I mean, Voltron! Lassiter as a Voltron pilot! That’s an undeniably weird bit of casting, right? I always thought the pilots were feisty Japanese teens with awesome spiky hair and sensitive bone structure. But Omundson is so inherently cool that it sort of works, and besides… Voltron!)

Anyhoo. They all head over to the Ambassador’s residence to search for the body. Oh, hey, the Ambassador is played by Malcolm McDowell! Awesomesauce. Malcolm McDowell can do no wrong. Which is not to say he never appears in bad projects -- he’s got a whole lot of crap on his long and distinguished résumé -- but he tends to be the very best thing about a lot of very bad films and television shows. They also meet his Vice-Consul, who is played by the slinky and awesome Polly Walker. Long story short: The dead woman is no longer under the bed, but Shawn correctly deduces that her corpse has been shifted to the swimming pool. The dead woman is identified as Annabeth York, a member of the Ambassador’s staff, who had recently uncovered the evidence that cleared Colin Hennessy’s name. She was strangled to death in precisely the same manner that Colin’s girlfriend Sarah Peele had been murdered.

Shawn theorizes that Annabeth and the Ambassador were having an affair. Anxious to find proof, he steals a key from the Ambassador’s twerpy kid and sneaks into the mansion. He discovers the Ambassador was in Zurich at the time of Sarah’s murder. He also overhears the Ambassador telling his Vice-Consul that he wants to let the police know about his affair with Annabeth.

Figuring this makes it unlikely the Ambassador murdered Sarah and Annabeth, Shawn volunteers his services to track down the real killer. Annabeth had received a cryptic text the night of the murder -- “The witnesses were right” -- suggesting Colin was indeed guilty of Sarah’s murder… okay, you know what? No one ever gained anything by scrutinizing the ins and outs and whys and wherefores of a Psych plot too carefully, so let’s wind this up fast: The murderer turns out to be Colin’s host father, an embassy employee with a dangerous fascination for Colin’s girlfriend. Annabeth uncovered evidence suggesting he killed Sarah, so he strangled her as well. And the Vice-Consul moved Annabeth’s body to the swimming pool in a misguided though well-intentioned attempt to shield the Ambassador from suspicion.

Worth noting: At one point in all this nonsense, Lassiter straps Shawn into a lie detector and grills him on whether or not he’s really psychic. Shawn passes with flying colors. The episode ends with a childhood flashback, in which Henry teaches young Shawn how to beat the machine, telling him it might come in handy some day. In some ways, Henry’s an awful father. In many others, he’s awesome.

Awesome 1980s reference:
For an episode with Star Wars in the title, this episode was awfully short on pop-culture references, Star Wars-themed or otherwise. There was a quick bit in which Shawn started babbling on about diplomatic immunity in an egregious Russian accent, leading Gus to snap, “The guy from Lethal Weapon 2 was not Russian, Shawn!”

Moment of Lassiter-based awesomeness:
(Lassiter straps himself into the lie detector machine to demonstrate to Shawn that he’s telling the cold, solid truth through all this.)
Lassiter: If you don’t treat O’Hara with the respect she deserves, I will discharge my pistol.
Shawn: Are you saying you’ll shoot me?
Lassiter: Repeatedly.

Oh, Lassiter. How I missed you during Psych’s long. lonely hiatus.
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