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    Five-O Home Page Author Mr. Mike's Avatar
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    (This show can be seen on MHZChoice.com streaming service).

    MAJOR SPOILERS, PLOT IS GIVEN AWAY!!!!


    There are more than a few similarities between the Portuguese show Daughter of the Law and the French cop show Spiral, which I think is "one of the greatest TV shows of all time, blah blah blah."

    Daughter of the Law is about a crack police team which solves difficult cases. The person in charge of this team, Isabel Garcia, is a woman, like Laure Berthaud, the leader in Spiral -- both are around 40 years of age. There are similarities with other team members -- i.e., Lopes, a rookie guy; later, a "newbie" woman; Baptista, an older guy with a sense of humor; and Santos, a hothead who intimidates witnesses badly, especially when he becomes boss of the team after Garcia is told to take a holiday because she is getting so burned out. There are also computer geeks helping the team and various bureaucrats and bosses making life difficult for them.

    The show starts with some nasty murders where women are raped and killed and left with scarves stuck in their mouths. Investigation of these cases reveals that they are not as they seem, and, on the other hand, other cases not related to these murders which look mundane reveal sinister sides. Lopes is one who wants to examine every angle of a case, whereas Santos wants to close them down as soon as possible.

    Francisco, a college philosophy professor, becomes a major suspect, but he is cleared after a DNA test. Garcia won't accept this, and is obsessed with trying to prove that Francisco is indeed involved with the killings.

    Garcia's life is a mess. She is divorced from her husband Jaime, who works for a sleazy tabloid newspaper which delights in ridiculing the way police deal with cases. She has a 16 year old daughter Sara who has the usual teenage problems, including having friends who live in a shitty part of town and are drug dealers. Sara has a lesbian-like relationship with her best friend Joana. She gets sexually involved with Santos (the hothead from her mother's team) with the result she becomes pregnant and has a back-alley abortion which, it is suggested, is botched and she will not be able to have any children in the future!

    Jaime gets out of control with his tabloid attacks on the cops, with the result his boss Franklin, pressured by Inácio, Garcia's superior, fires Jaime from the newspaper, but soon after gives him a job on the company's TV station where Jaime comes a superstar "avenger" type who continues his attacks on the police for what he sees as their incompetence. For some reason, Jaime comes to a "farewell party" (of sorts) for Inácio (don't know why he would even be there); he ends up abusing Inácio in front of all the cops and other people from the department and punches him in the face!

    It turns out that Fernando really is involved with the killings. He is a total wacko. As his brother relates, when their youngest brother drowned in a swimming pool when they were all kids, Fernando didn't bother to pull him out of the water, he grabbed a movie camera and started filming this. This leads to a totally stupid "brainstorm" where Garcia and Lopes finally figure out that Fernando is involved with the death of the women, because he was the guy filming snuff movies where the woman were killed, and he never raped them, therefore no DNA results, duh!! (There are no details about who actually >did< kill the women.)

    Things get VERY hairy near the end of the show, especially since Garcia is murdered by Fernando in the second-to-last episode, so I guess there won't be another season. This is accompanied by some totally shitty rock music and takes place in near darkness during a thunderstorm with lightning (talk about clichéd). What is equally crazy, Santos is outside the apartment while Garcia is being killed. He also came there, probably to shoot her, because she went totally apeshit when she found out Santos had knocked up her daughter, putting a gun in his mouth and so forth, and then buggered off, telling Santos he better find her daughter, who had been kidnapped (getting ahead of myself here) or she will finish the job.

    Anyway, Sara (the daughter) is kidnapped by Fernando at the end of the show. This is after he auditions her for a movie, which is sooo stupid ... Fernando's picture is all over the place, thanks to Jaime's "avenger" TV show; he was also "outed" by the newspaper when Jaime was working there. So why didn't the daughter recognize Fernando, who was pretending to be the director for the audition who was asking her all sorts of horrible questions like "Sara, did you ever have an orgasm"!!! WTF!!!

    The thing that really annoyed me as the show went along was they started to use pop tunes with lyrics as background music. I don't know why, there was a nice theme song for the show, and while the music was not that prominent (at least by the resident composer), it would often have these bass clusters indicating that "something really horrible is going to happen soon." I hate it when they use pop tunes with lyrics (something the Five-O reboot did a LOT), because it is basically telling you what to think because of the lyrics' message.

    And it gets stupider ... they start using classical music like a part of Mozart's Requiem after Garcia is murdered, and yet more classical music when Fernando is torturing Sara in this underground bunker next door to where he was hiding at his brother's place ... including Dvorak's New World Symphony. PUH-LEEZ!! Does this mean that people like me who listen to classical music are psychopaths?!?

    I watched all 20 episodes of the show in 3 days (augh) ... I definitely don't think it was anywhere near as good as Spiral. But I didn't consider it a total waste of time. At least I got to write the above rant, LOL.
    Last edited by Mr. Mike; 02-22-2022 at 07:21 PM.

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