Friday, August 21, 2015

Summer TV Rewind: Moonlight 1.11: “Love Lasts Forever”

“You learn a lot in war. Like why some people make it and others don’t.”
- Mick

So I know I said “12:04AM” was one of my least favorite episodes, but “Love Lasts Forever” also rates pretty low on my list. Again, it’s one of those situations where I understand the need for the ultimate plot move but the way they got there just didn’t interest me very much. Mick is being extra brooding over his burgeoning feelings for Beth while brooding over Coraline’s humanity. Beth is dealing with Josh drama. He’s apparently trying to file charges against a creepy El Salvadorian drug cartel leader. The guy, Tejada, is kind of ruthless according to the things he’s done in his home country. He tends to intimidate people by attacking their families and loved ones. At first, Josh is all no fear, go ahead with his plan to file charges. But on his way to the parking garage at his office, he’s attacked by two masked me who toss a picture of Beth on the ground with an x over her face. She’s been marked.

While Josh is getting beaten up, Mick and Beth are plotting to take Coraline’s blood in for analysis to see what made her human. Those plans are derailed a bit when Josh comes home all beat up. Beth tells Josh he can’t step down from the case, even if she’s in danger because he could never live with himself if something went wrong and Tejada got off on the charges. This of course leads to make-up sex. Which Mick interrupts because Beth failed to show up for their lab date. He does overhear Josh ordering the cops to assign a protective detail to Beth. So Mick offers to protect Beth. He’s not thrilled that Beth and Josh are apparently back together (he was contemplating telling Beth how he felt) but he clearly loves Beth and wants to keep her safe. So while Josh is serving an arrest warrant on Tejada at his daughter’s sixteenth birthday party, Mick and Beth head back over to the lab. It turns out there’s nothing odd about the toxicology of Coraline’s blood. The lab tech is surprised that it wasn’t a child’s sample because the blood was so pure. And it’s a rare blood type: AO negative. Which is Beth’s blood type. I guess that explains why Coraline picked her as a child. They don’t have much time to revel in this realization before one of Tejada’s men opens fire with a sniper rifle. That’s when it pays to have a vampire bodyguard. He gets Beth out of harm’s way and takes off after the shooter.

Josh is determined to move forward with the case but things take a dangerous turn when Tejada’s bail is set at only $5 million. Tejada sets his guys on Josh’s trail and this results in a hasty kidnapping right out of police protection. Mick and Beth are in hot pursuit (literally, they are in a freaking car chase) when Beth starts calling Josh’s phone. I get that she wants to find him but didn’t she think it might alert his kidnappers and they might hurt him because of it? Mick loops in vampire hacker Logan to track Josh’s cell GPS and they end up following the kidnappers to an abandoned part of a park. Mick takes out the thugs who kidnapped Josh and things look like they are on the side of our heroes when one of the thugs (who Mick threw back into the car) grabs a gun and shoots Josh several times through the backseat. Why Mick didn’t pull Josh out of the car first (or have Beth do it) is beyond me. It would have avoided all the ensuing drama but I guess it wouldn’t have served the same purpose. Ultimately, despite Mick’s best efforts to stabilize Josh’s three bullet wounds (including using Beth’s necklace to clamp off an artery in Josh’s leg and use a car cigarette lighter to cauterize a wound, Josh’s heart stops beating and CPR doesn’t work. The ambulance arrives but even they can’t bring Josh back. Beth had begged Mick to turn Josh to save his life but Mick refused. I was honestly surprised Mick was able to hold it together in the sunlight for so long surrounded by and covered in so much blood.

Mick uses his “scary face” to get the one thug not in the hospital to give up Tejada’s location. He feeds an incorrect location to the cops so that he can deal with the cartel boss himself. Despite Mick’s misgivings about being a vampire sometimes, he is loving the power and the rage right now. He gets to beat up a bar full of thugs and get a tasty snack along the way when he sinks his chompers into Tejada’s neck. He doesn’t kill the guy (I don’t think) but I’m sure he thought about it.

Beth is very clearly struggling to accept Josh’s death and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone or be around anyone. This doesn’t stop Mick from coming in anyway. I guess they never did establish that vampires couldn’t come and go as they pleased. Well with all the other myths debunked on this show, that’s just another one to toss aside. Anyway, Beth is still furious at Mick for not saving Josh but Mick says it would have been taking a life. When Beth questions why Mick keeps on going as a vampire if he hates it so much, he feeds her some line about trying to make up for all the bad things he did in his early vampire days. He can’t say that he does it because of her. When she asks him if he would have made a different choice had she been the one dying, he says he would have made the same choice (i.e. let her die) but in voiceover, he questions what he would have done. He isn’t sure and I can understand why. Love is a powerful emotion but it can fade over time. If he turned Beth and they fell out of love, it would be another Coraline situation all over again and nobody wants that!

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