Major Crimes' Major Exposition Dump: I Have Stroh Many Questions

Matt Webb Mitovich

Updated Wed, December 27, 2017 at 3:11 PM UTC

To conclude its sixth and final season, TNT’s Major Crimes on Tuesday night brought back Phillip Stroh in full force, forcing the freshly and dearly departed Commander Raydor’s team into a battle of wits, all while emotionally taxed.

I am not here to deliver a play-by-play of this week’s tense, exhausting doubleheader — very simply said, Stroh (played by Billy Burke) has recruited/coerced the similarly sketchy Dylan, a computer whiz, to eavesdrop on the Major Crimes squad as they search for the serial rapist/killer’s long-disappeared birth mother (in the wake of DDA Rios appearing to be his latest murder victim) — but instead rattle off some questions, if only because TVLine’s world-acclaimed TV Questions column is on holiday and won’t be back until 2018.

So, lemme know if you have any answers… or, more likely, questions of your own!

1 | Really, not even a throwaway line about Brenda Leigh Johnson (let alone Fritz Howard!) being MIA for Raydor’s funeral?

2 | Was the heartbreak of Raydor’s daughter almost as hard to watch as her husband Andy’s? (Props to returning guest star Zarah Mahler.)

3 | Conversely, did Rusty not seem heartbroken enough? Sure, his hard-scrabble upbringing steeled him a bunch when it comes to life’s curveballs, but Sharon’s death almost came out of frickin’ nowhere. Emily and Ricky may have more years as Sharon’s kids, but Rusty’s been the one at her side, day in/day out, for the past half-decade.

4 | Amidst everything else, are we really playing the “Rusty Being Forced to Cohabitate With Gus Is Awwwkkkkkward!” beat?

5 | Are we also playing the “Mason Questions the Historically Brilliant MCD’s Instincts Pertaining to a Serial Killer They Know Quite Well” conflict?

6 | Were you suspicious of DDA Rios’ “neighbor kid” from his first scene, perhaps when he turned out to have handy a photo of the padlock that used to be on the back gate to her pool? (Who takes photos of padlocks?) Speaking of which: What was the hacking plan if Tao never asked him if the gate had a lock?

7 | How long will it take for Buzz, Tao et al to realize their respective cell phones are burning through battery too quickly, due to Dylan’s covertly installed malware? I thought for sure they’d compare notes/get wise to the hack at least by the end of last night’s second episode, and yet… we saw nothing. Or, did they have that collective epiphany off-screen, and part of what we (and Dylan) saw last night through the surveillance cam was a bit of theater meant to misdirect their eavesdropper? (What if “Hunt,” whose appearance did blindside Dylan, was actually an actor meant to rattle their adversary?) Speaking of….

8 | Did it take anyone a moment (or seeing my tweet) to recognize a super-dapper Enver Gjokaj (Dollhouse) as Gwendolyn’s stepson Hunt?

9 | Speaking of guest casting, would it mean anything to anyone if I noted that Dylan is played by Will “Grandson of Richard” Attenborough? (That was a leftover “fun fact” from an old James Duff interview.)

10 | Does anyone really need to actually watch The Alienist after being exposed to roughly 40 commercials for it last night?

11 | That was Detective Nolan, right, spying on post-romp Dylan from the motorcycle, and then later frequenting the lad’s hooker girlfriend/Kristina Corinthos-Davis? Is that the top-secret “by any means” mission that Provenza sent him on? Does that mean the neighbor kid smelled funny to Provenza from go?

12 | Almost last but far from least, let’s talk about Gwendolyn: Is it safe to say that this guest star had more dialogue than any series regular in the previous nine episodes combined? As she dumped that epic/endless monologue of exposition, was I the only one half-expecting her to bring the story around to when she lost the Heart of the Ocean aboard the Titanic? (Should TVLine reconsider this year’s Most Convoluted Storyline winner?)

13 | And most lastly, for those who paid attention: What is Stroh really after?

Entertainment News