In Plain Sight, "Who's Bugging Mary?": Family affairs

Some quick thoughts on last night's "In Plain Sight" coming up just as soon as I accuse a widow of inventing her dead husband...

"In Plain Sight" isn't a "mythology" show in the sense we think of, ala "The X-Files" or "Fringe," but there tends to be the same kind of breakdown of episodes, where some are purely self-contained work plots, and others are about the larger backstory driving the series. It's just that this time the mythology is about a dysfunctional family, and about a magic suitcase of crystal meth.

And where the mythology episodes are often the ones to be looked forward to the most on those other series, they tend to be the weakest parts of "In Plain Sight." I would, frankly, take a dozen stories about murdered witnesses before we got another episode dealing with Jinx and/or the magic suitcase, the latter of which I thought we were finally rid of at the end of last season.

I recognize that David Maples and company are trying to tell a story about a character as much as about her work, and Mary's family is a fundamental part of her character. She wouldn't be the hard-ass she is if her dad hadn't run out on her, and if she hadn't been stuck taking care of her idiot mother and her flaky sister. But I understand that by now, and I still find her family to be abrasive, annoying and a large distraction from the chief appeal of the show, which is the interplay between Mary, Marshall and the witnesses. And the FBI agent is almost as irritating a character as Jinx, even if they explained his motivation for being so irritating at the end of "Who's Bugging Mary?"

(Speaking of which, the Mary who has held grudges for decades against mom and sis, and the Mary who can't stop being nasty to Eleanor for the sin of moving Mary's desk, does not seem like the kind of person who would be all "I look forward to working with you" to the FBI guy after he tried to destroy her life twice, and has still left her house looking like a complete wreck.)

When the episode opened with Mary dreaming that Brandi was going into WitSec, all I could think was, "Why can't this be real? And why can't she take Jinx with her?"

What did everybody else think?