Backstrom Investigates a Murder in a Scientology-Like Cult in the Latest Episode of the Rainn Wilson Detective Vehicle
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I get up every morning before seven, but for the first few hours, I’m awake, and my brain is in a bit of a fog. Despite Wellbutrin and caffeine, my morning essentials, I limp out of the gate every morning, sluggish, low energy, and sorely lacking in get-up-and-go.
I generally refrain from beginning my day with anything too taxing. This morning, that meant Backstrom, the one-season non-wonder from the teens that someone is inexplicably paying me to watch and write about.
That’s the appealing thing about the Rainn Wilson-led police procedural: it does not ask too much of its audience. It’s the kind of time-waster you can have in the background while you fold laundry.
I just finished binging the Final Destination franchise for my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. It was just what I needed at this uncertain time. I love the franchise's corny and formulaic nature, the way it sticks to the same game plan in entry after entry.
Yet I am faintly and persistently annoyed by the corny and formulaic nature of Backstrom. My problem isn’t with formula, per se, but with the ingredients. Final Destination revolves around people constantly dying freak deaths, at least forty percent of the time, with shit flying at you IN ALL THREE DIMENSIONS, whereas Backstrom is all about its obnoxious anti-hero constantly proving his intellectual superiority to the rest of the stupid world. Watching a sarcastic shamus put ding-dongs in their place is less satisfying than watching teenagers get impaled by an endless series of deadly projectiles.
There’s something strangely satisfying about experiencing all of something in its entirety, even if it’s something like Backstrom that fundamentally does not matter. It's not a matter of grave importance like the Final Destination series.
In "Takes One to Know One", the third episode of Backstrom, the titular stogie-chomping anti-hero, investigates the murder of a twenty-one-year-old beauty at a Scientology-like cult called the Church of Edification.
The great Pat Healy plays the creepy head of the Church of Edification, a waxy monster of banality who was sleeping with the victim. Healy's casting as a higher-up at a cult in the unmistakable mold of L. Ron Hubbard’s bastard brainchild promises more than it delivers. It’s inspired casting but not a role that gives Healy much to work with.
Making a church the episode’s backdrop allows the show to make the excellent point that religion is dumb, and people of faith are stupid, and it’s all just a bunch of hypocrisy and lies and bullshit.
Only the smartest and best minds are capable of such penetrating insight. I’m talking about people like Bill Maher in the motion picture Regligulous, where he traveled around the world telling believers that they were a bunch of mouth-breathing half-wits and that he was better than them.
We all learned a lot from that. More recently, Hugh Grant made that excellent and very necessary argument as the title character in the fright flick Heretic.
To Backstrom, cults are no different from mainstream churches, and mainstream religions are fundamentally just like fringe faiths: lame and wrong.
Backstrom doesn’t give a fuck. He’s not one of those cowardly schmucks who insult people behind their backs when he can insult them to their smug faces.
There was a time when puncturing propriety by hurling schoolyard insults in every direction, being purposefully cruel and sexist, and showing active contempt for social niceties were seen as positive qualities.
Now that Donald Trump is back in office, being an abrasive asshole for no reason suddenly seems less charming!
Sarah Chalke of Scrubs and Roseanne fame guest-stars as Amy Gazanian, Backstrom’s ex-fiance, who broke up with him a decade earlier and now heads a civilian oversight committee designed to keep a close eye on the police force and shifty characters like our anti-hero.
Despite investigating a case of professional malfeasance, Amy is nonetheless charmed by her rumpled former beau. He may look like death warmed over, but he’s the smartest man in the world and the best detective this side of Bruce Wayne and Sherlock Holmes.
The protagonist of Backstrom decides that the essence of all religion is secrecy, so he sets about learning the dark secrets of a shadowy organization with more than its share.
The Church of Edification ostensibly forbids sex for members who are under twenty-one but is unsurprisingly awash in hypocrisy. Its leader doesn’t even wait until members of his flock are of age before he starts shtupping them.
Like pretty much all cults, the Church of Edification is fundamentally a sex cult rife with abuse of all kinds, particularly sexual abuse and the abuse of power.
Backstrom doesn’t play by the rules. He plays by his own rules, but he gets results, which is why everyone on the show holds him in high esteem but also seems overly cognizant of his myriad faults.
Everyone seems to know that Backstrom is an alcoholic with a drinking problem that he’s not particularly working on or concerned with, even as it imperils his already fragile health.
Before I stopped drinking, I looked a little like Wilson in Backstrom. I was a little overweight, dressed shabbily, and had an unhealthy pallor from drinking every night and sleeping badly.
Backstrom looks like he’s doing badly. His colleagues are concerned but don’t want to appear too concerned out of fear of ending up on the receiving end of one of his devastating zingers.
Dennis Haysbert’s admiring colleague is a man of faith with a deep knowledge and love of scripture. He also respects Backstrom’s conviction that religion is dumb and people of faith are stupid because he has such a high opinion of his intellect.
The central mystery of “Take One to Know One” feels half-assed and random, an afterthought. Backstrom is a police procedural that puzzlingly doesn’t seem particularly interested in the procedural aspects of police work.
"Takes One to Know One” ends on an incongruously earnest note, with Backstrom seeing his doctor about his nightmares and his insomnia and the wise, unconventional guru giving a pep talk with a spiritual bent about how we aren’t just meat and muscles but rather spiritual beings whose souls need sustenance.
It’s not the first time the show has ended on a note of surpriring sincerity but it rings false. Wilson can’t smirk, drink and insult his way through the proceedings and expect us to care about him and his soul.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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