Rizzoli & Isles: "Lost and Found" and "It Takes a Village" (Hurdler Productions, Oster Productions, Warner Horizon Television, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I just watched a couple of Rizzoli & Isles reruns on LIfetime, “Lost & Found” and “It Takes a Village,” after I got back from a brief walk around the block. The two stories were linked by an arc involving Tasha, a homeless Black teenager who through sheer force of will has not only stayed in school but maintained a B-plus grade point average despite the difficulties of being on her own. Unfortunately, it all unravels when she witnesses a hit person shoot first a woman and then a man – the man actually hired the hit man to get rid of his wife rather than allow her to collect half his money in a divorce – and then he killed the husband when they had an argument over his fee. Tasha gets shot and the hit man is anxious to finish her off, and the other cops find her just as he’s about to club Rizzoli to death with a piece of pipe she found at the construction site but he got away from her.

In the “It Takes a Village” episode, a man from a bank surveying a home they’ve foreclosed on and wanted to sell finds a dead body perfectly preserved, like a mummy, in the house’s wine cellar. It turns out that she was poisoned with hemlock and her killer was her stepfather, who married his stepdaughter for the money she was supposed to have inherited from her real father, who had nearly $1 million in real-estate assets in Boston (where this show takes place). The stepdaughter had stashed the fortune in a bank in the Grand Caymans and the stepfather also poisoned his own wife after the older woman’s cancer went into remission and dashed his hope that he’d inherit the fortune legally after she croaked. But the tale that moved me was about the young Tasha and her placement with Gwen, a Black nurse treating Rizzoli for her injuries, who agrees to take her in as a foster mother so she won’t be relegated to a group home, where she’s worried that her grades will go to hell and she won’t be able to concentrate on her studies.