"Justice." I understand that not all the victims can be good or sympathetic but Mike was just such a cliche: rich kid rapist hiding behind the facade. Why did he grow up to be that way? What about his family? If nothing, wouldn't it be interesting to find out how would they feel after the truth came to light? What was he into other than brutalizing the girls who trusted him? We knew absolutely nothing about him, and not much about the victims either, except for Tessie.
It also kinda bothered me that, no matter how much I sympathized with Jimmy, the murder was ruled to be self defense, when it obviously wasn't, mainly because they had no problems arresting Dom in Boy crazy, among others. And in an episode centered almost completely about interviewing Mike's victims as the suspects, the doer and the motive had been predictable: instead of the murderer being the rape victim, it had been someone close to one.
I think that it would have been a good twist if Mike had somehow grown to feel remorse over his actions and committed suicide after the girls had left. The one following the girls wasn't Jimmy, but the cop who gave the gun to Tessie Bartram. She wanted to make sure that they would follow through with the plan. After seeing what had happened, she disposed of the gun so it couldn't be linked to her or the girls somehow. That would have been interesting and more complex, both the victim and story wise, and wouldn't have been as predictable, since, when it turns out that the victim committed suicide, there are usually subtle clues throughout the episode and the victim is displayed as sympathetic rather than being the wrongdoer.
Or maybe not all of the girls featured were his victims... maybe one of them was his girlfriend and was supposed to meet with him there when he was confronted by his victims and confessed, later she went over there and, feeling betrayed, picked up the gun and killed him. Shocked, confused, she met up with one of the victims and admitted to what she had done: they accepted her as one of their own, since she was too, in a way, betrayed by him, and because she had finally taken him off the streets, and later, when the truth came to light, she lied about being raped by him, to explain her connection with the woman who vandalised his grave, while the other victims followed. They could have made her to be the very girl who had vandalised his grave-that twist would have been unexpected: the woman who was the most revegenful at him was never his direct victim. (Of course, writers would have to explain one rose too many in Mike's yearbook.)
That would have been interesting and thought provoking: the way it turned out, however, it was too cliche for me. The actresses were great and I really felt sympathy for Mike's victims and the killer, music choices were great too, but the case itself was predictable and unoriginal, and the victim was just... too unlikeable and one dimensional.
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