The newsroom. Cassie saunters over to Dean at a computer holding two big "Do These Make Me Look Skinny?" coffee mugs. Somewhere, Kirsten Cohen grumbles, "Bitch stole my signature accessory!" Dean is looking for links between the killings in the 1960s and the recent ones. Cassie gives us another unnecessary civics lesson: "Back then 'equal justice under the law' wasn't too literal around here." Sam calls from the Mississippi River shrimp docks, providing the information that the property the mayor owned and was killed on used to belong to the Dorian family. Good thing Cassie found a way to weasel that name into conversation before! Good thing that towns in Missouri always had that one racist family you could count on to hand its racism down through the generations! Dean immediately clicks over to a full text article about "Cyrus Dorian," who "vanished in April of '63." April truly is the cruelest month. Sam continues on, telling Dean that the mayor bulldozed the Dorian home when he bought the property. Cassie confirms, "It was a big deal. One of the oldest local houses left." Dean quickly pulls up an article about the demolition and finds that the day after the house was torn down, the first killing occurred. Fade in to Cassie's Farmhouse of Darkness. Inside, Cassie prances around wearing another ridiculously tight Michael-Stars-looking shirt. I'm just thinking: Cape Girardeau newspaper salary does not pay for the woman to be wearing items from an overpriced L.A. line. Put the girl in something from The Gap. So, she walks pensively, takes a sip of wine. I take a gulp of wine. The lights begin to flicker and an engine revs outside the house. Cut to an exterior shot of Fat Joe Truck flexing on the house. Cut back to uselessly artful slow-motion zoom on Cassie, who actually widens her eyes in fear. She starts running around the house closing the shutters. Fat Joe Truck starts doing this hilarious tough guy routine, accelerating toward the house but stopping just as he gets to the bushes lining the front porch. I feel like I'm watching little boys play-fight in a schoolyard. Cassie continues to run around shutting shutters, which, whatever. This goes on for a while until she grabs her phone, dials it, and then yells, "Dean! Deeeaaaann!" into it. "Dean" what? "Dean, come save me from a posturing truck"? I don't know. And I know this is a silly show, which is fine, but this scene really bugs me because, you know, African Americans lived for decades with the horrible spectre of there appearing out of nowhere the blazing bright light of a cross on fire in the front yard, followed by the possibility of being dragged out of their homes and beaten or killed. Is it really in the best taste to revise this awful cultural history into one involving...a killer truck with really bright headlights?












