Investigating the victim of a shark attack, Lassiter finds a piercing he believes is a knife mark, not a tooth mark. Looking to avoid being upstaged by Shawn yet again, Lassiter tells reporters the victim was not killed by the shark, but murdered.
With a reward out for the capture of the shark, Lassiter and O’Hara had no luck renting a boat to find the shark and compare its teeth to marks on the victim’s body or see if its stomach contained proof of the victim’s identity. Henry thought he caught the shark, but it was stolen from storage and gutted.
Last week, “Think Tank” showed Shawn wasn’t fit for full-fledged police work. This week’s episode showed that Lassiter wasn’t fit to do what Shawn does, working mostly on intuition and instinct. Once he was able to identify the victim as a millionaire ocean activist without the shark, Lassiter gave up his murder theory, but Shawn and Gus still wanted to find the shark. The only person willing to take them out to sea turned out to own a knife resembling shark’s teeth.
Because this is a TV show, I never gave up the murder theory. Even as Shawn put the clues together, however, I realized how much of his process was guesswork. Shawn deduced that he and Gus were aboard the killer’s boat, but Gus logically pointed out that this particular fisherman might not be the killer. Lots of fishermen might own a shark’s tooth knife and have received threatening letters from the activist. I couldn’t be absolutely sure of the fisherman’s guilt until he attacked Shawn.
Although this was a takeoff on Jaws, the theme didn’t overshadow the episode or make it predictable. It was instead solid and satisfying.
