Shawn and Gus meet Declan Rand (Nestor Carbonell), a charming and attractive criminal profiler who seems to be just a little better than Shawn at everything, including movie trivia. Much like Shawn did in the Psych pilot, Declan insinuates his way into helping the SBPD on a murder case.
Three elderly people had turned up dead. Shawn figured out that all three had been on a liver transplant list, and someone else on the list might be killing them to move up. Shawn, Gus, Lassiter, O’Hara, and Rand confronted the next person on the list, a woman in her thirties, but she claimed to have been in Switzerland at the time of the murders, and had a stamped passport to prove it.
Lassiter lost faith in Rand after embarrassingly accusing the woman, who seemed to have nothing to do with the crime. Moving down the transplant list, Shawn made an embarrassing accusation of his own, shortly after which an eyewitness sketch came in, throwing suspicion back on the woman.
Meanwhile, Shawn recognized some of Declan’s psychological observations from an audiobook both of them must have owned. Visiting Declan’s house, Shawn and Gus found out he was very rich, and while he had no formal training, he had a desire to help the police using what he’d learned from his psychologist father. This mirrored Shawn’s backstory. Shawn wanted to expose Declan as a fraud, but Henry pointed out that Shawn was also a fraud, and that Declan didn’t need any specific training to call himself a profiler.
At the climax, Declan was found standing over the original suspect’s corpse. Despite some reluctance, Shawn helped prove Declan was not the killer, revealing a clever twist involving the suspect’s twin sister.
Shawn and Declan had good chemistry as enemies, which could raise the stakes in future episodes. More problematic for me was Declan’s success courting Juliet. At the end of the episode, Shawn seemed ready to open up to Juliet, which would shoot down Declan’s chances with her. Before Shawn could say anything, Declan opened up to Juliet, impressing her with his honesty.
The romantic tension between Shawn and Juliet is a running theme on Psych. If Shawn and Juliet started dating, it might ruin that aspect of the show. I worry that the show will go on teasing us. Shawn will have chances to step up, but will ultimately make no progress, all in the name of prolonging the tension. If tension never pays off, though, it’s pointless.
