PSYCH Gets Hungover with Last Night Gus

The morning after a police retirement party, Shawn, Gus, Lassiter, and Woody the coroner wake up in the Psych office and try to recall what happened as the party let out, including how they became involved with two freshly dead men.

“Last Night Gus” was Psych‘s salute to the movie The Hangover. As someone who hasn’t seen The Hangover, I undoubtedly missed the episode’s more subtle homages to the movie, but the comedic convention of picking up after a night of wild activity is tried-and-true enough to carry the episode on its own. The writers also took the opportunity to impair Shawn’s powers of observation, something we hadn’t seen before.

The first dead man turned out to be a private investigator working a case of suspected marital infidelity when he was killed. As our heroes made headway on that case, they deduced the P.I. had inadvertently taken camera phone photos of a man Shawn recognized as a wanted serial killer.

The killer couldn’t let anyone who had seen the photos live, or he might be exposed. Originally, the killer’s targets were limited to the P.I. and his client–the two dead bodies–but when Gus somehow ended with the P.I.’s phone, he became a target, too. I recognized this scenario as a classic lateral thinking puzzle: “A man is photographed while on vacation. The next day, the man is arrested.” The reader is left to come up with a story explaining why the man was arrested.

Going into this episode, I was worried I’d feel left out, not having seen The Hangover. My more general concern was that some themed episodes of Psych have gone so far to serve their themes that Psych‘s core mystery elements get watered down. Thankfully, “Last Night Gus” had both the laid-back feel of a slacker comedy and very solid mystery aspects.