Recap / Cold Case S 3 E 1 Family

Directed by Mark Pellington

Written by Meredith Stiehm

After Claire Tate, a 17-year-old girl in foster care, is a contacted by a man claiming to be her father, the team reopen the 1988 case of Jimmy Tate, an 18-year-old high school student who was murdered in a hit-and-run on the same night Claire was born.

Tropes:

• All for Nothing: Wyatt killed Jimmy to adopt his daughter, since Jimmy didn't tell anyone else he wasn't going through with the adoption. However, Wyatt never found Claire and got the one thing he was trying to prevent in the first place: a divorce from his wife.
• Babies Make Everything Better: It's implied that their struggle with infertility has strained the Wyatts' marriage, leading to his affair, and he believes that adopting Jimmy and Quinn's baby will fix things. Thus explaining why he snaps so badly when Jimmy changes his mind.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Jimmy is killed within minutes of his daughter's birth.
• Broken Bird: Both Quinn and Claire; the former due to the loss of her boyfriend and daughter, the latter due to her rough upbringing in foster care. Reuniting and learning the truth of what happened to Jimmy seems to set them on the path to healing.
• Creepy Gym Coach: The gym coach raped Quinn as a teenager, and preyed upon her lonely and love-starved daughter years later.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Quinn thought Jimmy had abandoned her and their newborn daughter in the bathroom. But really, he left to tell Mr. Wyatt that he had changed his mind and planned to stay with Quinn and raise their baby himself, for which he was killed.
• Desperately Craves Affection: Claire, underneath her aloofness and rule-breaking, which nearly drives her into the arms of a predator.
• Dramatic Irony: A rather cruel variation. In the present day, Claire gradually comes to trust a strange man (her father's gym coach) who claims he's her biological father. As it turns out, Claire was too close for comfort to the man who not only attacked her mother years before, but intended to do the same to her.
  • Her hanging out with the coach takes on a whole new level of irony when one bears in mind she's unknowingly fraternizing with the man who told that lie about Quinn's infidelity to Jimmy, setting off the chain of events that would tear apart Claire's would-be family.
• Flashback Effects: The flashbacks have multiple panels as if the viewers are reading a comic book.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Jimmy tries to procure one for Quinn, going to the school nurse to ask for a referral to a clinic. Unfortunately, the nurse happens to be a radical anti-abortion activist who proceeds to bombard him with horrifying and untrue stories of how much the baby suffers during the procedure and how Quinn will never be able to have children again.
• Hate Sink:
  • Nurse Laura, who frightened out Jimmy out of getting an abortion for his girlfriend with gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses, and ran an abortion clinic worker off the road. But in spite of her moralizing, she engages in adultery with a married teacher.
  • Coach Bruce Johnson, who maintained the facade of a caring father figure to Jimmy despite raping his girlfriend. When he found out Quinn was pregnant, Bruce abused Jimmy's trust by lying about her fidelity, which drove a wedge between the couple. Years later, he stalks and manipulates Jimmy and Quinn's troubled teenage daughter, Claire, by lying that he's her father, planning to rape her like he did to her mother.
• Hypocrite: The prim, proper, self-righteous School Nurse Laura is fooling around with Mr. Wyatt, which Jimmy discovers when he walks in on them making out in a classroom.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Years ago, the gym coach attacked Jimmy's girlfriend. Years later, he's rightly arrested before he can even attempt to do the same to her daughter.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Mr. Wyatt and his wife had been trying desperately to have a baby for years, but with no success. Mr. Wyatt was green with envy that Jimmy and Quinn had conceived so easily, especially since they didn’t even want to have a baby.
• The Lost Lenore. Gender-Inverted. Even years later, Quinn regards Jimmy as the best thing to ever happen to her. His death and apparent forsaking the night of their daughter's birth affected her so much that she abandoned their baby and her life fell apart after high school.
• Papa Wolf: The victim was killed because he wouldn't give away his recently born daughter to the person who wanted to adopt her; he'd already grown to love both her and her mother.
• Parental Substitute: Coach Johnson was this to his track star Jimmy, whose father had abandoned him while his mother was neglectful. He even lent Jimmy money to pay for Quinn's abortion. This is why Jimmy refused to believe the coach had assaulted her.
• Plot-mandated Relationship Failure: Jimmy broke up with his girlfriend when he learns she was attacked by his gym coach, unable to believe his father figure would do such a thing. This sets up the girlfriend's belief that Jimmy didn't want her or their baby, especially under the belief the baby wasn't his own.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • When Jimmy told Quinn "It's over", she thought he was talking about their relationship. But in reality, he meant "The deal to give away our baby is over." Had he been more specific to Quinn before he went to his soon-to-be killer to call it off, Quinn might've known Jimmy still loved her, kept their baby, and saved both mother and child the heartache.
  • Also, Jimmy never told Quinn who he made a deal with to adopt their baby. Had Quinn known it was their math teacher Mr. Wyatt, it could've solved Jimmy's case and given her closure sooner. At the worst, she probably would've given him their daughter after Jimmy's death instead of abandoning her.
• Prom Baby: Jimmy and Quinn's baby was born during prom. They had to slip away from the dance and deliver the baby in the gym bathroom.
• The Prom Plot: The backstory of the Prom Baby took place on a high school prom night.
• Stalker with a Crush: Angie to Jimmy. She was on anti-psychotic meds and did whatever she could to get his attention.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The School Nurse Laura is more interested in preaching her anti-abortion views upon vulnerable teenagers than offer any meaningful support for two teens without the means to raise a family. This all led to the tragedy on prom night and destroyed the lives of three people.

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