After a man who was accused of the murder of his children in a fire years earlier is murdered in the present day, Detective Vera goes through a crisis upon learning that the man may have been innocent.
- Acquitted Too Late: Joe was killed before being proven innocent of the crime he was in prison for.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- It looks like Doherty has a grudge against Stillman for once arresting his son. Instead, he relates he's happy Stillman treated his son as he should have been.
- At one point, the detectives receive a call about a man having jumped off of a building. Even though there were fears that it was Vera, who had implied that he was going to commit suicide, and the physical description was similar to his (forties, heavyset), the deceased man was not him.
- The Bus Came Back: Vera's former wife Julie, last seen in season three, is seen when he drunkenly appears on her doorstep. This concerns her due to both the fact they hadn't spoken in years and his current state.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Vera gets liberally drunk in the episode in response to his regret over his actions.
- Get Out!: When Lilly and Valens question Fire Marshall Crawford about his evidence and reliability over the Billingsley case, he angrily kicks them out of the squad house. The ending of the episode, however, implies that he has some residual doubts of his own.
- Heroic BSoD: Nick, after a man he arrested on false charges got killed in prison.
- Karma Houdini: Whomever stabbed Joe Don in prison is never caught, although a subsequent episode had Lilly briefly discuss investigating his murder.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Not deliberate but Ray Crawford lays out for Vera how this had to be arson, using all his expertise to back it up and push Vera to go after Joe Don for the murder. But chemical engineering professor Petrovic says this should never have been labeled arson. He complains that all it takes is a 40 hour course to become a Marshal and Crawford, like others, believes in long-debunked theories on how a fire works. He lays out this was just an accident while Crawford put his "instincts" over the actual evidence.
- My Greatest Failure:
- This serves as one for Vera, whose actions indirectly causes the death of (in all likelihood) an innocent man.
- Downplayed regarding his former wife, Julie. They divorced in season three after his serial cheating and inability to get her pregnant and upon briefly encountering her, he learns that she has remarried and had two children, something that he always wanted.
- Nominal Importance: The two young sons of the episode's main victim. Their deaths were the driving force behind the chain of events that followed but surprisingly, their ghosts do not appear and they are only seen in a photograph in their case file.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The episode is based off of that of Cameron Todd Willingham
, a Texan man who was executed in 2004 for the December 1991 arson fire that killed his three daughters. Like with this episode, there have been serious doubts over his guilt in the years since. - Tough Love: Doherty uses his own troubled son's history to tell Stillman he has to be tough on Vera, maybe even taking away his badge, in order to get him to finally face help.
- Turn in Your Badge: Nick is suspended at the end of the episode.
