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Recap / Cold Case S 2 E 11 Blank Generation

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Directed by David Barrett

Written by Chris Mundy

A woman asks the police to help solve her brother's murder. He had joined a cult in 1978 and her prime suspect was the "deprogrammer" that their father had hired.

Tropes:

  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Alison presents herself to the detectives as a former cult member who washed herself from that life. She is actually a true believer who acts as a mole for the jailed cult leader on the outside.
  • Cult: Matthew joined one to get away from his controlling father. In present day, the cult leader is in jail but the detectives suspect that he has a mole on the outside.
  • Defacement Insult: To stop her investigation, a cult member breaks into Lilly's home and leaves behind graffiti noting that the cult is still active.
  • Et Tu, Brute?: Matthew realized too late that his lover tricked him into taking the deadly poison and made it look like suicide.
  • Heel–Faith Turn: Former cult member Nick Logan became a priest.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: Matthew returns to the cult to convince Alison to leave with him. He fails to notice that Alison is a fanatical cult member, thus she murders him with tea laced with cyanide and manipulates him into writing a fake suicide note.
  • Never Suicide: Matthew Adams supposedly died by suicide. He did not.
  • Patricide: "Zero Hour", the cult's big plan, is not mass suicide as initially thought, but having the cult members kill their fathers.
  • Red Herring: The case gets reopened because the guy Matthew's family hired to "deprogram" him after his cult brainwashing killed someone else recently. Turns out he's innocent, but despite that, there's enough evidence by then that says that Matthew's death was a murder and not suicide.
  • Spotting the Thread:
    • The cult leader calls Matthew a fake punk, and deduces that he's a rich kid rebelling against his father since he wore Gucci socks behind his punk boots.
    • Lilly deduces that Alison was the the one who broke into her apartment since the graffiti left there matches the artwork at Allison's store. And just in time too, as she was about to do to Lilly what she previously did to Matthew.

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