Directed by Marcos Siega
Written by Erica Shelton
The team investigates the 1975 disappearance of an eight-year-old white girl after a postcard addressed from her to her black best friend is discovered, decades later, in a mailman's stash of undelivered mail.
Tropes:
- Challenging the Bully: Melanie gave Dale, a racist bully twice her size, a black eye for picking on her friend Cherise.
- Children Are Innocent: Nearly every character in the flashbacks except for Melanie and Cherise is virulently racist, even Cherise's older brother.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After decades of being apart from her best friend (either due to racism or other circumstances, namely Trauma-Induced Amnesia), Melanie gets her memory back and she and Cherise can finally be friends in peace. Melanie's parents are also reunited with the daughter they never gave up hope finding.
- Everybody Lives: This is the only episode throughout the entire series where the story turns out this way.
- False Flag Operation: Melanie's mom paints "critter lovers" on the side of her own house, pretending the racists did it so she has an excuse to move out of the neighborhood.
- Freudian Excuse: Dale resorts to picking on young kids because he was abused by his father.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Dale reveals that Cherise is the witness to his crime before the police even mentioned it.
- I Want My Mommy!: Said word for word by a crying 8-year-old Melanie as she's held at gunpoint.
- Ironic Echo: When Melanie breaks off her friendship with Cherise, she brings up the previous speech about how they're different as "horses and ducks".
- Karma Houdini: Besides Dale being arrested for kidnapping and attempting to kill Melanie, none of the racist neighbors are arrested or punished for harassing Melanie or the Pierces. They are all allowed to live their lives and even continue their prejudiced ways.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Melanie had this for 30 years, being adopted as an orphan under a new name in another state, and didn't remember her previous life until Rush came along.
- Never My Fault: Before he shoots her in the head, Dale tells Melanie her kidnapping and prospective murder is all her fault because she insisted on being friends with Cherise, which stoked racial tensions in the neighborhood and stirred up his father's violent rage.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: As much as the original detectives can be considered "heroes". They aggressively interrogated Cherise's older brother, causing the whole family to clam up. Had the detectives behaved respectfully, they would have solved the case in short order, found Melanie alive, and returned her promptly to her parents.
- Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: Melanie (temporarily) breaks off her friendship with Cherise at one point, due to the pressure of racism finally setting in.
- Tap on the Head: Melanie is shot in the head but suffers no more ill effects than Identity Amnesia.
- Unusual Euphemism: The racists refer to Melanie as a "critter lover" for her friendship with the black Cherise. In addition to being a necessary bowdlerization, this winds up being plot relevant as Dale is enabled to explain racism to Melanie and Cherise by clarifying that "critter" does not refer to their fireflies.
