Nothing like being alone in the fortress whilst the Goddess is away (auditioning chargers) to catch up on half-watched shows on the box, among them the short-lived Karen Sisco, Identity and this show.
In Plain Sight is a genial procedural with Mary McCormack‘s US Marshal Mary Shannon each week dealing with a witness protection client and their backstory, with a few beats on the side about the marshal’s personal life. You know what a sucker I am for procedurals. You also know what a sucker I am for the personal life of a favoured weekly law-enforcement/operating-room/intergalactic protagonist when done well.
So when, in the pilot, Shannon’s mother and sister move in with her, signs above them flashing ‘trouble’, I put them down to comic relief. Only, Shannon’s partner Marshall Mann (Fred Weller) is the droll and actual comic relief which left the mother and sister to be unwitting instigators of doom.
I put up with twelve episodes of that goddamned Shannon family arc, the cases-of-the-week a flimsy life preserver of sanity and interest, until a realisation in the season finale: those Shannon harpies were there to stay, to continue to be instigators of drama for the sake of drama, no matter that logic and safety and mental well-being dictated a couple of desert graves. Ah well.
I tried.
