Rizzoli & Isles Season 7 Episode 4 Review: Post Mortem
Jack Ori
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There's an awful lot of unsolicited advice going around in Rizzoli & Isles Season 7 Episode 4.
Angela thinks Vince should get Kiki a less practical birthday gift. Kent thinks Maura should get surgery to correct her cognitive issues. And Jane thinks Maura's attempt to try new activities is silly.
That doesn't even count all the opinions coming from the quirky guest of the hour, CJ the Postal Inspector.
Most of the hour was dedicated to a very silly case involving the Postal Service. At first it looked like it might be interesting, as someone went to a lot of trouble to make a murder look like a suicide. Instead, one of the most annoying characters to ever grace our screens showed up and stayed for the rest of the hour.
And there it is. The condescending detective tone.
Postal Inspector
Was anyone else hoping that CJ the obnoxious Postal Inspector turned out to be behind the package stealing or whatever it was that occurred? That would have at least given her character some reason for taking up so much time.
Instead, she appeared to be an attempt at comic relief, but she wasn't all that funny. Vince's annoyance at being called elderly a dozen different ways mirrored my own, and her inability to get along with Frankie wasn't much better.
At least in the end, she came to respect Jane. But Vince probably spoke for many viewers when he said he wasn't sorry to see her go.
I didn't ask you to do this.
Maura
Meanwhile, Maura had a few touching scenes in which she dealt with, or tried to deal with, her neurological problems. Kent gave her a list of neurosurgeons for which she didn't ask, and she was understandably angry before deciding to look into surgery.
It's not the surgery that scares me. I guess I'm just afraid of what will happen if it doesn't work.
Maura
Maura's admission to Jane that she was distracting herself with her neural retraining exercises was one of the most emotional scenes of the hour. This is the Maura and Jane that have been missing for the last couple of seasons: supportive, dramatic, yet breaking the tension with humor.
Your brain isn't what I love about you. What I love about you is you took my mother in so now I don't have to.
Jane
Jane can hardly be blamed for wanting Maura to take her mother off her hands, either. Angela is at her best when she is more than a stereotypical overbearing mother. In "Post Mortem" she didn't get to have much depth at all.
Angela's main function seemed to be to convince Vince not to give Kiki a blender for her birthday. First she accidentally showed the blender to Kiki, then she proceeded to call Vince over and over while he was too busy to take her calls.
I didn't think there was any evidence that Kiki actually disliked the blender. She and Angela are different people, after all. Angela seemed like she was really overstepping by pushing Vince to change the gift.
It was both surprising and ridiculous that Kiki actually didn't want the blender. Isn't she supposed to be a life coach? She should, at the very least, have recognized that her inability to communicate with Vince is a problem.
In any event, I was rooting for her to actually want the blender because Angela was so annoying about it. The romantic gift hidden inside the tambourine was cute, but it would have been nice for Kiki to love Vince for who he was, practical gifts and all.
So what did you think about "Post Mortem"? Did you enjoy this quirky case, or would you prefer a more straightforward mystery?
Weigh in below, and don't forget you can always watch Rizzoli & Isles online if you missed anything.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on X.
