"Great Guy, Yet: Dead" wasn’t the best outing for Prime Suspect.

Which is unfortunate considering Joelle Carter from Justified was playing Louise, the wife of Tony the victim. Sadly, none of her considerable talent was used, rather she was relegated to tears, denials, potential adultery, and getting on Jane’s nerves. All of that would have been fine had she been given something to work with, but the writing for her character felt flat.

In fact, flat can be applied to the entire case this week. Tony, “the nicest guy in the world,” left behind a boring tale of living a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget, burying himself in debt, and making enemies. A par for the course procedural case, however credit must be given to Prime Suspect for doing something other than a run-and-gun police chase.

It’s one of the strengths of the show, the need to use good old-fashioned detective work, smarts, and manipulation to get information and catch the bad guys. In the beginning, I was a little hard on the series for not making my heart race a little, but now I’ve come to enjoy watching a case get solved without the use of an army of computers, brute force, and copious amounts of bullets.

Seriously, watching the guys make fun of Nestor as he attempted to jump out of the window away from Jane was a riot. No guns were necessary, just plenty of gymnastics jokes and legs pointing in the wrong directions. Plus, they hypnotized a witness, how awesome is that?

In Jane’s home life, meanwhile, she went back to Matt and his son Owen’s birthday party. Naturally, crazy controlling ex-wife Trish would rather she not show up and attempted to disguise it as a benefit to Jane. Maybe I was wrong when I said nothing got my heart racing because Trish certainly did. At least Owen did like Jane’s gift. If I were keeping score that would be Jane: 3 Crazy: 0.

Overall, while I could have done without the case, the sum of Suspect’s parts made up for some of it that malaise. And, hey, did I mention they hypnotized a witness?

Other thoughts:

• Getting arrested with a tiki torch – that’ll make a great story for prison.
• Someone needs to get Nicorette on the line with the amount of gum everyone chews.
• Speaking of gum, I counted five pieces for Jane this week.
• Jane ripping the bet in half with Average Auggie made my cheap heart stop momentarily.