Psych: Season 6 Finale

As usual, the season six finale episode of Psych was awesome. When this show first began, it started strong by first showing the audience the unbreakable bond between the fake psychic detective Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and his goofily loveable best friend Burton ‘Gus’ Guster (Dulé Hill), who helps Shawn out on investigative cases when he’s not busy working as a mild-mannered pharmaceutical salesman. Together they bumble their way to the truth while spouting out an impressively encyclopedic array of useless pop culture references. Shawn and Gus are essentially a modern version of some of the madcap comedy teams of the 1920s—Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Bros., etc.

The writers of the show have cocooned the events of the relationship between these two friends within the larger scope of the seedy underworld of beautiful Santa Barbara. You see, Shawn managed to secure a consulting gig with the SBPD based on his success rate. I believe that at the time this arrangement was made, Police Chief Vick (Kirsten Nelson) said something about how results don’t lie even if the methods are unorthodox. And so we get an entire police force of straight men to act as foils for the zany antics of Shawn and Gus. And that is really what it’s all about. Every week there’s a new case, and while the mysteries are fun, they serve mostly as a background against which Shawn and Gus can shine on in their shenanigans. Can you tell I’m a fan of the show?

In this latest episode, two bodies are found at a construction site. One is recent, but the other is decades old. When the coroner explains that the bodies belong to two people who were thought to have been involved in a suspected murder from years ago, Shawn’s dad Henry (Corbin Bernsen) gets the Chief’s permission to become reinstated as a detective so that he can work the case. The crime was one of the ones he wasn’t able to solve and it’s clear that he is still passionately irked about it.

Along with Shawn and Gus’s thick repertoire of random knowledge, most of the Psych episodes are specifically themed around pop culture references as well. They usually center around a particular reference—such as Indiana Jones or a potpourri of vampire movie references and sight gags. The season six finale episode was no different. This time around there were many, many allusions to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The score for this show was filled with cool smoky jazz, there was a scandal that no one wanted to talk about involving a rich and influential family, there was a femme fatale, the case ran decades into the past which provided a nostalgic flavor, red herrings and twists abounded, and there was even a coroner scene that reminded me a bit of the Chinatown coroner scene. I can’t exactly put my finger on why, but it was there nonetheless. These scenes, among other plot elements, definitely encapsulated a decent Psych-based homage to the classic film.

And beyond the plot elements, the camerawork even lent itself to the cause. There were lots of exterior long shots of Santa Barbara and crazy camera maneuvers that swept and pushed in fast. These maneuvers acted as segues into new scene locations. While the cinematography is decidedly not Polanski-esque, it did help to change the conception of Santa Barbara from small seaside town to something larger and more sprawling with zones very different from one another. And this echoes the sprawling landscapes of Chinatown’s 1930s Los Angeles very strongly.

Finally, a lot of great work went into making this episode a real satisfying finale. And by satisfying, I mean completely unsatisfying. There were multiple cliffhangers at the end that will leave me anxious for their resolve until I get to see what happens in season seven. So watch the show, from the very first episode if you can. It’s that good. And especially catch this latest one if you’re a Polanski fan.