Tough Love
When the body of a judge who had a reputation for giving harsh sentences to those in his courtroom, even teenage juveniles is found, the team investigate and uncover a link to an academy that deals with tough love while Kristen faces hurdles of her own as she resettles with her teenage daughter into an apartment in New York City.
Tropes:
- Asshole Victim: Nobody is mourning Judge Weaver's death for how arrogant he was and the brutal sentences he gave to youth offenders, even less so when he's revealed to have been taking bribes and never gave a damn that his actions ruined so many of their lives.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Judge Weaver had a tendency to do this, such as sentencing a youth to eighteen months for possession of alcohol. Turns out he had been doing this for years after choosing to take bribes to ship students off to cruel institutions like Beech Mountain.
- Juvenile Hell: Beech Mountain Academy, a reform school led by Dean Keith Saunders who subjects students to horrific and sadistic treatment. Sarah Hayes and Luke Hadley used to be students there before the former committed suicide shortly after she left and the latter broke out upon hearing about it to get revenge. Fortunately, it gets shut down after its crimes are exposed and Saunders is arrested.
- Karmic Death: Hadley’s first victim Stuart Weaver was a corrupt judge who had been taking bribes from Keith Saunders to slap youths, including Sarah Hayes, with absurd sentences for relatively small crimes and send them to Beech Mountain, though not before they were subjected to toxic therapy sessions by Hadley’s second victim, child psychologist Molly Kendall. Hadley’s third victim Eddie Groff is the one who built the school in the first place and allowed everything to happen, though he barely manages to survive.
- Revenge: The reason for Luke Hadley's rampage. When his girlfriend Sarah Hayes committed suicide sometime after she left Beech Mountain, he snapped and went after those he deemed responsible.
- Rich Bastard: Beech Mountain’s founder Eddie Groff, who comes from Old Money and designed the school's systems. The role he played in Sarah's suicide was what inspired Hadley to tear down the proverbial castle Groff built and subject him to a more painful version of the torture inflicted on Weaver and Kendall before the Task Force intervened.
- Sadist Teacher: Almost the entire Beech Mountain faculty to a horrific degree, to the point where the dean resorted to bribing a state judge to obtain an infinite supply of victims to torture. The only decent one out of them seems to be the janitor, who chose to look the other way when he caught Hadley with a phone and learned of his plans of escaping out of sympathy for him and all the other students.
