Season 4, Episode 05
Shawn Gets the Yips
"All right, look. I know you're all thinking, it so here goes. I am suffering from a mental block. It goes all the way back to my youth. It's very common amongst highly-skilled athletes and international men of leisure. They call it the Yips."
Directed by Tawnie McKiernan
Written by Kell Cahoon and James Callahan
After the department softball game, Psych and several members of the police department retire to a nearby bar to celebrate McNab's birthday. Things take a shocking turn when a lone, hooded gunman enters the building. While Shawn warns Lassiter in time, the gunman and Lassiter exchange fire before the gunman flees, leaving everyone confused. While the police think it was some junkie thief, Shawn feels the gunman deliberately came in targeting someone – and soon, he finds that Lassiter is the assassin's target. With a mysterious figure out to kill the head detective, Shawn finds himself investigating Lassiter's past cases, and in particular, his takedown of a local drug lord named Ivan Petrovich…Tropes:
- Asshole Victim: Petrovich's death; he was a particularly aggressive drug lord who tended to sell to children. Nobody is weeping at his demise.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: The party at the bar at the beginning is partly for McNab's birthday; it ends rather abruptly with a shootout between Lassiter and a hooded gunman.
- Booby Trap: McNab finds himself the victim of one; when he opens his mailbox, it explodes, sending him flying into a pool. He loses a couple toes and is badly burned, but gets out largely intact.
- Broken Glass Penalty: During the Cold Open, Henry is trying to correct little Shawn's form for throwing a baseball. Shawn puts the ball through his father's truck window.
- Chekhov's Gun: The scene that introduces the elliptical also introduces Shawn losing the phone.
- Dead All Along: Ivan was already dead when Lassiter found his hidden office. A nearby rat made it look like he was moving for his gun, and startled Lassiter into shooting him anyway.
- Death Trap: Subverted when Shawn finds himself on an exercise elliptical with a note taped to it reading "If your heart rate drops under 150, you DIE", and a beeping device with a red light inside the machine. Turns out the note was Juliet trying to motivate him and the beeping device was Shawn's missing phone.
- Distinction Without a Difference: Shawn claims he doesn't lose the cordless phone—he simply places it somewhere that then eludes him.
- Good-Guy Bar: The SBPD are known for frequenting the bar in the beginning. This is Shawn's first hint that the gunman's attack was not just a robbery gone wrong.
- Grief-Induced Split: Mr. Salamatchia and his wife divorced after the death of their only child.
- Kick the Dog: During the trial, Petrovich turned and winked at the parents of a teenager who died of an overdose of something he sold.
- Knight Templar Parent: Mr. Salamatchia is the assassin; the father of a kid who overdosed because of Petrovich. Outraged and heartbroken, he embarked on a crusade to wipe out everyone he blamed for his son's death. This included Lassiter and McNab because although they arrested Petrovich, they couldn't get any charges against him to stick except for illegal weapons, which only put him in jail for a short time.
- Misplaced Retribution: The killer's son died from overdosing on drugs supplied to him by an infamous drug lord who targeted high school teenagers. While killing said drug lord is an understandable if not justified action, the man also blames Lassiter for failing to have the drug lord arrested on drug-related charges despite Lassiter doing everything within his power to put the drug lord away.
- Non-Fatal Explosions: McNab is blasted 20 feet into his apartment's pool by his booby-trapped mailbox and suffers some burns, a missing eyebrow, and the loss of parts of a few toes. He's on crutches for the rest of the episode, but his injuries are never mentioned again, and might as well be Negative Continuity. He should have suffered the sorts of internal hemorrhages that kill soldiers near, but otherwise uninjured by, massive explosions.
- Red Herring: The gunman dropped a motel key during the initial shootout. Lassiter heads over to investigate, but it turns out to be a trap; on his way back, he's nearly sniped.
- Running Gag: Shawn can't keep track of where he put the office's cordless phone and can never remember to put it back to charge it. It becomes a Chekhov's Gun at the end when he finds it in his pocket and decides Throwing the Distraction is the best way to save Lassie from Mr. Salamatchia.
- The Unfettered: A notorious drug lord named Ivan Petrovich exemplifies this; a particularly nasty piece of work known for targeting kids and teenagers in particular. Subverted that this approach has made him a disproportionate number of enemies, both on the police force and off.
