Series / Flashpoint

"Connect. Respect. Protect."

—SRU motto

A Canadian show made by CTV about a police tactical response team in a nondescript (but clearly Toronto) city. It is co-produced by and also airs on the American network CBS, one of several shows developed as a means of getting around the most recent writers' strike (Canada is outside WGA jurisdiction). The series premiered in 2008, and after five full seasons, the series finale aired in December 2012.

Flashpoint is a show about an elite group of officers within a Canadian metropolitan police force, call the Strategic Response Unit or SRU. They're called in when the situation escalates beyond the ability of ordinary officers to handle, particularly hostage situations, armed criminals and bomb threats. Unlike a show like SWAT, the show isn't about the glamor and gunplay of the unit, but rather the personalities and conflict-resolution skills involved in running a group that has to deal with the tense situations they confront. Team leader Sergeant Greg Parker, along with veteran officer Ed Lane, lead their team in an attempt to make sure that everyone gets home alive — officers, victims, and perpetrators.

A show with a remarkable amount of emotional appeal, character development, and complex webs in each episode.

Not to be confused with the 2011 DC Comics series, the 2013 animated adaptation of said comic or the software that allows you to play flash games.

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This show features examples of:

• Abuse Mistake: An early episode has a cop beating his wife until her sister takes matters into her own and holds up the husband at gunpoint. While investigating the situation, SRU officers quickly discover that the cop's partners and friends on the force knew, or at least strongly suspected, that the cop was beating his wife, but looked the other way out of misguided respect, writing it off as something else.
• Abusive Parents: This was assumed with Greg Parker's father and how his ability to negotiate was developed.
  • The subject in "He Knows His Brother" was abused by his father and had spent much of his childhood trying to protect his younger brother from the same.
  • A later episode invokes this when a subject is found to be talking to a girl who says her stepfather is sexually abusing her, but it turns out it's all a fabrication and the girl isn't even real.
• Accidental Kidnapping: In "Unconditional Love," a crook on the run from a gun deal gone bad hijacks a car from a woman, not realising her baby is in the back seat.
• Action Girl: Jules is the only female member of S.R.U. Team One, but is temporarily replaced by Donna Sabine, who leaves then Team One to join Team Three when Jules comes back. It's so bad that the sign on the door to the women's bathroom just says "Jules." After Lew's death, the S.R.U. finally gets a women's bathroom when Leah Kerns joins the team. (The "Jules" sign disappears).
• Affectionate Nickname: Just like most military units, law enforcement teams, and armed services, nicknames are used more than real names.
  • "Samtastic" for, well, Sam. Only used when he's being extra awesome.
  • "Jules" for Julianna Callaghan, "Spike" for Michelangelo Scarlatti, "Wordy" for Kevin Wordsworth, "Lew" for Lewis Young, "Raf" for Rafik Rousseau (so much so that it's weird to hear any of their real first names, Spike's isn't mentioned for at least a season, Raf's is only used once)
  • "Boss" for Greg Parker. In fact, Leah is corrected really quickly on her first day when she calls him Greg. Ed's the only one who calls him Greg and it is rare (and it's pretty strongly implied that their friendship predates Greg being Ed's boss).
  • In fact, Sam, Leah, and Donna are the only people whose names aren't shortened in some way. S.R.U is lazy when it comes to more than one or two syllables.
    • Though it clearly predates his time with the SRU and is used to the exclusion of his full name, "Sam" is technically a nickname too. His full name, Samuel, is spoken exactly once — in the series finale.
  • Parker is the only one who calls Ed "Eddie".
• The Alcoholic: Parker was previously this, causing his wife and son to leave him. After taking care of a young girl involved in one of his cases, he recovers and never goes back.
• All There in the Manual: The official CTV site has a lot more details about the backstories of the various characters.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Invoked by SRU veteran Rangford in "Haunting the Barn," who shows up at the SRU to get an old case file, but ends up barricading himself in the base when his request is refused.
• Alone with the Psycho: Happens often when the hostage takers try to get a room with only them and their target.
  • In "A Day in the Life," Marina Levin is pursued by a former co-worker/subordinate named Oliver. She evacuates most of the staff but she and two others don't make it out; Oliver kills one outright and Marina, under Parker's guidance, talks him into releasing the other, leaving her alone with Oliver (although she still has Parker's aid via her Bluetooth).
  • "Acceptable Risk" sees Claire Williams corralling members of a pharmaceutical company she felt were responsible for her husband's death. She kills several on her 'hit list', and corners one final victim before her rampage is brought to an end by Team One.
• Amoral Attorney: In "Never Kissed a Girl", it's discovered that ADA Dan Cheznik built his career on convictions based on circumstantial and/or flimsy evidence and that a number of innocent people, including the hostage-taker in this episode, were wrongly imprisoned.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: Done by Raf in "A Day In The Life". He begins telling the subject a story about "a guy I know", but as he concludes the story, he switches over to first-person pronouns, making it clear that the "guy" in the story was himself.
  Raf: He had this really great music teacher and this teacher made him feel like he was the most awesomely talented kid in the world. Like anything was possible. He told him he was so much more together, more, more... Well, you know, more, more mature than other boys his age. Except it wasn't so simple, 'cause it turns out this teacher had his own ideas about being mature, uh, about keeping secrets, about... about love. Now, the boy, he was not feeling that at all. He went home, he was all upset. He didn't tell his dad why he was upset, but his dad got it out of him, and, well, his dad, he grabbed a baseball bat, tracked down that teacher and he gave him what he felt he had coming, if you know what I mean. And then the dad went to prison. And he's still there. He's still there. Uh, he's been there, what, 15 years now. And the kid knew his dad did that 'cause he loved him like crazy. He knew that, but he would have given anything... anything... for him to... to have shown it in a different way, you know? Just to have put down the bat and found the right words instead... so he could stay a part of my life.
• And the Adventure Continues: The last episode shows us that despite the changes in the team as a result of the Faber incident, Team One will continue to keep the peace.
• Anger Born of Worry:
  • Jules gives Parker a What the Hell, Hero? after he had put himself in danger to protect a girl from one of his previous cases, half the time berating him for going into the situation without calling them and the other half for causing the team to worry.
  • In "Lawmen," both Parker and Ed are furious with their sons, Dean and Clark, who disobeyed their orders, left the police car, and put themselves in danger at the scene of crime.
• Arson, Murder, and Lifesaving: What happens to Dean and Clark (Parker and Ed's sons respectively) after they help the team catch the suspect but disobeyed Parker's orders to stay put in "Lawmen". While dreading the worst, the sons are shocked when their fathers decide to treat them to pizza instead (though Ed and Parker specifically tell them not to do it again).
• Artistic License – Geography: Mostly, the series is pretty accurate and uses real Toronto street names in episodes. Sometimes, however, there are screwups, which generally are only apparent to people living in the Greater Toronto Area — although this can just make watching episodes even more fun for locals.
  • In "No Kind Of Life," the SRU are trying to deduce the location of a suspect and Spike has worked out a way to track a transponder that happens to be among the man's possessions. Parker asks a detective if the suspect has ever frequented areas in the northeast part of the city, but promptly specifies the area northeast of Highway 401 and Highway 27, which actually covers the entire northern half of metro Toronto. It gets worse, as a line or two later the detective suggests Brampton, which is a separate city located to the northwest, and then the team finally catch up to the suspect at the Georgian Downs racetrack, which is located over 60 kilometres north of Toronto, close to Lake Simcoe.
• Ascended Extra: The role of Kira, SRU's dispatcher, moves slowly from just the Voice with an Internet Connection to a full-fledged character as the first season progresses. In later seasons, Winnie has replaced Kira as the primary dispatcher in similar fashion.
  • The cast expanded to include a paramedic and a second dispatcher as minor/recurring characters in the early third season.
• Asshole Victim: Often seen.
  • "Whatever It Takes" had a basketball coach who ends up being taken hostage by one of his players. He verbally abused his team and encouraged them to physically assault the weaker and/or less competent players. He didn't really help his case when he kept asking the S.R.U. to shoot the teenage hostage taker.
  • In "Asking For Flowers", the victim is a cop who is abusing his wife. His sister-in-law takes him hostage and he subsequently tries to kill her. He almost gets away with it, but the S.R.U. has the boat wired and is listening when he brags that he's going to kill her and make it look like self defense.
  • The series finale has the assumed bomber, who is killed by the real bomber, be a disgraced psychology prof who was a sadist to his students.
• Axes at School: "Perfect Storm"
• Babies Make Everything Better: Deconstructed in "Backwards Day," where frustrations of not being able to have a baby damages a couple's relationship, leading the husband to cheat on his wife with an old flame.
  • Inverted in "Collateral Damage," where the death of a baby is the impetus behind the events of the episode.
  • Deconstucted again in "We Take Care of Our Own." Jules is pregnant and on her first day of work after she and Sam find out; they decide that everything will be fine and no one need to know yet. Cue minor freakouts from both parties during the entire episode, from Sam calling Jules just to check on her and Jules quietly panicking when Sam gets to close to a man wearing a couple of blocks of C-4. They decide to tell the team the next day.
• Badass Adorable: Riley in "Severed Ties" when she is kidnapped by her birth mother. The younger sister she never knew about has a severe allergic reaction, and while the birth mother is distracted, Riley quietly sneaks away to call the police for help.
• Badass Bookworm: Spike
  Spike: CJV Electronics. CJV was busted a couple of years ago. They were selling pirated operating systems.
  Sam: How do you know that?
  Spike: I know because I'm a highly-trained officer on the cutting edge of twenty-first century investigation.
  Sam: I thought it was because you're a geek.
  Ed: He's not a geek, okay? He's a geek with combat skills, that's why the ladies love him.
• Badass Bystander: Deconstructed. Every time an untrained bystander attempts to be a badass or resolve the situation, it either makes things worse or something happens to ruin their efforts (as an example, Parker could have talked down the hostage takers in "Grounded" had a passenger not tried to be a hero).
  • In fact, the one time this trope is played straight is when the bystander is Ed Lane.
  • There are several instances (including one later in "Grounded"; also "Aisle 13", "A Day In the Life", and "The Fortress") where a civilian bystander does manage to play a key role, but in each of those cases, the civilian was in some way receiving guidance or coaching from an SRU officer (and the actions they helped with never involved the third party having a physical confrontation with the subject — at most, they might guide them in trying to talk a subject down, and sometimes it's as minor as just feeding information back to them so SRU knows what they're up against). When bystanders try to intervene without police support, it usually ends with all hell breaking loose.
  • There are a few cases where circumstances conspire to ruin things on the part of a bystander; at one point a school shooter's crush manages to talk them down, but before the team can move in the boyfriend re-escalates the shooter.
  • Also deconstructed in "Day Game" when ex-cop Gil deliberately engineered a hostage situation in order for him to heroically show up and defuse the situation, so that he prove specifically to Parker that he was SRU material after Parker had denied his attempts to join SRU in the past. Unfortunately for him, things got out of hand and Gil ended up accidentally shooting the hostage.
• Badass Crew: SRU Team One.
• Badass in Distress: Whenever any of the team gets taken hostage or gets pinned down by heavy fire.
• Bait-and-Switch Tyrant: Dr. Toth is first introduced as a military psychologist who specialises in breaking teams apart, and really gets under the team's skin with his questioning. But he also practices Brutal Honesty and forces them to confront their issues, diagnoses Woody as having Parkinson's, and is motivated by a genuine desire to ensure that the team is effective and they're doing the right thing. He also makes a personal appeal to Da Chief to keep Sam and Jules on the same team.
  "I like this team. I like your Sergeant. I think you do a good job. The problem is that your Sergeant doesn't trust himself. And that's why I came in."
• Berserk Button: Ed is the team's stoic, but if you harm one of his teammates, especially if it's Greg Parker, he will be pissed.
  • For that matter, hurt or endanger any Team One member and you'll have the entire team coming after your blood.
• Big Brother Instinct:
  • In "He Knows His Brother," the older brother is quite protective of his younger sibling protecting him from their abusive father. His protective instinct even extends to a younger soldier-in-training who was roughed up by one of their training instructors.
  • Ed has been known to show this on occasion to both Jules and Spike.
• Bittersweet Ending: In "Severed Ties", after the events of Maggie kidnapping her children, the adopted parents of Riley are willing to allow an exchange of letters and photos between the two, but refuse to allow Maggie to directly see Riley unless Riley chooses to do so when she turns eighteen. Meanwhile, there is no mention of the adopted parents of Becky allowing Maggie any contact.
• Black Dude Dies First: Lewis Young was the first person of the team to die.
• Blood from the Mouth: Parker suffers through this in "Keep the Peace Part 2," having taken multiple shots from the bomber.
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: Happens to Donna at her wedding when a shooter hits the best man, causing his blood to splatter on her dress, and it ends up all over her hands as she tries to stop the flow of blood.
• Book Ends: Greg and Ed talk about "Doing the math on all those 'I'm Fine's'" in the pilot and the finale.
  • Also, the same song is used to lead into the final (post-incident) scenes of both episodes.
• Bound and Gagged: Happened in several episodes.
• Break the Cutie: Attempted on Tasha Redford, in the first-season episode "Attention Shoppers", but Jules gets to Tasha before she can jump.
• Broken Pedestal: Happens to Spike and his mentor MacCoy in "No Promises" after Spike finds out the man who taught him and helped him to become a good cop was a snitch for a high-ranking drug gang to pay off his debts when his wife was sick and when his daughter was in drug rehab.
  • Happens to Ed in 'Haunting the Barn'. His mentor, Danny Rangford, has a total breakdown, and even tries to goad Ed into killing him.
  • Finally, to Donna, in "A New Life," when her ex-partner and mentor from her days as a Vice officer falls off the sobriety wagon, spills his guts to a mob henchman, and then tries to kill Donna's new husband. Donna nearly kills him out of sheer rage before Ed manages to talk her down.
• Bullying a Dragon: In a rare heroic example, after being shot several times and yet still managing to defuse the bomber's last dirty bomb, Parker takes some time to ramble on (barely, since he's been shot at least four times) that the suspect's plan is completely undone, and that for all his planning, everything he'd done had been for nothing at all. The suspect's fury, after what he's done in the episode, is wondrous to behold. Especially when Ed kills him mere moments later.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: In "Day Game", almost everything that ex-cop Gil did was because he felt Parker ruined his life after declining his application to join SRU twice, leading up to Gil's divorce and him being kicked off the force for insubordination. In reality, Parker declined several applications to the SRU every year.
• Call-Back: After Parker gets shot in "Follow the Leader" and his team waits for him to return from the hospital, Wordy jokes with him that he has to buy the first round of drinks. Spike then quips that Wordy should know, as he has been shot a few times (in "First in Line" and "Clean Hands").
  • Wordy even lampshades this.
    Wordy: Isn't right, boss.
    Parker: What do you mean?
    Wordy: I'm the one supposed to take the hits.
  • Parker tells Ed how he has hugged a hundred kids but doesn't know what it feels like to hug his own son. A few episodes later, Parker reunites with his son properly for the first time in eight years and one of the first things he does is hug him.
  • Back in season one, Ed tells Sam who had first joined the team that "when you're democratically elected team leader, you get to make autocratic decisions" after he clashed with Ed's orders. In season two, when Leah first joins, she had a minor dispute with Ed about his orders and after, Sam explains to her.
    Leah: Guess that was a mistake?
    Sam: [quoting Ed] When you're the democratically elected team leader, you get to make autocratic decisions.
  • Dr. Toth's interviews in the Season 3 finale call back to previous events, particularly Sam's early days with the team.
  • In Day Game, Ed makes a callback to Raf's first day on the job in "Day In The Life".
• Catchphrase: Parker's reminder to "Keep the peace," whenever the SRU starts a mission.
  • The SRU's motto, frequently repeated: "Connect, respect, protect."
  • Also "I have the solution," meaning a clear shot at the aggressor, not a way to solve a problem. ^note American viewers would know the term mainly from submarine movies, where a "firing solution" is the math required to get a torpedo from a moving sub to the target.
  • Since "Copy that" is basically "Yes", "I understand", "I heard you", "I'm doing that", "I'm on my way", and any other affirmative response you can think of in S.R.U speak, it's used an... uncountable number of times. Don't even try.
  • Sam's fond of telling the others "There's no place I'd rather be." It's even rubbed off on Jules.
  • Also frequently a variation of the line "That's why we get the cool pants," another contagious phrase that began with Sam.
• The Chains of Commanding: Parker often struggles with this but it gets particularly hard on him in season three and four where he is doubting his ability and judgement to lead the team.
• Child Soldiers: The neighborhood drug gang in "Lawmen" inducts teenagers into their gang, much to the disgust of the police.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: In "Terrors", Steve, a paramedic Jules was dating, decides to storm into a restaurant when he heard gunshots, despite the fact that Jules, a trained hostage negotiator, told him not to go in and wait for the cops. Both he and Jules are taken hostage and he is shot.
  • Also Parker. He takes every injury or death, whether from his team, hostage taker, or innocent civilian, hard and often blames himself for not doing a better job.
  • And in one episode, an unarmed Ed Lane chases a would-be assassin.
• Clear My Name:
  • The young man in "Never Kissed A Girl" is wrongly accused of raping and killing his best friend and wants to be cleared on the crime he never committed. Unfortunately, after being denied to have an appeal, he decides that he has nothing else left to lose and storms the courthouse with a gun, taking a security guard hostage, to find the lawyer who tarnished his name.
  • "Collateral Damage" revolves around a man accused of murdering his infant daughter taking his wife and two doctors hostage. One of the doctor's findings seemed to convince his wife he was responsible, so he wants to get a second opinion so that she'll believe in him again.
• Cold Sniper: The concept of the series is built around the team trying to avoid falling into the trope.
  • However, of the main snipers, Ed Lane is closer to this than Sam Braddock or Jules Callaghan, who are definitely more lighthearted and gregarious. At the same time, Ed also has to deal with a lot of the effects of killing people, namely serious PTSD both in the first and fifth seasons.
• Companion Cube: Spike treats the team's anti-bomb robot more like a beloved pet than a piece of equipment. He even named it Babycakes.
• Continuity Nod: In the episode "Never Let You Down", Leah gives the team wristbands memorializing Lewis, whom she replaced. Years later, in "Fault Lines", Spike and Wordy can be seen to be still wearing them. Wordy's is seen again in "The Better Man". Both are seen without them in later episodes, but, appropriately, Spike's can be seen during the last scene of the series in "Keep the Peace (Part 2)".
• Covert Distress Code: In one episode, Parker is taken hostage but the rest of the cops are unaware of this. He is told to give his team instructions over the radio as normal and direct them away from the hostage taker. He complies but tells his team members to 'stay frosty' — his team's code word for a situation like this. The hostage taker unfortunately realizes a few moments later what Parker did when he sees that the team isn't following the orders (not to mention it's fairly blatant; he doesn't even try to hide it in the conversation like many examples of the trope do), but it gives Parker the time to get the message across — if he'd tried to tell them directly, the hostage taker might have tried to cut them off before he could finish.
  • In "Sons of the Father", two nurses had been kidnapped and killed following their shifts. They had both been forced to call home and claim they were working late, so all nurses were given a distress code of "Dr. Armstrong" to use in the call if they become the next target.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: In "Perfect Storm," the bullied teen has no intention of killing his bullies. He's only threatening them, so they would feel as humiliated as he did when they begged for mercy.
• Cool Shades: Ed often sports a pair.
• Cowboy Cop:
  • Sam Braddock, at least to start off. Donna as well, during her short run, seems to have retained some "whatever it takes" attitude from her undercover vice days, and frequently expresses frustration with the rules.
  • Gil, a cop with a great career until he tried out for the S.R.U, and his answer "Shoot the subject ...right?" to the hypothetical scenario didn't pan out. He wasn't accepted and his life got worse from there.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The show had a forensic psychologist... for about three or four episodes.
• Cry into Chest: Spike cries as Parker cradles him after Lewis was killed by a bomb. Seen here◊.
  • Danny Rangford breaks down after Ed talks him down from a suicidal urge; Ed's eyes are suspiciously wet, too, as the two fiercely hug.
  • Donna cries into Ed's shoulder in "A New Life," following her emotional break after learning of her ex-partner's betrayal. She's also understandably upset, as she believes her new husband is probably not going to live after getting shot two times in the back. Fortunately, he does.
• Cult: One plays a major role in "The Farm" when a young woman who attempts to rob a gas station reveals she is trying to escape from it.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Sam Braddock saw his sister hit and killed by a car when he was a young boy, and later pulled the trigger in a friendly fire incident that killed a friend. Amazingly, he manages not to let it affect him, and is actually quite upset when Ed hears a rumor and consequently pulls Sam out of a leadership position.
  Sam: You wanna know what happened in Afghanistan, is that it? I was sniping an enemy compound from 1500 meters. The recce was done, and I was cleared to fire. When we went to do the ID, one of them was my buddy Matt. He shouldn't have been there. I was cleared to fire. All you had to do was ask.
• Deadpan Snarker: Sam.
  • "Nice post-incident reflexes, guys."
• Death Glare: Ed Lane uses this on a cop who tries to prevent him from warning Parker that the cop investigating their incident has a personal vendetta against Greg.
• Desperate Object Catch: The detonator to the necklace bomb.
• Divorce Assets Conflict: Occurs in "Custody" where the father got both kids and it leads the mother to kidnap her own children.
• Domestic Abuse: What sets off the events in "Asking for Flowers," where the cop husband is beating his wife and her sister has had enough.
• Driven to Suicide: After being foiled by the SRU, a number of antagonists are driven to shoot themselves.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • There are a number of explosive entries in the series, starting in the second episode. Notable is one through a wall in "Just A Man."
  • In "No Promises", while Jules and Sam are chasing a suspect, Ed comes out of nowhere to tackle the suspect and bring him down.
  • Sam jumps onto a suspect from above a walking tunnel in a park after being told to "head him off" during "Severed Ties."
  • Similarly, Leah's first on-camera moment after her return to the series is her suddenly appearing to tackle a fleeing suspect.
• Dysfunction Junction: Team One has varying degrees of this.
  • Parker was divorced from his wife due to his problems with alcoholism and hadn't seen his estranged son for years. His father was very strict (possibly abusive).
  • Ed has been having problems with his relationship with his wife and son, being more attached to the job than his family. After killing a desperate 18-year-old girl he's been having PTSD flashbacks and daily panic attacks.
  • Sam Braddock revealed in "Acceptable Risk" that he saw his younger sister being hit by a car and killed instantly when he was nine, plus his experience in Afghanistan which included a friendly fire incident.
  • Raf was sexually assaulted by a teacher and his Papa Wolf father was sent to jail for attacking the teacher.
  • Spike has a less troubled backstory than many of the others, raised by loving parents and seemingly having no major traumas (at least, not that he ever references) prior to the start of the series, but has an ongoing conflict with his father who didn't approve of his career choice, which becomes even more of a stressor when his father also becomes terminally ill (they do reconcile before his death). He also loses his best friend Lewis and suffers immense guilt over the situation.
  • Leah was a firefighter prior to joining the police department; she seems to be mostly okay, but she occasionally alludes to difficult cases from her past. She also has family in Haiti during the earthquake (the in-universe reason for her being Put on a Bus is that she left to help them put their lives back together).
  • Wordy appears to be most normal of the team, being Happily Married with three daughters but season 3 finale reveals that he is developing Parkinson's.
• Easily Forgiven(ish): Ed learns that the mother of the girl he had to shoot a few episodes ago wants to see him and is totally unprepared when she forgives him. It takes several more episodes before he can forgive himself.
• Embarrassing First Name: Spike doesn't mention his real first name if he can help it, although Parker calls him by it when he gets cocky. It's Michelangelo.
• Episode on a Plane: Happened in "Grounded," when a group of armed hijackers take over a plane and force them to land early.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Drug dealers and gangs are often shown to have family and genuinely care for them, such as the two drug lords who are brothers in "The Good Citizen" and the biker gang having a birthday party for their kids in "Below the Surface".
• Exact Words: The first rule for negotiation is to never lie to the subject. Most of the time they follow this in spirit as well as in letter, but in some cases the only way to make the negotiation work is to make a technically true statement knowing they're implying something other than the truth.
• The Fagin: Pete Joris in "Run to Me" has teenagers doing short cons and bank robberies for him.
• Fair Cop : SRU Team One and Donna also..
• Fallen Hero: Happens to SRU veteran Rangford, who is regarded as one of the best but ends up having a breakdown over an old case.
  • Bill, Donna's ex-partner/mentor, had fallen under the influence of alcohol, insubordination, and suspected drug use and incidentally revealed his undercover team's names to the mob when drunk. They then went to hunt down spouses/loved ones of each team member. The mob tells him that his choices are to let them kill Donna or personally murder her new husband. He gets the husband to trust him, drives him to a warehouse, and shoots him twice in the back. Though the husband survives, Donna almost shoots Bill before breaking down and saying that she hates him.
• Family Versus Career: Something that Ed consistently faces. Majority of the time, career wins.
• Fast-Roping: Lewis and Jules are introduced practicing this, and fast roping is used from time to time throughout the series.
• Fatal Flaw: Greg Parker has Chronic Hero Syndrome, wanting to protect all the civilians and hostage takers. This makes him often continue to negotiate to the hostage taker when some might say he should have action earlier. He takes each death very personally and blames himself for not doing a better job.
• A Father to His Men/Team Dad: Parker to Team One. He cares greatly for each team member, can get fiercely protective over them, sometimes refers to them as "children," and at one point even tells Spike that he loves him like a son.
• First Day from Hell: Raf. Who on Earth decided it was a good idea to start a rookie on SRU's busiest — and craziest — day of the year?
• First-Name Basis: Only Ed is allowed to call Parker by his first name, Greg. Everyone else calls him "Boss" or "Sarge". When newcomer Leah calls him Greg, she is corrected quickly.
• Follow in My Footsteps: Played with..
  • Jules' father is a cop and survived one of the first instances of a sniper attacking civilians. Since they didn't have a SWAT, S.R.U or SWAT like teams, they were pretty much powerless, so he decided to move to a farm in the middle of nowhere to protect his family. He wasn't pleased when Jules decided to be a cop, much less S.R.U.
  • Dean, Greg Parker's son, has decided he wants to be a cop when he grows up, with no prompting whatsoever from his father. Clark, Ed Lane's son, promptly declares him insane. Even his father, a decorated police officer, wants him to do something else with his life.
  • Sam was following in the footsteps of his father (a General) when he joined the Army, though he later broke tradition by leaving the service to join SRU. Sam mentions at least once that his father is less than thrilled with this turn of events.
    Sam: He wants me back in the military where I can "really make a difference".
    Jules: Nice. What did you say?
    Sam: I said I can make a difference here. He thought he heard me wrong,'cause it didn't sound like "yes,sir".
• Foreshadowing: In "He Knows His Brother", as the team was heading into the woods to chase a teenager who had shot his father, Spike tells Lewis that he's uncomfortable in any woods because bad things tend to happen to "his people" in them. (According to Spike, the Romans have horrible luck in wooded terrain.) Later in the episode, Spike gets pelted with an small improvised explosive that temporarily sidelines both him and Lew. He even throws in an "I told you so."
  • In "Day Game", the practice situation with Raf in the beginning of the episode ends with the hostage taker committing suicide after releasing his hostage. Later that day, the team has a situation that ends almost the exact same way.
  • A season one episode has a veteran SRU officer almost lose his mind over an old case long after he retired. In season 4, Ed starts to lose his mind after being forced to kill a teenage girl.
• Forced into Evil: Maggie had believed that once she got out of prison, her children would be returned to her; she melts down completely when she learns that they were permanently adopted and she won't be getting them back. It's then that she decides to kidnap them.
• Friendly Sniper: Played with the entire team, they are all nice and empathetic people who will kill you if they have to. Please don't make them have to.
  • Sam Braddock is much more outgoing and friendly than Ed Lane, but has no problems being absolutely serious and authoritative when the situation calls for it.
• Friend to All Children: Played with. Parker is very good with children - even teenagers - and they appear to like and trust him too. But he often has trouble reconnecting with his own son.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: One episode has a man try to kill his brother's drug dealer by forcing him to snort his entire stock all at once, as retaliation for said brother's death by overdose. The SRU stops him and arrests the dealers along with him.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: In "Backwards Day", the husband did cheat on his wife, after frustrations of not able to have a baby overwhelmed them. However, he quickly realized that he loved his wife and not his mistress. The mistress, of course, felt differently.
• Good Is Not Soft: Every member on Team One is very friendly and likable off the field. They will try to negotiate and talk down the hostage taker first without violence but they will not hesitate to pull the trigger on anyone threatening to hurt a hostage. And if someone threatens a team member...
• Gory Discretion Shot: When Lewis dies after triggering a land mine, the actual event is very distant, out of focus, and obscured by dust clouds and scenery.
• Gun Accessories: SRU units use a lot of modified guns. They also have attached flashlights, red dot sights and even more additions, not to mention various non-lethal weapons like fire suppressants and smoke grenade launchers. Interestingly enough, though they attach foregrips to their submachine guns, they tend not to use them, instead using the mag well as a grip.
• Guy In Real Life: The "Laughing Man" robber is so desperate for an emotional connection that he's fooled by a teenage boy with an altered voice. The boy is using his sister's name to trick the vigilante into killing the his stepfather. The stepfather, for his part, is horrified by what appears to be a teenage boy threatening to kidnap his six-year-old.
• Happily Adopted: The two girls, Becky and Riley, in "Severed Ties" were happily adopted by two separate families, but their birth mother gets released from jail early and wants all three of them to be a family again, resorting to kidnapping to make it happen.
• Happily Married: Wordy and Shelley. While they have their rough moments, Ed and Sophie ultimately end up pulling through. Donna and Hank, at least until "Keep the Peace, Part One" when Donna is unfortunately killed in the line of duty.
• Hard Head: Usually averted; if somebody is knocked unconscious they get medical care immediately. Played straight in the episode "Shockwave," in which Sam is knocked out by a bomb blast for about ten minutes. When he awakes, he's apparently completely fine.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Justified. Special Response officers tend to remove their helmets before storming crammed spaces, as they can dangerously impair their vision and movement. The choice of whether to wear helmets or not depends on the needs of the situation, and the judgement of protection versus speed of movement.
• Heroic BSoD: Several, particularly:
  • Donna Sabine, Jules' temporary replacement, undergoes one after being forced to shoot and kill a customs agent while safeguarding a serial killer. Overlaps with a Shower of Angst.
    • She gets one again when a crime family who she had helped take down years before starts hunting down the spouses/fiances/significant others of her and her old squad. Her new husband, to whom she was married at the start of the same episode, is shot and wounded in a revenge plot. Donna ultimately comes a hairsbreadth away from gunning down her ex-colleague, who turns out to have been responsible via a convoluted blackmail scheme, before the SRU team talks her down.
  • Spike, when fellow team member and friend Lewis Young dies after stepping on a land mine.
    • By extension, everyone on the team breaks down at this point. Ed and Greg are very good at hiding it, but watch Ed's jaw, and watch how Greg comforts Spike. Spike is just the closest and most visible.
  • Sam also, in the second season finale, when a lone deranged ex-soldier inside the Godwin Coliseum (AKA Maple Leaf Gardens), with whom Sam had started to make a connection over their ex-military backgrounds, is shot and killed (by his own design) while holding Spike at gunpoint. Sam subsequently states his desire to leave the team, but Ed and Greg both recommend a support group instead, stating that it's probably overdue.
  • The team as a whole has one following the events of "Broken Peace," after Ed is forced to shoot and kill the 18-year-old daughter of the original subject (who had taken her mother hostage) when she draws a handgun, which she had gotten to protect herself from her father, and starts shooting at the subject to try to save her mother. The team spends the evening examining all of the ways that they could have prevented it, each member blaming themselves and each other for how the situation turned out. Ultimately, Raf decides to leave the team, because while the kill shot was justified by SRU protocol, he felt that justice would have been better served if the girl had been allowed to shoot her father. Ed's trauma eats away at him for the rest of the season (despite the girl's mother forgiving him) until he can't shoot a subject. He then goes to his therapist and finally confesses how much he's affected: he sees her die every time he looks into his scope, he's been withdrawing from his family, and he's been hiding the panic attacks that he's had every morning since that night.
  • When Raf has to make his first kill shot in "Grounded," Ed and Sam immediately start talking him through what he's going to go through, because they know he's going to have a Heroic BSoD (and shows signs of it immediately).
  • Given that SRU is a life-saving organization, not a life-taking organization (just like real SWAT-like teams), any time a member of the team has to take a kill shot, it affects them badly. This includes Ed, the almost-gruff veteran, who, during the pilot episode, after killing the hostage-taker, has to be talked down and visibly has difficulty for the rest of the season, not just from taking the shot, but because the hostage taker's son ran into the line of fire just as he pulled the trigger - the few seconds it took to learn that he killed the HT instead of the son stayed with him for a long time. That said, the episode also clearly establishes that Ed is disturbed by having to kill anyone, even the HT (amplified by the fact he did so in front of the man's son). And the entirety of "Fit for Duty" deals with the emotional impact of Ed killing a girl a few episodes earlier ("Broken Peace"), during which he also recalls other killshots..
• Hero of Another Story: There are at least four other teams (apart from Team One) on the S.R.U. roster. Only two of those teams are ever actually given real screen time and identified: Teams 3 and 4. In particular, Team 4 Sergeant "Troy" (never given the honor of a surname) is seen in "Haunting the Barn" and "Follow the Leader." Donna Sabine, after leaving Team 1, is given a prominent role on Team 3 as the team leader. She returns to help her old team in "Fault Lines/Personal Effects," is heard calling in her team's position in "The Better Man," and finally in "Keep the Peace, Part One."
• Heroic Bystander: Subverted. Untrained bystanders attempting to be heroic and stop the hostage takers on their own usually make things worse for themselves and for the team because they tend to unintentionally antagonize the hostage taker and escalate the situation. The only times that bystander intervention works is when the team is in contact with the bystander and talking them through it (and this never involves physically confronting a subject, at most they're usually being instructed in how to talk the person down). Even then there are a few close calls.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Greg appears to do so in the final episode when he takes multiple shots while defusing the final bomb. However, the final scene takes place after a time skip of a year and reveals he survived, although he's forced to retire from active duty.
  • Also in the series finale, Donna refuses to wait for Spike to disarm a suicide bomber, because they believe he has other bombs planted around the city and if he dies, they lose their only lead. Jimmy staying behind to cover her while the rest of the team clears the area also qualifies. Unfortunately their suspect is actually a victim, the "suicide" bomb was remote controlled, and the real bomber blows it up when he sees the cops.
  • Lew, once he realizes that the only way he'll possibly survive is to endanger the members of his team, calmly calls his parents to say goodbye, and then radios his teams to say the same, before stepping off the landmine.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ed and Parker. Close friends and teammates for many years. Parker knows Ed always has his back and Ed knows he can talk to Parker about anything. Becomes doubly heartwarming when their two sons are shown to be developing a friendship like theirs.
  • Also Lewis and Spike, which becomes a Tear Jerker when Lewis dies and Spike harbors guilt for letting his friend die.
• Hostage Situation: And how! ^note But not as many as you'd think: the show is just as much about talking violent offenders down as it is about saving people.
• How We Got Here / In Medias Res: Most episodes, start like this, showing the "flashpoint" of whatever situation the SRU is called in to deal with, rewinding to show how they got there, and then resolving the conflict. Started being phased out in Season 3, before it got more common again in Season 4.
  • Inverted in "Fit for duty" (the screen shows black text on a white background, rather than the inverse) with 'One hour later'
• Hypocrisy Nod: An almost literal example in one episode. Right before a raid, the team is having issues with Ed discovering Wordy is taking the medication levodopa because of Parkinson's and that Greg knew about it. Talking of the tension, Jules remarks "teams and secrets." Sam gives her a "really?" look as the two happen to be carrying on an affair and Jules sighs, "All right, I'll shut up now."
• Human Shield: Happens a fair number of times. SRU doesn't let that stop them, however - there are always plans and ways to deal with this situation.
• I Am Spartacus: In "Run, Jaime, Run" several of "Jaime D's" fans claim that they're him to act as a distraction for him.
• I Call It "Vera": Spike (the team's demolitions expert) and "Babycakes," his anti-bomb robot.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Ed, reflecting his piercing and calculating personality to deal with the hostage takers accordingly. Donna, roaring at a captive (alleged) serial-killer to "Shut it!!!" when he started whistling in 'Clean Hands'.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Subverted at the end of Day Game, when Ed tries to reassure Greg that "You did what you had to do."
  • Greg always reassures his team about this whenever they have to take a kill shot.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Discussed in "Clean Hands," when some of the team fantasize about harming the prisoner they're protecting. Later invoked while trying to talk down the episode's antagonists, who are fellow law enforcement officers with a personal grudge against the prisoner.
• I Never Got Any Letters: In the season four episode "Through a Glass Darkly," the estranged mother and grandmother of a hostage discover that they have both been writing letters to each other for years, which were intercepted by the hostage's grandfather.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: In "Through a Glass Darkly," the grandmother says she didn't even know she had a granddaughter but yet knows the granddaughter's name, tipping off Greg and Jules that she knows more than she claims.
• Inside Job: In the season 2 episode "The Fortress," a nanny helps her criminal boyfriend burglarize her employers' home, but has a change of heart when her employers' children become caught up in the robbery.
• Interrupted Suicide: Happens quite often.
  • In "Whatever It Takes," Parker manages to convince the basketball player that life isn't all about sports and that the verbal and physical abuse his Jerkass coach did to him and his team was wrong before he tried to jump off the roof of his school.
  • In "Collateral Damage," a flash bomb is used to make Frank flinch, giving Ed time to tackle him and knock the gun away.
  • In "Forget Oblivion," Leah and Sam save a hypernesiac from suffocating himself with carbon dioxide in his garage to save his friend from being used for blackmail and to keep his overly photographic memory from being taken advantage of. He is then promptly kidnapped. From the ambulance.
  • In "Business As Usual", Parker has to talk down a man who has poured gasoline on himself and is threatening to set himself on fire, made more complicated by the fact that they can't do anything that would produce a spark for fear of triggering a fire, which eliminates virtually all of their standard tools of incapacitation ^*rubber bullets or gas canisters still have to be fired, flash-bangs are still explosives, and he can't tackle the guy fast enough to prevent him from carrying out his threat. He eventually devises a way to temporarily incapacitate the man using industrial fans (turned on in a safe location and then brought onto the scene already active), giving Parker a chance to get to the man and grab away his lighter before he can activate it.
  • "A Day In The Life" is the only time we see the team handling a suicide attempt that isn't part of/connected to a larger case (presumably they actually do this fairly often, but it wouldn't make for a good episode). In the first of three cases they get that day, a subject is threatening to jump off a bridge on the anniversary of his wife's death. Jules eventually convinces him not to go through with it for the sake of his adult children.
• Interservice Rivalry: Sam and the subject in "Clean Hands" briefly engage in this; Sam was special forces, the subject was infantry.
• In Love with the Gangster's Girl: In "The Better Man," an undercover agent became involved with the drug leader's girlfriend, and many of his actions to protect her and bring down the drug gang only lead to trouble for himself and Team One.
• In the Blood: Jules' father was a cop.
  • Sam served in the military and his father is a General.
  • Averted with the younger son in "Sons of the Father," who did his best to distance himself from his serial killer father's crimes, but played straight with the older son.
  • Greg's son Dean wants to be a cop.
• Ironic Echo Cut: In "Lawmen", when Ed asks Dean (Parker's son) how he convinced his father to let him go on an escort ride with the team, Dean says he did it by telling him Clark (Ed's son) was interested in going too. Cut to Clark who looks like he never wanted to go in the first place and is bored out of his mind^note a later conversation confirms he had no real interest, suggesting he actually went along with it specifically so Dean, who actually wanted to do it, could use that as leverage.
  • In "Backwards Day", the husband tells Ed and Lewis how he regrets cheating on his wife with an old friend, while said woman thought differently.
    Josh: That one night was the biggest mistake of my life.
    (cut scene)
    Hannah: It was the night that was always meant to be.
• Is This Thing Still On?: At the end of "A New Life", Jules and Sam talk honeymoons in a way that makes it clear there's a relationship. "Priority of Life" reveals that they did so without turning their microphones off first; no one else was listening at the time, but their conversation was picked up by the auto-transcriptor. Since the team was on probation, the transcripts of all their calls were being reviewed, including the transcript that contained those remarks.
• It's Personal:
  • The investigator in "Acceptable Risk" made the interrogation on the team much harder and more demanding because of her personal grudge against Parker. Her partner was killed in action while in Parker's team and she wanted to get Parker arrested for poor judgement. It turns out it was her partner's fault, because he hesitated when Parker called Scorpio. ^note  Code for "Take the shot."
  • It didn't start out that way for a security guard who set up a robbery in order to be let back into the police force. When the team responds, it's revealed he was rejected from the SRU by Greg, causing his whole life to spiral out of control, and he's been blaming Greg for every minute of it. And he's just as skilled and plenty trigger happy...
  • Parker's judgement can get affected whenever children are involved, because he usually ends up thinking about his own estranged son.
  • "Haunting The Barn" is basically made of this trope: the subject is a former Team One member barricaded in an SRU conference room.
  • The subject in "Between Heartbeats" is a young man whose father Ed was forced to shoot in an earlier call. He intentionally sets up the situation to lure Ed out and kill him.
• It's Snowing Cocaine: Played for Drama - a man tracks down the drug dealers who sold his brother the coke he overdosed on and is about to force one of the dealers to down his entire stockpile in one sitting before SRU catches up to them.
• Jerk Jock:
  • "Perfect Storm" deals with a group of these bullying a classmate and said classmate snapping and bringing a gun to school.
  • "Whatever It Takes" plays with this trope as well, ultimately being traced back to the team's coach.
• Just a Kid: In "The Perfect Family," Donna hesitates in following Parker's order of shooting the teenager who kidnapped his baby son and is endangering both of them. Ed calls her out on it later and she explains that the reason why she hesitated was because she saw a scared kid.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: A variation occurs in "Aisle 13" where the teenage hostage taker acts arrogant and tough like he knows what he's doing, but Team One is easily able to see through his insecurities.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": When Lewis steps on a landmine which does not go off immediately^note the team even lampshades how rare this is in "One Wrong Move", Spike tries everything he can think of to disarm it. When it becomes clear that any further rescue attempts will only serve to put his friend in further danger, Lewis purposely lifts his foot after Spike walks away, detonating the mine.
• The Last Dance: In the eponymous Season 2 episode, "Last Dance," a terminally ill young woman and her fiance decide to spend one night living outside the rules before taking their own lives.
• Like a Son to Me: Greg tells Spike he loves him like a son (in Italian) in the season 4 finale.
• Like Father, Like Son: Dean and Clark, Parker and Ed's sons respectively, are appearing to develop a friendship much like their fathers.
  • Dean is a lot like Parker in general, in addition to wanting to follow in his footsteps. In the series finale, Clark even remarks on Dean's ability to read people "just like [his] dad".
• Limited Advancement Opportunities: Parker warns Donna Sabine about this when she first joins Team One. Ed has been a Constable for years when the series starts, and he's only a Sergeant in the finale because Greg is medically retired from SRU, and Ed takes his place.
• Love Makes You Crazy: The premise in "A Day in the Life," where Valentine's Day is regarded by SRU as one of the toughest days of the year for hostage taking. Three cases are shown: a suicidal widower, a woman taking her daughter's manager of a strip club hostage, and a recently fired man infatuated with his boss.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Team One makes use of ballistic shields on many occasions, which come in handy whenever more protection is needed.
• Mama Bear: Inverted by the girl in "Broken Peace" who saw her mother being assaulted by her abusive father, leading her to attempt to shoot and kill him.
  • Deconstructed in "Custody". A woman about to lose custody of her children kidnaps them and attempts to go across the border with them. When stopped by the police, she sees them as a threat and brings out a gun, intending to shoot anyone who was going to take away her kids.
• Manly Tears: When Ed finally learns that running away from his pain is not helping, he then begins to realize that shedding manly tears is part of the means of coming to peace with the actions required of him.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Donna and her fiance/husband where she is a cop and he is an IT.
• Mission Control: The SRU's mobile command van.
  • Considering the characters, Spike most often has mission control. Oftentimes he is supported by Parker, or replaced by Jules if he is needed in the field.
• Mistaken for Junkie: Laura in "Last Dance." Restaurant staff see her slurring her words, bumping into things, breaking a glass, and muttering incoherently to herself in the bathroom. They assume she's high on something. She's actually dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (a degenerative brain disorder).
• Mood Whiplash: After Ed was able to reconcile with his estranged brother and the team was able to crack down on a third of the city's gun supply, all seems good... but as the episode ends, Ed goes home to an empty house after his wife leaves with their son to stay with her mother, and Parker warns Ed that things might stay that way.
  • A light moment in an otherwise tense situation, Parker says this as a way to ease his team's worries that Ed was being held hostage in "Never Kissed A Girl:"
    Parker: "Okay, he's charming, he's good looking; Ed's going to be fine."
• Mugging the Monster: Deconstructed at the end of season three when Ed, in a hurry to get to his wife, inadvertently gets the attention of a desperate man who points a gun at a uniformed police officer. The problem is that Ed left his sidearm back at the station, resulting in the monster not being very effective at the moment. It ends badly.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Haley's ex-boyfriend in "You Think You Know Someone" has this reaction when he finds out that it was Haley who accidentally shot her mother, not Parker and realizes that his well-meaning efforts to get the truth out (including kidnapping and assaulting Parker) ended up hurting Haley.
• New Meat: Sam.
  • Donna.
  • Later, Leah.
  • Even later, Raf.
  • And then Leah again.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Plenty of attempts by bystanders to intervene only make things worse.
  • In "Broken Peace," the daughter of the main antagonist of the week correctly refuses his birthday call. It sets up his Roaring Rampage of Revenge and all further attempts to communicate with him are shut out by his tunnel vision, with tragic results.
• No Guy Wants an Amazon: Averted with Donna and her husband. When he first sees her in action, he tells her how much he admired her for remaining calm and doing her job so well.
  • Also averted with Sam and the way he refers to Jules as a "sniper chick," making it clear this is part of what attracts him to her.
• "Not So Different" Remark: SRU members will often share experiences from their own past in order to relate to a subject. Since many of the subjects, especially the ones that they choose to use this tactic on, are ultimately decent people who are acting out of some sort of desperation, it works more often than not.
  • In general, Parker is able to relate to parents such as the ones seen in "First In Line", "Custody" and "Severed Ties" who are desperate to help/protect their children as he is a father himself.
  • In "Behind the Blue Line", Sam tells a former soldier suffering from Survivor Guilt that he struggled with the same feelings as Sam had lost one of his best friends due to a Friendly Fire incident.
• Oh, Crap!: In "You Think You Know Someone," Parker calmly tells his two kidnappers that they had just kidnapped, assaulted and are now unlawfully detaining a police officer. One of them already knew and didn't care. The other didn't know and begins freaking out.
  • Sam's reaction when he asks Jules if she wants breakfast... and sees Greg standing in the living room.
  • In "Eyes In", a truck is jacked and the driver is abducted. Spike and Leah, with the help of some other officers, prepare a roadblock for the truck while the rest of the team head off to rescue the driver, who is being held in the trunk of a car going in a different direction. The latter part goes off without a hitch, but just as the truck is bearing down on the roadblock, the rescued driver reveals that he was hauling anhydrous ammonia^note pure, undiluted ammonia; transported in pressurized form, it's basically Deadly Gas Made of Explodium. Most of the cops don't recognize the term, but Spike does, and a look of horror comes over his face as he realizes what will happen if the truck hits the roadblock and crashes.
    Spike: Pull the roadblock. Tear it down!
• One of Our Own: As in many real life cases, hostage-takers won't hesitate to use police as a Human Shield.
  • In one case, Ed goes out of his way to involve himself in a situation, even though he's off-duty at the time, in an attempt to get the hostage-taker to let the civilian hostage go.
  • Jules does the same thing when she and her date are off-duty and happen to come across a man taking a restaurant hostage and ends up shooting someone. The date, who also happened to be a paramedic, runs inside to help and Jules follows him, resulting in both of them also being taken hostage.
  • Parker is kidnapped on his way to help Haley, a young girl he looked after in one of his previous cases. In another episode, an ex-cop specifically targeted Parker to get revenge.
  • Sam is also taken hostage once.
  • Spike in both "Behind the Blue Line" and "Blue on Blue."
  • In a more tragic example, in "Haunting the Barn," the subject is a retired SRU Sergeant who established the unit and trained many members, including Greg and Ed, and is suffering from hallucinations and an emotional breakdown.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: Done in "Severed Ties," in the locker room scene.
• Outlaw Couple: "Last Dance." Greg even refers to the fugitive couple as 'Bonnie and Clyde'.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Referenced in many episodes and is often one of the main catalysts of some subjects.
  • "Clean Hands" has the father of a murdered girl attempting to kill the serial killer that Team One is safeguarding.
  • "Coming To You Live" has the radio talk host recently finding out that his Old Flame's son who died in a car accident years earlier is actually his son. He kidnaps a young politician who he believes was involved in the accident.
  • In the ending of "Behind the Blue Lines", after the shooter decided to go Suicide by Cop, the shooter's father is seen collapsing in grief when realizing his son is dead.
  • A father is trying to cope with the death of his baby daughter while also being accused of murdering her in "Collateral Damage".
  • In "Good Cop", the titular cop had accidentally killed a young teenager and now the boy's father is inciting a mob to demand justice for his son's death.
  • In "Jumping at Shadows", the 911 dispatcher Kate bonds with the little girl who calls frequently because she had lost her own daughter three years prior.
  • Tragically occurs in "Broken Peace" where Ed is forced to shoot and kill a teenaged girl in front of her parents as the girl was actively attempting to kill her abusive father.
• Papa Wolf:
  • Once Ed Lane has enough suspicion that an investigator is specifically targeting Parker in her investigations about the team, he immediately goes to warn Parker, breaking rules to get to him, even death-glaring a cop who tries to stop him.
  • In general, Ed is fiercely protective of his team, and becomes more aggressive if a suspect is intending to harm or has already harmed one of his teammates.
  • Raf's father attacked a teacher who attempted to sexually assault his son. Unfortunately, it landed him in jail.
• Parents as People:
  • Ed struggles to be a good husband and father for his family but often puts the team first, causing strain with his wife and son.
  • Also Parker, whose alcoholism caused his wife to divorce him and his son to be estranged from him. In later seasons, he reconciles with his son.
  • Largely averted with Wordy, who finds time to be a doting father to his three young daughters despite the pressures of the job.
• Parent with New Paramour: Seen very briefly but in the season four finale, Dean (Parker's son) appears to get along well with Marina, a woman who showed interest in Parker in the previous episodes. Likewise, it's mentioned in Dean's first appearance that "he has a stepfather he loves". ^note This is initially given as a reason why Dean doesn't want contact with Parker, but there's no indication that his relationship with his stepfather changed even when Dean decided he did want a relationship with Parker as well.
• Parenthetical Swearing: In "The Element of Surprise," it's evident that Parker and Naismith don't get along. When the team is getting ready to bust a drug dealer, Naismith gets into the same SUV as Parker, much to Parker's annoyance. He then tells Naismith in polite terms to shove off.
  Parker: "You know, I'm good here. You want to go check if your boys got the outer perimeter secure?"
• Pet the Dog:
  • Despite having a vendetta against Ed Lane and coldly shooting down a police officer who happened to be there, the Croatian sniper in "Between Heartbeats" owns a cat and makes sure to feed it before he leaves. He also doesn't choose to go the route of Revenge by Proxy when he is easily able to find Lane's son.
  • In "The Good Citizen", when the Vigilante Man was going after drug dealers and holding one of the main drug lords hostage, the drug lord's brother (also a drug lord himself) is offering money and anything, just as long as the vigilante lets his brother go.
• Phrase Catcher: Sergeant Daniel Rangford, mentor to Greg and Ed, is the guy who came up with Greg's "Keep the peace" catchphrase.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Ed cradles Parker after the latter's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: In the season finale, Ed begs the badly injured Parker to not leave him.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted and averted by the SRU team. But also played straight in certain cases, like in "Jumping At Shadows" where the team finds out the guys after a little girl found her house (which was under Witness Protection) because they bribed a police officer.
  • In "Perfect Storm," one of the targets of the bullied kid is the son of a cop. When the cop thinks that the shooter killed his son, he hunts the kid and guns him down as the situation is winding down. Parker then delivers an epic verbal beatdown, describing exactly how the cop failed in his duty. Then he lets the guy see his (perfectly alive and well) son, which comes as a great relief to him but also further underscores how stupid and needless his actions were.
• Pregnant Badass: Jules in season five.
• Pregnant Hostage: In 'Aisle 13', one of the robbery-gone-bad hostages reveals to she is pregnant.
  • Earlier, in "Backwards Day," the hostage reveals that she's pregnant, which makes the subject even more unhinged (because the hostage had an affair with her husband).
• Precision F-Strike / This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Parker, after a tense moment where it looks like the hostage-taker might shoot Ed. Fortunately, the team comes in just in time and Ed gets to safety. His exact words are "son of a bitch," with emphasis via smacking the table.
• The Profiler: Doctor Luria, until she was removed from the series. Parker also fulfills this trope with regularity, although pretty much any S.R.U member can contribute something to a profile.
  • Jules seems to be shifting more towards this as the series progresses.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Many hostage takers attempt this on Team One. Unlike other examples in other media, the most this gets them is the team backing away, and occasionally with their guns lowered. The only people who holster their guns are the negotiators ^note Usually Greg (and usually a voluntary move used to gain trust and build a connection), but everyone has had a turn talking down a subject; the rest of the SRU keeps the subject and negotiator covered.
  • Inverted in "Haunting the Barn", the only time this actually happens, as Ed disarms himself and removes all his gear, and steps toward the subject, so that he can talk down his mentor, who's suicidal and having an emotional breakdown. His mentor gets even more upset that Ed is doing something he was taught to never do.
• Put on a Bus: Kira early into season two, Leah at the beginning of season three, Wordy a couple of episodes into season four, and Raf after the season five premiere.
  • Not completely in Wordy's case, because although the character was written out of the squad due to early-stage Parkinson's Disease, he still shows up whenever the SRU team deals with his new department, or when they all get together for a social event in the fourth season finale, or for Jules & Sam's wedding in the series finale.
• Quitting to Get Married: In 'A New Life', Donna reveals to Ed on the way to her wedding that since she's put in 20 years of service, she's eligible for early retirement. She tells him that after her honeymoon, she'll be taking a package. Eventually averted when we see that she really hasn't quit after all in the series finale "Keep the Peace." (It is never made clear if Donna actually retired and then returned, or if she simply changed her mind and stayed with the S.R.U. after "A New Life.")
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Invoked for Amy Jo Johnson's pregnancy when her character, Jules, is caught in the line of fire.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Wordy has no problem watching girl movies like "Lady in Waiting," because his wife and his daughters watch them all the time and he wants to take every opportunity he can to get to understand them better.
  • Parker wears a pink shirt in the second episode of the series.
• Redemption Equals Death: Several cases:
  • Quite likely the fate of Irina, the Russian nanny in "The Fortress," who lets hey boyfriend and his gang into the house to rob her employers, then has a change of heart when the kids come home early. After her boyfriend takes the kids hostage and threatens to kill them, she tries to fight him off, but he shoots her in the chest. We last see her being wheeled out of the house by paramedics.
  • A later episode has two men working together to kidnap a girl to get her wealthy, estranged, and dementia affected grandmother to pay a ransom, but the mother intervenes and is taken too. The leader orders the other to take the mother and kill her, but he fires into the ground and sets her free. Later, he frees the teenager rather than use her as a hostage, and is killed for his efforts.
• Red Herring: Season 3 episode 2, "Severed Ties," opens with someone taking pictures of young children at a playground shortly before one of them is kidnapped, and the photographer is quickly identified as a recently paroled sex offender. It's just a coincidence, and one of those pictures helps identify the real kidnapper. He still goes to jail, though.
• Rescue Romance: Marina develops a crush on Parker after he helped and comforted her during a hostage situation in "A Day in the Life". Initially Parker is hesitant to get into a relationship with her because he thinks she is only seeing him in rose-tinted glasses and he feels he doesn't deserve someone like her. However, he eventually moves past this and from what is seen at the end of Season 4, they are officially together.
• Revenge by Proxy: In "Acceptable Risk," the killer in question was targeting people who she felt betrayed her by accepting hush money after she filed a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company that made a drug that killed her husband. The killer would then cross the Moral Event Horizon by shooting an innocent woman who was shielding her husband. The team shot her before she could.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: In "Follow the Leader", the SRU bust a white supremacist organisation, then have to stage a desperate search when the learn three members have escaped with bombs.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Marcus Faber, the antagonist in the series finale, is a clear Expy of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: A young woman joins an activist movement and hijacks a riot to use as a distraction in order to get revenge against a cop who killed her best friend.
  • A mob boss's wife attacks the family members of the undercover cops who betrayed them with the accidental help of team's leader, who drunkenly revealed their names to a guy with a friendly attitude and a "pawn-shop cop ring", thinking he was a fellow member of the force.
  • A terrifying one in "Acceptable Risk", where the team responds to an active shooter situation. The gunman is killing the people she thinks responsible for her husband's death (the pharmaceutical company that made the drug that killed him, and the lawyer's that forced a settlement to cover it up), but it's quickly clear that she has an extensive target list. As the team moves through the conference center where the shooting takes place, they come across a lot of dead people, and every time they slow down to try to provide assistance to the victims, they hear additional shots and have to rush off.
• Running Gag: A major perk of being in the S.R.U. is getting to wear the cool pants.
• Sacrificial Lion / Land Mine Goes "Click!": Lewis Young at the start of the back half of the second season. After stepping on a landmine and keeping his foot held down firmly while simultaneously disarming a separate bomb. As the rest of the team evacuates a college campus around him and tries every angle possible to save him, he calls his family to say goodbye and sacrifices himself by deliberately lifting his foot off of the trigger. Cue team-wide Heroic BSoD.
• Sadistic Choice: In "One Wrong Move," the team is trying to save Lewis, who has stepped on a land mine. However, if they let Spike try to disable it, there's a high chance that Spike could die too. No matter what the team does, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. In the end, Lewis does a Heroic Sacrifice rather than let Spike endanger himself.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Councilman Malone's father is revealed to have done this in "Coming To You Live," though for reasons that are not unsympathetic.
• Security Cling: In their confusion of being surrounded by police, the two children cling to their mother who lost custody of them to their father and had kidnapped them in "Custody."
• Sensory Tentacles: Remote camera-on-a-cable sensors or pole-cams are used in practically every episode.
• Series Continuity Error: The age of Wordy's youngest daughter... early in series one, Wordy mentions that youngest daughter Ally doesn't have much hair, but has enough to braid, which makes it sound like she's a young toddler. This is backed up in the episode "Clean Hands" early in season 2, where Wordy tells Donna he wants to "be able to tuck in my baby girl tonight with clean hands." That episode ends with a shot of Wordy and a little girl who looks about three. But in the season 3 finale, Wordy says Ally is only two and a half, which would mean she wouldn't have even been born when season one began.
  • Donna Sabine's policing history varies wildly from 'Clean Hands' to 'A New Life'. She tells Wordy that she worked with Vice for "four years"; undercover for "two". Then she tells Ed on her wedding day that "You know I was a beat cop for eight years; Vice for ten; S.R.U. for two now." This ret-conning allows for Donna to claim that after a twenty-year law enforcement career, she wants to take early retirement and settle into happily wedded bliss.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Both Ed and Jules dress up to act as bodyguards for a VIP and his wife in "Eagle Two," much to the teasing of the team.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: There was a place where several soldiers who were dealing with PTSD could come and stay in "We Take Care of Our Own".
  • Sam has elements of this.
  • Ed deals with PTSD throughout much of seasons one, two, and five.
• Shock Collar: A girl in "The Planets Aligned," who's been kidnapped for years, has been kept inside a house by use of a shock anklet and being told that if she leaves the house, she'll die.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the robber's signs of perpetrating a robbery in the fourth season resembles the one used by the Laughing Man.
  • One episode featured a vicious biker gang.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The show takes pains to examine the psychology of the subjects the team confronts. It also maps out deescalation tactics in detail.
  • Most fictional works simply have their characters wear equipment vests and treat those vests like body armor. This show acknowledges how those vests don't provide adequate protection by having most of the team wear separate plate carriers beneath.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Ed and his brother Roy. Where Ed is generally stoic, calm and sticks to the rules, Roy is more emotional, reckless and likes to bend the rules.
• Smarter Than You Look: Sam. At least early in the first season, he had many "duh" moments, where audience members at home knew more about how to handle a hostage situation than he did, and he's supposed to be a professional^note  It's forgivable when one recalls that Sam was with JTF-2 in Afghanistan, and his paradigm was still that of a special forces soldier early on; he grows out of it by the time season two is underway. However, he can quote Paradise Lost, and he's a whiz at geometry.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: In the beginning of "New Life", as Raf is chasing down a shooter, Donna's wedding ceremony was proceeding while a violin is playing in the background with an occasional more exciting remix added in. It ends with Donna and the groom kissing while the shooter is hit by a car but only the violin is playing.
• So Proud of You: Parker says to his team in "Acceptable Targets", after a particularly grueling and difficult mission.
• Stalker with a Crush: Happens between a boss and one of her employees in "A Day in the Life." The employee had become madly infatuated with the boss, sending her emails and leaving gifts at her house. When she gently tried to tell him she wasn't interested and fired him as a result, he returned to the office with a gun so he could propose to her, believing now he had a better chance with her, completely missing the point of said firing.
• Stockholm Syndrome: A particular sad case in "Planets Aligned," where Penny was kidnapped by a man for eight years and he conditioned her to be scared of the police.
  • One of Greg's negotiating tactics is to invoke a mild form of this in subjects, by building a connection between them and him.
• The Stoic: Ed.
  • Not So Stoic: When something threatens or hurts his team or family, he gets pissed. In Season 5, he's also emotionally devastated by having to shoot a particularly sympathetic subject, eventually leading to a breakdown in "Fit For Duty" during which he admits that it always hurts him when they lose a subject, even if he doesn't show it.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: A number of subjects have done this, usually as a desperate last play. The most tragic case is SRU veteren Daniel Rangford, who suffers an emotional breakdown and takes himself hostage, flipping between this and attempting to invoke Suicide by Cop.
• Suicide by Cop: Multiple hostage-takers have or may have gone out by this method, with at least one doing so to secure his wife's financial future via the insurance payout after his death. If the team is able to identify that a subject is attempting Suicide by Cop and doesn't otherwise pose a danger, they will not shoot. Unfortunately, if the suspect does potentially pose a threat, they have to take the shot even if they suspect that the person is trying to attempt suicide by cop, because they can't afford to take that chance and be wrong.
• The Squad: But of course.
• Taking You with Me: In "The Farm", a man starts a drug rehab facility and is quite normal until one of his patients goes back into the world, relapses, and dies. After that, he won't allow anyone to leave, instead convincing them that they're better off staying at the eponymous Farm forever and forming their own community separate from the outside world. When he discovers he's dying of cancer, he decides the best way to keep his patients safe from the scary world is to kill them (unusually, for a cult story, without their permission).
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Almost every member of Team One has had to do this. Sometimes it works, sometimes the talking distracts the suicidal long enough for an active interruption... and sometimes, no matter what they do, it doesn't work.
  • In "Attention Shoppers", Jules talks down Tasha before she could jump.
• Talking Your Way Out: Mocked by an ex-cop with a grudge against Parker in "Day Game" after he captures Parker and tells him to try to talk his way of this.
• Team Dad / Team Mom: Greg Parker is the more empathetic leader of Team One, but often consults Team Leader Ed Lane about personnel issues and together they deal with the team. Greg cares for the team more openly than Ed, but Ed definitely keeps an eye out for anything that Greg misses and takes up the slack when Parker is off his game, especially when Spike's father dies and Parker is dealing with his doubts about his objectivity. Greg almost always consults Ed about issues with the team, unless he's trying to protect Ed from the ramifications of knowing (Jules and Sam's relationship) or letting the team member come to terms with a problem, like Wordy adjusting to the fact that he has Parkinson's disease.
• Through His Stomach: Marina (the woman whom Parker rescues in "A Day in the Life") bakes some cupcakes to thank the team; but as Jules points out later, those cupcakes were made specifically for Parker to hint at her interest in/affection for him.
• Title Drop: Never mentioned by the characters, but one of the show's producers, Anne Marie La Traverse, said that she hoped the show would take viewers to their "own personal flash point."
  • Nearly every episode has a character say the episode's title.
• To Absent Friends: Ed Lane actually says this line, verbatim, in the closing minutes of the series finale. He follows it up by raising his bottle of beer, saying, "To Donna and Lew." The remaining members of the team follow suit.
• To Be Lawful or Good: The majority of the time, the team stays lawful, as it is their duty as the police to uphold the law and not be judges.
  • In "Follow the Leader," Parker is shot and pinned down by heavy fire but orders the team to continue finding the bombs. Ed and everyone else blatantly disobey him to get him out.
  • Spike and Ed agree to get rid of the audio drive where it recorded Parker (who was held hostage by a deranged ex-cop) saying he had lied and broken protocol to protect his team. But Parker stops them, saying there shouldn't be any more secrets.
  • In "Haunting the Barn," Parker toys with keeping Daniel Rangford's breakdown and siege a secret, but ultimately decides to put it on record.
  • Ed lays it out in "Broken Peace": Their job is to enforce the law and follow the rules, which is why he shot and killed the girl who was trying to kill her abusive father to protect her mother.
• Together in Death: What the boyfriend in "The Last Dance" plans after his girlfriend commits suicide with a morphine overdose. The girlfriend doesn't know of his plan, and Team One is able to stop both of them in time.
• Token Minority: Lewis, Raf, and Winnie the dispatcher.
  • Twofer Token Minority: Leah (black female) joins the team after Lewis' death. When Leah leaves due to "family issues" (her family lives in Haiti), black rookie Raf takes her place. Leah rejoins the team after Raf decides this job isn't for him.
• Too Dumb to Live: Sam's introduction to the team is to, while in street clothes and without stating that he's a cop, walk up to the uniformed and heavily armed team and offer to show Jules (a photo of) his gun, just after they have killed a subject. It's only due to the S.R.U. commander's intervention that he isn't arrested or worse.
  • The people in "Shockwave" who had refused to leave whatever they were doing in the room because it was just a "fire drill". Even when a security guard and Sam in full police gear try to get them to leave and explicitly say it isn't a drill they refuse, resulting in all of them being trapped on the floor when the bomb goes off.
• Trauma Button: Regular civilians after being held hostage and/or threatened violently take much longer than trained cops to recover. Recurring character Marina tells Parker that even after almost a year of almost getting killed by her Stalker with a Crush and seeing him killed in front of her, she has trouble adjusting normally, such as having difficulty dating, and seeing red flowers reminds her of him.
• Traumatic Haircut: Tasha Redford. (See Break the Cutie above.)
• True Companions: The whole S.R.U. see each other like family.
• Truth in Television: Many episodes end with no one getting killed, which more closely reflects the aim of SWAT and other similar divisions. This differs from many other crime TV series and films, including those depicting SWAT organizations, where dramatic protocol often demands that someone gets killed by the end of the episode, preferably in a hail of bullets. With a couple rare exceptions, one shot, one kill applies when Flashpoint does have to go there.
• The Un-Hug: In "Planets Aligned," Parker is congratulating Jules on a job well done while Jules wants to thank Parker for helping her through the negotiation. Parker starts trying to shake hands when Jules moves in to hug him, leaving a bit of an awkward moment while they're hugging.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In the pilot episode, Ed, in full police gear and carrying a sniper rifle, steps into a crowded elevator and casually asks someone to push the 10th floor button. The occupants look surprised, then amused.
• Unwinnable Training Simulation: At the start of "Day Game," Raf is trying to negotiate down a subject played by Ed. No matter what he does, Raf can't win (defined as everyone surviving); Ed kills himself in one round, Ed kills Raf another time... at the end of the episode, Raf figures out the solution: There is no solution, it's all about living with the choices you make, and a reminder that you can do everything right and things still come out wrong.
• UST: Between Sam and Jules.
  • Since Sam and Jules proved that they could follow the "Priority of Life" code (save civilians first, then Law Enforcement, then subjects), they get to work together while openly in a relationship as of the beginning of season five.
  • There's a lot of UST between Spike and Winnie throughout season five. They eventually resolve it by the time of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Vigilante Man: "The Good Citizen" deals with a man gunning down drug dealers because his brother had died from a drug overdose caused by the same people.
• Visual Pun: Sam and Ed shoot a few golf balls — with their sniper rifles.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: This happens often.
  • In "First in Line," the father of a dying girl grabs a cop's gun when his child's donor heart goes to a different person because she was at home (on orders from the hospital, to make it even worse), instead of at the hospital when the heart arrived.
  • A father who had just won custody rights for his children finds out his children were missing from school. Cue him going to his ex-wife's lawyer and threatening him with a gun.
  • The sister of an abused woman wants to stop the husband from hurting her sister again, so she kidnaps him and holds him at gunpoint.
  • A widow who lost her husband to a rare drug reaction and losing support of people who were bribed/accepted a settlement by the pharmaceutical company to keep it quiet promptly goes to a company's party and began shooting those people.
  • The leader of a drug rehab program that's morphed into a cult honestly (if insanely) wants to keep his patients safe from the outside world by killing them, because he's dying of cancer and he is certain they can't survive without him. Ironically, if he'd just told them what was up, they might have gone along with it; instead he tells them nothing, and they panic when they realize they're in danger.
  • If you haven't figured it out yet, except in very rare cases, the people with whom S.R.U. have to deal are rarely clear-cut villains. This is why the job is so hard on the members of the team.
• Wham Episode: The first part of the series finale, "Undecided Reality/Keep the Peace Part 1," could possibly be considered the whammiest episode of the series. Jules and Sam get married and announce they are expecting. After they disarm a bomb later in the day, they figure out there are not one or two bombs, but in all likelihood, ten. The bombs start going off around the city where everyone has loved ones, and Dean and Clark are downtown. Dean and his girlfriend arrive at the station safely, but Clark is missing. They finally believe they've figured out who set the bombs, only to have their suspect subsequently get blown up — with Donna standing right in front of him. The episode ends with Donna's death and an unresponsive Clark buried in rubble in the City Hall parking garage. Whew.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Rarely do we see the effects of the incident on the people involved, unless those people are the S.R.U.
  • The Russian nanny in "The Fortress" is taken off the scene by paramedics, but we never hear if she lives or dies.
  • The cop that shoots a suspect in "Perfect Storm" is verbally berated by Parker and cuffed by Lane, and then we never hear anything else.
• What the Hell, Hero?: On his first mission with the S.R.U., Sam lets a paramedic with a live heart go alone into a live and dangerous hostage situation.
  • Of course, one also wonders why some regular cops didn't go with the medic.
  • Parker also gets one from Lane after exposing himself to an unnecessary level of risk while negotiating with an armed hostage-taker in "Custody."
  • Parker gets another one from Jules after being kidnapped in "You Think You Know Someone" for going on his own to help Haley, a girl he had helped in one of his previous cases, without calling for backup, which nearly results in him dying.
    Jules: You've got no right going around giving up your own life, trying to save everybody else's. Not if you don't have to. She's not the only one who needs you.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: the last scene in the series takes place a year after the events of the finale. Sam and Jules have a baby girl named Sadie, Sam's now team leader (Ed's job on Team One) for Team Three, Ed has been promoted to Sergeant and is running Team One, Greg's near-fatal injuries in the finale forced him to retire from active duty and he's now an academy instructor, and Spike and Winnie are officially a couple and happily dating. Leah's the only one whose next steps aren't mentioned, but presumably she's still with SRU doing the same job she always has.
• Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Justified. It is the team's job to ensure that each standoff ends with minimal-to-no casualties, which includes the life of the hostage taker. Lethal force is used only as a last resort. This is what differentiates S.R.U. from S.W.A.T. teams: S.W.A.T. is the "takedown" team, leaving negotiation, profiling and other aspects to other groups, while S.R.U. is fully integrated.
  • Deconstructed in "Acceptable Risk," when the investigator interrogating the team demands to know why Parker didn't give the command to shoot the target when he had the chance. Parker, being the skilled crisis negotiator that he is, wanted to give the target a chance to surrender and prevent any further casualties.
  • In the episode "Haunting The Barn," Ed and Parker point out Daniel Rangford's contributions to S.R.U., pointing out that his efforts to educate on hostage negotiation and psychology changed the team from "straight S.W.A.T." to S.R.U., meaning they don't just shoot 'em, but rather try to talk down suspects and save lives. This is reflected in their name: They are the Strategic Response Unit, taking total control of a situation, rather than just a strictly tactical approach.
  • Deconstructed again in "Broken Peace" when Ed is forced to shoot a girl that has made an impression on the entire team instead of letting her kill her father, the hostage taker. The team runs down the options that they didn't really have because of the life saving protocols of the S.R.U. They couldn't use less lethal force because of the hostage taker's proximity to the target. They couldn't shoot to wound because she was an active shooter and could have continued to fire at the hostage taker. And they definitely could not let a civilian kill a perpetrator who wasn't presently an immediate danger, because they aren't judge and jury. They serve the law. The hostage taker wasn't firing and the girl was (she actually fired two shots already and was lining up for a third), so Ed took the shot.^note In addition, had they, for whatever reason, let the girl shoot the HT, they would have been in complete violation of SRU protocols, which identifies, prioritizes and specifically gives guidelines for dealing with immediate threats to life, of any kind. As Ed points out, that's why there are rules, because otherwise, everything is improvised, nothing is consistent, and then they are interpreting the law instead of enforcing it, which isn't their job. Unfortunately, Raf couldn't live with that version of keeping the peace,^note He specifically states that despite guidelines and rules, the law and knowing that it was the correct action, he firmly believes that the team was in the wrong to shoot the girl, leaving him unable to reconcile the difference between what is lawful and what is right so Leah's back on the team.
  • And Deconstructed in the finale when they realize the bomber is utterly resentful of authority and has a Berserk Button about any form of psychology being used against him since that's what made him go Ax-Crazy. Being cops/negotiators, Greg acknowledges that they represent everything the bomber hates and there's no way they'll be able to do anything except take him down when they find him.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Parker appears to have some fear over heights or flying, as mentioned briefly in "Clean Hands" and "Day Game".
• Wicked Stepmother: Played with in "Run Jaime Run," where a corporate robber falls in love with a girl online, who claimed that her stepfather was abusing her. What the robber didn't know was that the "girl" was actually a teenager boy posing as a girl and wanted his stepfather dead. At worst, the stepfather neglected the stepson.
• Working with the Ex: Jules and Sam after breaking up in season two. Eventually by season four, they get back together again.
• Would Hit a Girl: If she's an active shooter, yes, Ed would shoot a female subject. Doesn't mean that it doesn't affect him.
• Would Hurt a Child: There were a few hostage takers who wouldn't mind shooting or harming a child.
  • In "Lawmen," one of the first signs that Sergeant Matt was Jumping Off the Slippery Slope was that he was going to hurt Parker's son Dean for finding evidence against him.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious:
  • Spike is almost always Spike to his teammates, unless he puts himself in a dangerous situation. In "Shockwave," when Parker is begging him to get out of the area where a bomb could blow up, he calls him Michaelangelo. And afterwards, Ed says, "Michaelangelo Scarlatti, what were you thinking?"
  • Likewise, Parker is generally referred to as Boss or Sarge by everyone while on the job; but if Ed wants to get his attention, he refers to him by his first name. One example was in "Follow the Leader," when Parker was shot and pinned down by a live shooter, Ed in frantic worry calls out "Greg" multiple times.
• You Just Told Me: In "Attention Shoppers," the team had caught one of the gang members gunning for Tasha Redford. They knew there were at least two others and wanted the captured gang member to identify some pictures of who else was involved. The gang member's eyes lingered a little longer on one of her friends, alerting Parker.
  • In the series finale, the team believes the bomber placed ten bombs, based on a list of complains they'd found. After five have been detonated/defused, Jules is talking to him on the phone and asks "Where are the other five bombs?" He answers "How did you know there are five?", confirming their theory.
• You Killed My Father: A villainous version. The son of the man who Ed was forced to kill in the pilot episode ("Scorpio") was after Ed in "Between Heartbeats" to avenge his father's death.

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