WMG / Cold Case

Cold Case

The team will be the subject of at least one cold case before the show ends.

So far, while they've been shown to be peripherally involved in the history of past cases, none of the Cold Case team members were ever considered a suspect, major witness, or victim of one; most of the other Jerry Bruckheimer shows (especially CSI) had multiple episodes where its main cast were on the receiving end of an investigation. However, both Det. Valens and Jeffries have old cases tied directly to them (Valens has his and his brother's sexual molestation as kids and his girlfriend's supposed suicide, and Jeffries' wife's hit-and-run murder) that could easily be reinvestigated in a later season, and there's still a lot about Det. Rush's own dysfunctional family history to bring something up.

• What about the episode where Valens was a witness?
  • Other than him finding the body, he wasn't that involved with the case as a witness. There must be a case where they are heavily involved. In CSI: NY, Bonnasera was tracked down by the Cold Case people because new evidence popped up implicating her as a suspect, and there have been plenty of times on CSI:NY where the evidence they themselves are looking at turns out to come from an internal source, or the leads had to step out of a case because one of the suspects is related to them. So far, none of the team members on Cold Case has had that happen to them; there is simply no episode where they or someone they are related to is a suspect in a case they are looking at. Yet.
• This may have happened in the finale of last season. Or it will happen this season, because the killer in the cold case ending that season committed vehicular assault on Detective Rush before she could make it official, and Word of God suggests that the vehicular assault itself might turn cold!
  • It's likely to happen, but not for the reason you'd think. The suspect, Moe Kitchener, took a bullet to the head, courtesy of Hank Butler, who wanted revenge for him burying Hank's daughter to cover up her murder. Hard to convict someone who's dead.
• This happened even earlier. In "Officer Down," Jeffries is one of the victims shot in the prologue, and the squad spends most of the episode investigating him. But the case is 'hotter' than usual because everything but one flashback is set in the previous 3 or 4 weeks.
  • Even before that, "Strange Fruit" had Jefferies being the one who found the body, as a kid no less. He wasn't present for the actual crime but the emotional investment was significant.

Watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Vera aged Will Jefferies six years.

In episode Creatures of the Night Will is seen to look very bored at the movie screening of Rocky Horror with Vera. So bored, in fact, that it aged him six years.This explains how two episodes before (in Strange Fruit) he is 12 in 1963, but in the episode after (in Best Friends) he is 60 in 2005.

Kat Miller will have something happen to drop her out of the squad sometime soon.

Despite proving herself a competent and determined detective since her introduction in season 3, Kat is still not recognized as part of the Philadelphia homicide team by any of the people coming in to get the team to investigate their cold case. Det. Rush is always called the only female on the force, and the team goes through great pains to correct this. Considering the show's in its fifth season now and this trend is continuing, either the general public (including those supposedly interested in women's positions in power, like in the episode Torn) have mass, laser-guided Genre Blindness towards Kat's promotion, or Kat's days on the force have been numbered from the start.

• More or less confirmed as of "Jurisprudence", though she's ultimately only gone for a few episodes before getting her position back.

It's not just a metaphor - the team sees dead people.

Essentially, it's a mild ability that tells them they have the right solution. They can also temporarily give it to others close to the victim to grant some comfort and closure. Why else would they continue to do the job that most of the department considers scut work?

Rose died at the end of Best Friends

Usually, when the above mentioned dead person shows up so their loved one can see them one last time, they smile, loved one smiles, we get an image of what loved one looked like when young, dead person fades away, show over. When Billie appeared to Rose, they actually made physical contact and walked away hand in hand, Rose suddenly a young woman again. They were able to touch because Rose had just died and Billie came to escort her to Eternity.

• Except that's not the only time the ghosts have made physical contact with the living people. Sonya in "Disco Inferno" actually dances with her dead boyfriend, and Chris in "Daniela" with his girlfriend, both living people probably being less than half Rose's age and having no reason to be dead.
  • This isn't my theory, but I couldn't help but notice the screen fades to white as the episode ends. It could imply Rose does in fact die and Rose and Billie are reunited in the afterlife.
  • There's something about the specific feel of that scene that suggests it too. Rose isn't the only one to make contact with a victim, or even the only one not to revert to her older self at the end ("Disco Inferno" also ends with Sonya in her younger form), but most of the episodes where there's a significant moment between the victim and a surviving loved one are more of a "one last chance to say goodbye", while the vibe in "Best Friends" is more like "now we're together again".

George Marks was conceived by rape

As they say in "The Woods", Hysterical Blindness is the product of severe trauma in the past. George's mother hates him for no real reason and has blamed him for her blindness since birth, and while she is the epitome of horrible mother the child George keeps returning to her old family home because he has no family but her. Then when she is about to be raped at the end of the episode, that makes her recover her sight. Quite suspicious that this trauma erased precisely the very same effect of that other unknown trauma, don't you think? Maybe the attempted rape sparked memories of a first rape that hit her so hard that "a nail went through another" and undid the effect of the first rape, which had also been the way George was conceived. If this is true, it would make the later bastard George a literal bastard.

Working on from "the team sees dead people" above...

They actually bring closure to the victim's restless spirit, whose ghostly energy manifests as hallucinations showing flashbacks related to the crimes and confessions.

Cold Case and James Cameron's Titanic take place in the same continuity

Specifically, the 5th season episode Slipping was a sequel to Titanic.

Rose got pregnant with Jack after all, conceiving a daughter, and gave her for adoption in Philadelphia (de deWitt-Bukaters' hometown according to Titanic's script) because she had no money to raise her at the time. Eventually she moved to the Midwest where she married her husband, Calbert. Meanwhile, this unidentified daughter (born Dec. 1912) grew up in an orphanage, married in the early 1930s and (as we are told in the episode) went mad after giving birth to another daughter, Nancy Patterson, who was killed in 1962. Eventually, Nancy's daughter Rachel grew up to look just like her great-great-grandmother Ruth.

If an episode took place in 2020...

• It would have covered the March For Our Lives movement, specifically the murder of a student gun control activist.
• It would have covered a sexual assault accusation, either the accuser or accused is the victim.
  • Isn't that basically "Justice"? Wrong era but same concept.
    • I was thinking more of a high-profile case, like the Kavanaugh-Ford saga in 2018, and the victim being at least somewhat sympathetic and not a flat out Asshole Victim.
• They'd probably find a way to do a coronavirus-related episode too. The victim would be a nurse, doctor or journalist.
  • Either a healthcare worker or a clerk killed while enforcing a mask mandate. They would suspect a virus negationist, only to discover that the victim's friend or coworker did it for reasons unrelated to the pandemic.
• It would have covered a series of police brutality protests. The victim would either be a protestor or a police officer suffering a crisis of faith. Complicating matters would be the suspects's hostile behaviour towards the detectives.
• There would have been an episode inspired by Dear Evan Hansen, possibly initially framed as a suicide.

Carson Finch is writing a coming out statement at the end of "It's Raining Men."

Carson Finch was a conservative newspaper columnist who was hiding the fact that he was gay. He was very angry when the victim threatened to out him to the public. At the end of the episode, he is shown typing on a computer with a serious and thoughtful look on his face. It's possible that the investigation made him finally want to reveal his homosexuality.

Natalie and Abby Bradford had a fight before they were separated as kids in "A Dollar, A Dream".

That explains why Natalie is initially reluctant to reunite with her sister in the present.

• Given their respective attitudes, if they did have a fight, there's a decent chance it had something to do with their mother's disappearance, specifically Natalie thinking she'd just run off and trying to give an idealistic Abby what she thought was a reality check.

Natalie Bradford's hatred towards her mother in "A Dollar, A Dream" is actually a suppressed guilt response.

Consider that Natalie spends most of the episode talking negatively about her mother, but their last interaction was actually a positive one; she also insists that her mother abandoned her and Abby, when the mother's one consistent trait was that she'd do anything for them (i.e. spending her first disposable income in months on a birthday cake for Abby). Natalie spent most of the last months of her mother's life being mad at her, only for her to disappear right after they made up. Natalie suspects her mother isn't coming back and can't handle the guilt she feels for wasting all that time, so she creates an alternate narrative where her mother was deserving of the vitriol, up to and including being the kind of person who would willfully abandon them. She distances herself from Abby because she subconsciously feels she (Natalie) doesn't deserve to be loved. When she learns her mother died, it shatters that narrative and forces her to confront her feelings and deal with them, which allows her to accept being reunited with her sister.

This show is just one big hate mail to the city of Philadelphia (and quite possibly, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)

Even though it's among one of the few police procedurals that does not take place in NYC, Los Angeles, Miami or Chicago, it still does not portray the city in the most favorable of lights. We see that racism, sexism/misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and discrimination against Christians and veterans, even in modern days, is rampant, police officers, including the detectives, for the most part, are painted as lazy, stupid or corrupt (amongst being one of the above "isms" or "phobias" mentioned) and citizens are either too scared, too apathetic or just plain too dumb to help their fellow citizens in need. You would think that the creators have either erroneously thought that this was a "love letter" to the city or they had some sort of grudge against it and wanted to make it look as bad as possible.

Cold Case is set in the same universe as Judge Dredd.

The squad is the precursor to Psi Division, as they can see the dead and get psi flashes of the younger selves of interrogation subjects. Also, the flashbacks are not told as interrogations, but as mindreading of suspects.

In the episode Daniela, John was the father of Cassie's baby.

The last time we see Cassie in the flashbacks, she's dancing with John after getting rejected by Chris. We know that she ends up pregnant and that her whole life would have changed had Chris reciprocated her feelings, implying she got pregnant that same night. It's not hard to imagine she used John for comfort and that it might have led to sex.

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