Rizzoli & Isles 6×04 – Imitation Game – Recap

In Rizzoli & Isles 6×04, Frankie has plumbing problems, Angela’s keeping secrets, an FBI agent visits the BPD, and Jane and Maura attend a black-tie museum benefit. Read on for our full recap.

Fowl play

Rizzoli & Isles 6×04 opens with an experience familiar to many Bostonians: being stuck in traffic. With emotions and levels of bickering running high in one family’s car, the driver ploughs into a waste management truck transporting a refrigerator to the dump – and when the refrigerator opens, a dead man with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead falls out. Nothing like a corpse to put the horror of sitting bumper-to-bumper in perspective.

Over at Maura’s house, Jane’s raiding the fridge. As she sits down to make herself a nutritious fried chicken sandwich for breakfast, her mother lambasts her for stealing food that “a new friend” made. Oh, Angela, you know better than to say something like that. Detective Rizzoli is on the case, determined to find out the identity of the “secret chicken friend.” Angela finally reveals that the daughter of the man she’s been dating had her over for dinner the previous day.

Angela: Janie, I love you, but you are so nosy.
Maura: True. …Sorry, I was thinking out loud.

Gotta love when your significant other takes your parents’ side. In spite of Maura’s veritable treason, Jane doesn’t back down; she tries to guess the name of her mother’s new beau (“It’s not Leopold, is it?”) but Angela stands firm. I’m willing to bet that the only thing with even a chance of shaking Jane’s focus is a new case. Enter Fridge Man. On the way to the crime scene, Jane cracks a terrible fried chicken-related joke about “fowl play” and asks Maura to keep an eye out for any clues about the mystery man’s identity.

Maura: So you want me to snoop?
Jane: No, I want you to use your impeccable attention to detail.

Tomato, tomahto.

A wild FBI agent appears!

Have you ever noticed that Korsak always beats Jane and Maura to the scene? Rizzoli & Isles 6×04 is no exception. He fills them in on the situation: The driver of the waste management truck claims to have picked up the fridge on his regular route and had no idea what was inside. Back at the morgue, Maura runs the victim’s prints and, as if by magic, a wild FBI agent appears! Turns out the dead man has been wanted by the authorities for a while, and although the agent isn’t at liberty to discuss any further details, he wants full access to the findings of the BPD’s investigation.

…Needless to say, Jane’s not having it. “I believe the saying is ‘I’ll show you mine if you tell me what the hell you’re doing in my house,'” she tells him. After Maura shares her observations, the agent reveals their vic was a notorious thief who only stole extremely high-priced items – as in those worth millions of dollars. So, what brought him to Boston? Nothing good, that’s for sure. An examination of trace evidence at the warehouse where the fridge was dumped reveals the answer: Valuable artwork. The only problem is that nothing’s been reported missing. By analyzing the shape of the sticker adhesive on the victim’s lapel, Maura concludes that the Boston Museum of Art was the target. Jane and Korsak head over to the museum, but it’s the eve of the BMA’s annual benefit event and the director isn’t exactly eager to talk to them. As he puts it, “Unless you think one of my paintings murdered someone, this conversation is over.” That plotline may have been viable on Angie Harmon’s first TV venture, Baywatch Nights, but as this is Rizzoli & Isles 6×04, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s off the table.

Over at the Dirty Robber, Angela’s ex-husband’s plumbing work is falling apart at the seams, and she wants her son to fix the problem. Frankie’s not exactly known for his plumbing skills, but he confidently patches things up. As for the geyser that erupts behind the bar, that was totally part of the plan. (Yikes.) Luckily, Susie and Nina show up with a water vacuum to save the day.

Painted into a corner

Back at headquarters, Maura and Jane determine that if traces of cobalt blue paint were found at the warehouse where the fridge was dumped but no paintings went missing, the thief probably switched out an authentic canvas with a fake – which probably wasn’t too hard given the museum’s prehistoric security system. Maura uses her benefactor status to get into the event – with Jane as her date, of course.

In a tie-back to the previous episode when they bickered over who was yin and who was yang, Maura wears a classic black dress while Jane is resplendent in white. Maura soon identifies a potential forgery, using reasoning that makes Jane’s head spin:

The brushstrokes seem halted, less musical than his other work. It’s a subtle, yet discernible discrepancy. Also, I don’t like the way the canvas fits into the frame.

Jane promptly uses the cocktail stick from her drink to scrape off a paint sample. Maura’s horrified, but analysis proves her hunch was right: Although the canvas is about 150 years old, the piece was painted using modern materials, so there’s no way it can be authentic.

Using X-ray technology, Maura determines that the forgery was actually painted on top of another image. Tech whiz Nina and art school graduate Susie do the rest, identifying the original artist as William Louis Sontag, Sr. and the painting as the descriptively named “Duck Hunters on the Ohio River.” It must have been stolen from storage at a Vermont art gallery – and Charlie Ganz, a disgruntled former restoration expert-turned-art professor, seems like the perfect suspect.

Turns out Ganz has fled – but not before apparently burning the original painting to destroy evidence of his involvement in the theft. That’s $20 million literally up in smoke. The investigators track him to a local marina, where they find him dead of a suicide. “I guess you could say he painted himself in a corner,” Frankie quips. Nobody’s amused.

Over at the Robber, Frankie finally triumphs over the plumbing, but after Jane throws a bunch of plumbing terminology his way in an attempt to trip him up, he admits he called in a professional. Meanwhile, Jane applies the principle of outsourcing in her own way by getting Korsak to bring up Angela’s mystery man. When Angela suggests he and his life coach-turned-girlfriend Kiki double-date with her and Ron, Jane springs from her eavesdropping niche in triumph, and Rizzoli & Isles 6×04 ends with the familial bickering we all know and love.