Rizzoli & Isles 6×06 – Face Value – Recap

Rizzoli & Isles 6×06 features a heretofore unfamiliar members of the Rizzoli family, a witness with facial recognition blindness (no, really) and some very cute moments between our two title characters… if you’re into that sort of thing. Read on for our recap.

No blenders in jail

Rizzoli & Isles 6×06 begins with a mother and daughter sitting inside a tent. Are they on a relaxing getaway to commune with nature? Nope, they’re camped outside a store on a the day of a big sale, waiting for the doors to open. As the crowd surges forward, the mother gets trampled. Now, that would never happen in the Berkshires.

Over at the Isles(-Rizzoli) residence, Maura has some great news. “You’re gonna get a dishwasher with only one button?” Jane guesses. Actually, Mama Rizzoli’s cousin Carlo is in town, and Maura invited him over for dinner. Exciting, right? Wrong. Apparently Carlo is a serial sue-er, so Jane doesn’t want him anywhere near Maura’s house. “He doesn’t have a job and he has two Lexuses!” Jane exclaims. “Or two Lexii.” Before she and Maura can debate the pluralization of automaker names, they’re called away on a case, leaving Angela to Carlo-proof everything in the house.

Outside the charmingly named Best Lots, Maura determines that their victim – Helen – wasn’t actually crushed to death by the crowd.

Frankie: Stabbed? For a five-second advantage to get in the store? What, someone just had to get their hands on the last blender?
Korsak: Well, they don’t let you bring blenders into jail, so that hardly seems worth it.

They’ve only been on the scene for a few minutes and already they’re narrowing down potential motives. Nice job, Korsak. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.

Hot dogs: Barely a real thing

Back at headquarters, Nina and Frankie scan the store’s video surveillance tapes and come up with a suspect – Elliott Dutton, a bookkeeper for a dry cleaning company. The footage shows he was right next to Helen when she was murdered, but he claims to have a condition called facial recognition blindness that makes him unable to remember people’s faces – which explains why he initially mistakes Frankie for his boss based on the clothes Frankie’s wearing. Jane’s skeptical, so she naturally goes to seek resident medical dictionary Maura’s opinion.

Maura: It’s a real thing: prosopagnosia.
Jane: I’m sorry, it’s not a real thing. Fear of spiders, that’s a real thing. Hot dogs, those are real things.
Maura: Hot dogs are barely a real thing.

Jane finally concedes that while the condition may be real, Elliott’s claim of having it is still in question. She gazes at Maura’s chest for a while, deep in thought. Cut to Jane entering the interrogation room wearing Maura’s lab coat. I’ve had this dream before. What? Never mind.

Some stuff happens in the rest of the scene, but I wasn’t really paying attention because Angie Harmon in a lab coat is… very attractive. As far as I can tell, they figure out Elliott really does have the facial blindness thing because he doesn’t recognize Jane until she talks. Yup, something like that.

‘Yes’-adjacent

On the way to talk to Franklin, the boss whom Elliott claims chased him away from the office and toward the crowd outside Best Lots, Korsak says he’d still be able to recognize Jane if he had prosopagnosia because of her distinctive mane. She majestically flips said mane, then asks him not to tell anyone she did that. After all, she needs to protect that butch swagger she has going on. As far as interviewing Elliott’s boss goes, they’re out of luck – he’s been stabbed, too, but did he die by the same weapon that killed Helen?

Maura: It appears that the apex of the incised wounds is indeed rough and uneven, which would be consistent with what Helen suffered.
Korsak: “Indeed” is close to “yes,” right?
Jane: “Yes”-adjacent.

I love how Korsak looks to Jane to decode her LLBFF’s linguistic quirks.

Remember how Elliott uses people’s clothes to help recognize them? Jane, Korsak and Maura figure out that the man who chased him away from his job may not have been Franklin at all, but someone with similar clothes and hair who was in the middle of killing Franklin when Elliott showed up. That means Elliott was the actual target of the stabbing that kicked off Rizzoli & Isles 6×06, not Helen – even though Elliott’s prosopagnosia makes him, as Jane puts it, “the worst witness ever.” With the department’s help, Elliott goes into hiding at an assisted living facility. As he settles in, he and Jane bond, and he opens up to her about the struggles associated with his condition. He also tells her that he can recognize her by the sound of her footfalls, because one of her legs is shorter than the other. When Jane shares this observation with Maura, Maura tells her to get it looked at.

Jane: I don’t want to get it looked at!
Maura: Well, it could cause damage to your back over time. Simple enough to lengthen the other leg.
Jane: I don’t need to be taller, Maura. Men are already afraid of me enough as it is.
Maura: And you think it’s because you’re tall?

Clearly, the implication here is that men are afraid their girlfriends will find Jane more attractive than them. That’s what I got out of this exchange, anyway.

Lest we forget about the cousin Carlo situation, dinner at Maura’s goes so well that he returns the next day to play his trumpet and bake zeppoles. Maura’s convinced he’s changed. Angela’s convinced he’s medicated. Jane’s convinced his new leaf won’t stay turned. And Carlo? He slips on some oil in the kitchen.

‘I can deal with him’

Meanwhile, Nina and Frankie uncover some financial irregularities in the dry cleaning company’s books and find that several of the business’ locations are actually empty buildings or plots of land. What’s more, a fire erupted at one of the sites the previous day. Could this be the reason Franklin was murdered and the killer attempted to silence Elliott? Frankie and Korsak head over to the torched office to investigate, and Korsak finds some documents that survived the flames. Maura does some kind of fancy image enhancement thing and finds a link between the dry cleaning company and a shell enterprise owned by the lawyer of a well-known local drug dealer, Spencer Romero. If Romero was laundering money through the dry cleaning company and the IRS was starting to look into its business dealings, that would explain the fire and Franklin’s murder. Elliott can’t recognize faces, but after Jane shows him a video of the suspect, he’s able to identify Romero as a frequent visitor to the dry cleaning company’s office. Jane heads back to the office to brief Korsak, and when she returns to check on Elliott, he’s escaped through the bathroom window. She catches up to him at the bus station and promises the department will keep him at a safe house while they deal with Romero.

Elliott: What if you can’t deal with him?
Jane: I can deal with him.

What a badass. It turns out that dealing with Romero will happen sooner rather than later – he’s waiting to attack outside the bus station, but Jane and Korsak neutralize the threat with a little help from Elliott. Now Jane can turn her attention to the other threat that needs neutralizing in Rizzoli & Isles 6×06: cousin Carlo.

Jane: Look, you may have gotten away with suing the funeral parlor at Aunt Josie’s funeral and mysteriously cutting your fingertip off with a ladder at Kay’s Hardware, but you and I both know that your neck is fine. Really, with the cervical collar? Come on!
Carlo: Jane, we’re family!
Jane: Maura is family, and when her father started causing problems, I shot him.

…Again, what a badass. But Maura doesn’t need her girlfriend to stand up for her in this instance: She captured Carlo’s “fall” with a hidden camera, and now that his fakery is abundantly obvious, he leaves with his tail between his legs. Carlo: 0. Maura: 1. Luckily, he left his zeppoles behind, which opens the door for Maura calling them “Italian doughnut holes” and Jane trying to confiscate them. Adorable.