Ghost whisperer - season 5

 missing 22

1 - Birthday presence

Melinda has an emergency delivery and Aidan is born. We instantly move to 'five years later' and they're happily throwing Aidan's birthday party, but also a bit worried by what Delia calls 'the birthday curse' because every year something happens on that day. 

The child can see ghosts too, and there's a ghost woman telling him to go with her. He sees her every birthday. The woman died right when Aidan was born, so she thought Aidan was hers, but it's not. Her baby is well and lives with his dad and his wife. Aidan has 'empathy', he can feel other people's emotions. 

2 - See no evil

Gwen, a girl who died in a car accident that also got her mom in a coma thinks it's because she didn't forward a chain-mail and now she's sending that chain-mail to everyone and hurting people that delete it. Mom had a brain tumor that caused the accident, and when she dies she explains it to her daughter. 

A little girl that lives in the hospital has a scary ghost-friend that made her start the chain. 

3 - Till death do us start

Eli's dad dies and Melinda sees Eli's ghost-mom. She died seven years ago. They're both ghosts now, and his dad keeps trying to keep Eli and his childhood friend Casey apart. Melinda thinks it could be because she might be his half-sister. His father Ray was dead jealous of his wife Evelyn and Casey's dad Dom, but finally the truth comes out. Evelyn was indeed having an affair, but with Casey's mom Ann. Ray was so sure that she was having an affair with Dom, he was never sure if Eli was really his son. Now they move on, but Casey is freaked out by the ghost-thing so they won't be a couple. 

4 - Do over

Delia is having a terrible date... After that business with Charlie's ghost, I thought she had started to date that friend of Jim... the one Charlie wanted for her but maybe it didn't work out. 

The morgue at Jim's hospital is haunted :-p 

Eli is sick and has no voice and is tired of his mom being there all the time :-p

In the 50s a patient died in surgery, but Melinda finds that he's still alive. He was dead for three minutes but came back. The doctor had a heart attack and died. 

Delia finds her secret admirer, the one who's been sending her gifts and spreading flower petals for her : the waiter who spilled wine on her because he feels nervous around her. 

Melinda talks to the ghost  of the doctor, making him understand that he didn't kill anyone, he saved his patient. 

So, who's haunting the morgue?? We'll see...

5 - Cause for alarm

Melinda sees Aidan talking to imaginary friends. She tells her 'secret' to Carolyn, Aidan's teacher. Years ago she was going to elope with Sean, but he was accused of stealing, he ran away and had an accident, and died weeks later in a hospital. Carolyn's dad framed him to get him out of their lives. 

Aidan can see things that Melinda doesn't see, 'friends' made of light scared of the 'shadows' left by broken people. 

6 - Head over heels

Rich Nathan asks Eli to help him with his anxiety attacks. Melinda is worried because her empath son keeps keeping up feelings and odd behaviour. Eli is worried because Melinda knows who his patient is and that his sister died, and she tells him: "who can keep a secret better than me?" which is funny and stupid, because she's always telling everyone or doing strange things and talking to thin air in public...

Nathan was in love with a girl that died, and never knew he had a son, never knew she was sick. After her death her son found out about Nathan being his father and believes that he neglected them and is angry. Melinda brings them together to talk and make peace. 

Aidan tells mom and 'dad' of his imaginary friends, different from ghosts somehow. 

7 - Devil's bargain

A 19-year-old girl scared of an operation has Jim promise her he won't let anything bad happen to her, but then she dies. He feels guilty and thinks that she's haunting him, but no, it's a completely different story. Surgeon Morgan, Jim's teacher, had a story with student Tina (she was in Jim's class) but she disappeared and died. President Bedford or something tells Eli out loud and clear that he doesn't like him, but later he tells Eli that he did keep him behind to protect him and Melinda too. The 'shadows' are scaring people, they are dangerous...

8 - Dead listing

Kirk died of allergy reaction and tells Melinda that his wife Rita killed him. Delia knew them both because they worked in real estate as well (the actor is Richard from Ally McBeal). 

It's a tough case because they appear to hate each other, it's a 'war of the roses' situation. What they don't know is that they were both trying to make up but he died first. The fights started for jealousy, and she ended up electrocuting herself by accident so now that she's a ghost too they can see each other and talk and make peace and cross over together.

Aidan's friend can do magic tricks, so he wants to do magic too, using his ghost friends to help him.

Melinda and Jim speak to him to make him understand he must not do that. They don't know there's a ghost of a little girl in his room who tells him that if people find out she's there something bad will happen...

9 - Lost in the shadows

Melinda finds her, the girl that lived in the hospital, in Aidan's closet. Melinda talks about Julia's parents, the angry little girl, and tells them her 'secret' of course, and they're quick and willing to accept it. Julia's very scary "you don't know what you're dealing with". That same night Aidan goes missing. Melinda tells the cop (Eli's friend) that she can see ghosts. Julia leads Aidan to a train station where she thought they'd find kids. She believes that she can't go into the light because the good ghosts will suffer. The place was shut down while she was in the hospital so she doesn't know about it. Carl tells Melinda not to anger the 'shadows'. The 'shadows' attack the little ghost girl and Aidan helps her to call the 'shinings', but they don't come in. Aidan points a light at the shadows to make them go away, and it works. Melinda and Jim finally find him and take him home. There, Melinda has Julia's parents talk to her, and to introduce her to her friends: Ned, Eli, Delia... Julia thinks that when she tried to help her little friend she made her more sick instead, until she died. Lili had leuchemia, the same thing she had. Her parents didn't tell her to let her have hope, because she died a lot later. Finally Julia sees Lili smiling, into the light, so she says goodbye and goes into it.

10 - Excessive forces

Melinda and Jim have a night out leaving Delia with him. While going to meet them, Eli gets pulled over by a cop with a ghost in his back seat, who tells them "do what he says, he's a killer with a badge". 

Melinda's car was toed away, and 'accidentally' stripped down looking for drugs. Jim gets her a new car. The ghost is Dylan, a kid who died in an accident. His friend Jake was dating AnneMarie Ramsey, the cop's daughter, but Ramsey was harassing Jake to keep him away from her. Dylan had been breaking his mailbox with a baseball bat, and AnneMarie was so mad at her dad that she had Jake do it too. Ramsey was a control freak, and he cemented the mailbox, so when Jake hit it, it didn't break, and the bat moved backwards and hit Dylan. 

They all have a good talk together and Dylan crosses over. Last thing he said was "will you tell them I said goodbye?" and she said "I will, I promise". Why didn't she say it right away, while he was there? I don't understand this way of writing things...

11 - Dead air

Ned has a radio show, and airs a made-up-break-up-call. Delia's upset about it and because she barely sees him anymore, now that he's in college. A woman bursts in accusing Ned of broadcasting a real story, not a made up one. He simply found it on his computer, and after she goes out the machines go crazy, the word 'killers' appears on the laptop and his friend's ear starts bleeding. The ghost then reveals to Ned's girlfriend that he cheated on her. Delia is very angry after hearing it all on the radio. 

Melinda finds Delia in her shop and says "do you want your job back?"... when exactly did she stop working there?

Years ago a man pretended to break up with his wife for another woman to win a trip to Bahamas, which seems even stupider than it is when you hear him say how jealous she always was :-/ I mean, come on! The wife Maggie actually put the radio dj up to this, so sure her husband was cheating she wanted him to get a name out of it. She was wrong back then, she ruined her marriage; now her ex Jack is married to the girl he named, Daisy, but that happened later. She was engaged to Bruce, but when Maggie called him to tell him everything, he died in a car accident. Bruce was jealous too.

Jack and Daisy got along well together, but maybe they would have remained good friends, they had no intentions of leaving them.

12 - Blessings in disguise

Ned likes a new girl in town, Katie. Her family acts weird. Melinda has a vision touching her brother's hand, and Aidan saw it too... Her real name is Rachel, and her parents were 'protesters', and one of his friends died instantly in an accident trying to do something bigger than spraying, and all this time he's been haunting them believing that he left him behind to die alone; Melinda allows them to talk it out and the ghost Trevor tells them where to find the proof that he didn't kill him.  

Rachel's father still has to answer for the fact that he ran away, but his family won't have to, and they'll be able to stay where they are, and not keep running away anymore.

13 - Living nightmare
Robert (Will from Criminal minds) comes to Jim's hospital all bloody and Melinda has a vision of a girl being hurt with a knife.
(Jim says to him, "my name's Jim"........ well, it's not, have you forgotten? you're Sam now right? Everybody sees Sam and knows you as Sam, because Jim died...... but this little detail has been forgotten apparently so not to disturb anyone with the maybe-unpleasant thought that she actually had a child with Sam.... )
Robert's biological father was believed insane and the murderer of his wife. Robert has the same pathology, a chronic insomnia without cure that leads to death. The ghost of Robert's father says that the demons get to you when you sleep, that's why he doesn't want the doctor to make Robert sleep. He didn't want to hurt his wife, he wanted to protect her from the demons inside him (and she died from a simple cut on her arm? As bad as it may have been, she just stayed there to die? what did I miss?)
His father was preventing Robert from sleeping, but it turn out that Robert is not sick like him. Dad never slept. Robert is about to kill himself when his girlfriend and Melinda stop him. Without his father interfering, he can now sleep.
14 - Dead to me
Ned gives his teacher of the occult a ouiji board, and they have a message from the dead. She thinks that he's trying to hit on her, and he tells her that she's haunted. The ghost leads her to meet a man, and they like each other, until Brian turns out to be the guy on the other car in the accident that killed her fiancèe Curtis, and his daughter too. The girl brought them together because they're so much alike and understand each other, and Madison wanted to do something for him, like finding him someone to talk to. After that's over, the board still tells Melinda that someone she knows is about to die.
15 - Implosion
Aidan's turtle Giovanni died. Eli's cop friend is transferred.
Eli and Ned take turns in hiding the Book of Changes... :-/
A 12-y-o kid dies at a military base, and he tells Melinda and Eli that Bedford, the President of Eli's university, took away a mine from the base. He keeps asking them for the Book, he's scared of the Shadows, and he threatens to kill himself along with Delia if they don't give it to him. Eli goes to Delia's office with the Book, freeing her, then talks to him and gives him the Book (it's all blank pages now). Eli goes away and the Shadows make the bomb explode, killing Bedford. The Book of Changes is now in Ned's home disguised as a school book, but Bedford's ghost sees it. 

16 - Old sins cast long shadows
Ned is hurt again while checking out a house for Melinda - haunted obviously, they all are apparently.  Delia can't take it anymore, after the explosion, but of course Melinda doesn't stop looking for her ghost. A little girl, Cassidy's ghost, is there, but she's not the only one. In that house many years ago an old woman pretended to be a medium and now she keeps ghost children trapped in there to please the Shadows. Melinda can cross over Cassidy and her two older ghost friends who tried to protect her, and Delia comes to help them all.
17 - On thin ice
(Eli cried reading Twilight??? Oh my.... )
A graphic novelist is haunted. So we have an episode with Melinda in graphic-novel-style... oh-my-again....
The anthropology teacher helps them. Thanks to her 'anonymous' call, the body of Shane is found frozen in a lake. His stepbrother Colin is the real author of Damon's new novel. Finally Damon admits it in front of everybody at his book signing. Shane took Colin's work and brought it to Damon, than took a shortcut across the lake and fell through. Now Colin and Damon will probably work together.
End: Aidan draws two figures, him and his 'brother': just imagination or premonition or...?
18 - Dead eye
The ghost of a clown scares Melinda, she has a sort of phobia for clowns I guess. Charles was actually a private investigator who died dressed as a clown at a party. He's still here to protect Sherry because she's a very good girl. She won the lottery and gives a lot to charity. She left her long-term boyfriend because she thought he proposed after eight years together because he had found out about it, but he didn't. He proposed because he thought she was pregnant. She became engaged to a guy she thought was rich already so didn't need her money, but he's actually almost broke and does know that she's rich. At the end, Sherry and Todd get back together. Charlie fell in love with her too, and goes away now that he knows she'll be happy.
Bedford's ghost comes to tell her "trust nothing and no-one"
19 - Lethal combination
Jim wants to take Melinda out on a date and calls a new babysitter, and Aidan tells this Kelly that she stinks then insists on playing hide and seek. He got locked in a little cross-space and she called 911. A ghost tells Melinda to keep Kelly away from children. They ask a man who gave Kelly references (the ghost was his wife) and again they introduce themselves as Melinda and Jim..... they completely forgot (maybe by distraction maybe on purpose who knows) that he's Sam for the world!
Accidents keep happening to children in Kelly's care. Ex-wife Laura cause the accidents and tried to kill Kelly and Gil. Laura had been addicted to painkillers and alcohol, and Kelly became Gil's second wife, according to their traditional lifestyle (???). He loved Laura, with Kelly was something different, not romantic (??) Kelly took care of their daughter.
20 - Blood money
A kid is missing and Melinda and Eli talk to detective Coulson and he asks their help, believing in intuition, so Melinda tells him her 'secret'. Danny is found alive but they found the body of a kid kidnapped eleven years ago, Henry. Henry staged his kidnapping along with his friend agent Coulson, and now he holds Melissa at gunpoint and looks for the money then tries to kill her but Henry saves her. At first Henry was happy and didn't care about money, until he met Jeff Coulson who strongly wanted money and talked him into it. When he saw his mom crying on tv he wanted to go back hoe and Jeff killed him. Melinda has Henry talk to his mother, and make peace.
21 - Dead ringer
Gail and Kyle are moving in together in Grandview and she says her dad did not like that when he was alive.
Watcher Carl keeps teaching Aidan board-games, chess....
Melinda sees Kyler's ghost and tells Gail he's dead, but he's not. Melinda's visions are getting more and more strong and real, scaringly so. Ned thinks the Shadows are messing with her head.
Kyle had a twin brother and they were both adopted by a loving couple, but Seth died when he was 8,  only a week before they would be brought home. Melinda gets served with a restraining order...
Aidan falls and hurts his head and she didn't help him because she thought it was a vision..
Carl tells her that Aidan is in danger, from the Shadows. He tells her to make Aidan stop seeing ghosts,  to tell him that these things are not real, but she doesn't want to.
Kyle sees Seth too, and Seth threatens Melinda's life. Seth is angry because when their adopted mom died in the plane crash she went into the light instead of staying with them. Melinda tells Kyle that she went because she was happy from all the love that she had for them (well, for Kyle, but Seth hoped he could have her too now) and Melinda and Jim have a discussion about keeping Aidan safe.
Seth breaks a lot of stuff at the shop (ghosts do a lot of things that people can see, like moving things), and finally Melinda gets him to calm down realising that he's just mirroring Kyle's image but he died at eight years old, wanting her mom and a family. Before going into the light, Seth tells her that Bedford told him to be angry at Melinda.
Melinda is sad because to keep Aidan safe she'll have to lie to him and change who he is.
22 - The children's parade
Aidan tells them "I feel better, that there's no such things as ghosts. I feel better"
Melinda acts strangely, in a bad mood, saying hard things like that she hates her shop, that she can't see the difference between real people and ghosts. Carl tells Eli that making Aidan believe he can't see ghosts is a terrible thing, and maybe the Shadows made him say otherwise to Melinda.
Aidan can still see ghosts and Shinings, and he tells Carl that the Shinings are children who have crossed over already, that's why the Shadows want ghost children. The Shadows take hold of Melinda, so Carl asks for Aidan's help. He calls all the Shinings to help and fight the Shadows away and save her.
Melinda and Aidan go together to talk to the ghost boy at the hospital who was sad thinking nobody ever loved him or wanted him, but his mother did, so much she died saving him, and he crossed over along with a lot of children that many years ago 

Redemption - 2013

Nope, I didn’t like it at all. I usually like Jason Statham movies, to the point that more than once things here have gone like this: what movie is that? - I don’t know, but there’s Jason in it - ok then, let’s watch it.

This time though, I didn’t like it at all. First of all, he’s the bad guy 90% of the time, then does a good thing and we should call him a hero.... second, I thought this time around we would be spared the shallow romance since the co-protagonist was a nun, but yet again, no, there’s the romance with the nun... sigh. Third, the beginning is too forced, the middle is boring, the ending is annoying. 

The story:

The very beginning is not too clear, Joey was a soldier than something happened and he was now wanted by the court martial, something like that. We find him again one year later, a homeless guy sort of crazy (because of drugs, alcohol or PTSD? unclear at this point). Bad guys approach all the homeless, he has a girl named Isabel run while he tries to stop them but he can’t fight and they beat him then manages to run away. He also manages to enter an apartment from the roof, and guess what, the apartment is empty and richly decorated, the clothes are all his size, there’s a message on the answering machine conforming that Damon, the man living there, won’t be back before a few months have passed, there are the keys to a car he can use, and he even finds a new credit card with its codes in the guy’s mail.... come on, really???? No million-dollar-cash? :-/ I mean, come on, this is too much, I know very well about hero/protagonist’s luck, but this !! It’s like he found the genie of the lamp!

He still drinks too much. He gives money to the nun that helps the homeless and asks her about Isabel. Very honestly she speaks to her mother-superior or something and gets permission to use the money for something she really really wants. She uses it to buy a ticket for a ballet. 

He starts changing, he stops drinking and puts fliers around asking Isabel to get in touch with him. Poor girl, they caught her and forced her to work as a prostitute. She calls him saying not to worry about her, she’ll work for them until she’s paid what they want..

He speaks to Damon’s neighbours saying that he’s Damon’s boyfriend and he’s letting him use the apartment while he’s away to get himself back on track. He starts eating healthy, exercising, and finds a job as a dish-washer in a Chinese restaurant. When there are troubles with drunk customers, he’s called to deal with it and gets noticed by some Chinese boss so they hire him as ‘bodyguard’, a batterer, someone that does the dirty work, but he doesn’t care, he only seems interested in the money. He’s making a lot of it, and he sends foods to the nun for the homeless people. He meets again his wife, who now has a very difficult/shitty life with a daughter and no money, and he gives her a lot, saying there’s more to come. 

He leaves a red dress for the nun, and when she tries to return it she also tells him that Isabel’s body has been found, beaten to death. 

The nun tells him that she sold some stuff to give him his money back but he refuses it. She tells him that there are a lot of ‘Isabels’ out there, and he should use her clean money to start a new honest life. He finds the two guys that caught Isabel and beat him up, and now that he’s healthy he beats them up and asks about Isabel’s murderer, but they don’t know much, only that it was a ‘customer’. 

The nun wears the red dress to meet him outside, she’s so nervous she gets drunk, and tells him that she dreamed of being a ballerina, and then asks him to kiss her and he does (what a nice guy, huh? :-/ )

Quite shaken she runs away. Not surprisingly the cops can’t find who killed Isabel. 

The nun tells him her story: Her parents wanted her to become a gymnast instead, and her coach abused her, raping her when she was but a little girl of ten years old: ‘he did it 17 times. it would have been the 18th’ but she cut his throat instead. She was very young so instead of sending her to prison she was sent to be a nun. 

Joey asks the Chinese for information on the guy who killed Isabel, and they ask him a favour in return, a job that nobody wants. They also deal in human-trafficking, people imported from China inside boxes, and he has to count how many of them are still alive. A really chilling scene, so upsetting. 

The ‘customer’ keeps hitting girls, but as promised they give him his name. 

It’s finally October 1st, the day Damon comes back, the day of the ballet, the day it all must end. 

He asks the nun to take some good pictures of him to leave his daughter, then they have sex at the apartment but have to run away when Damon comes back. 

She asks him to join her at the theatre, but he has stuff to do. He gives a bag full of money to his wife, and his pictures to his daughter. Good.

At night, instead of joining her he goes to kill Isabel’s murderer. The nun finds him drunk after it’s all done. He says he’s finished now. He tells her what happened during the war, he killed five random people for revenge, out of rage. 

The nun leaves, choosing to go to a mission in Africa, and reads his letter: he says he gave money to the poor, and also information to the police on the human-trafficking , and also money to Damon for what he took. 

He’s on the run now, maybe he’ll get caught, maybe not, the movie ends and we simply don’t know.

Yawn. It’s finally over, needless to say I won’t ever watch it again...

Joey - Jason Statham

Cristina the nun - Agata Buzek

Il commissario Montalbano - la piramide di fango

"The mud pyramid" . I liked this, although I'm not really into complicated political-financial plots; I liked it anyway, though. 

As always I really much like when there are side characters like this lady who tells him the name of the dead man or the victim's father, because to portray these old 'country characters' there are often really good actors, you know the kind that never really became a huge name but that can really do their job well, and I liked these two actors too. 

This episode starts with a man in his underwear, barefoot, running away at night under the rain, and it looks like he's already been shot in the back. He rides a bike to a construction site or something, hides inside a huge pipe and there he dies. Fazio is already there when Montalbano arrives. The pipe is 18 meters long and the body is at the end, so Montalbano barely looks at him before going back out because he's claustrophobic. 

The two of them go looking at the village where the man probably came from; they meet an old woman who sells eggs and stuff but doesn't have a license to do that, actually she never even asked for it nor she intends to, and from Fazio's questions about it she gets that they are cops so she calls her big son to send them off but Montalbano offers her a deal: no more talk about that if she answers a few questions. She's reluctant to spy on anyone, but he only needs innocent answers so she can tell him who the man was: Nicotra, who lives alone with his German wife. 

Gambardella is a journalist that called at the station to talk to Montalbano who wasn't in. Mimì didn't talk to her because there's a history between them, although this time it's the other way around, she left him :-p  

Mimì is all cocky, saying they need to compliment him because he caught a drug dealer after receiving an anonymous phone call. 

The journalist calls again later and meets Montalbano at his house to talk. She says she's being investigating on a construction company, but someone didn't like her snooping around and sent her a picture of her own son, a clear threat. She says she talked to three workers, one of them is the man Mimì arrested for drug dealing, so Montalbano asks the chief of narcotics to free him with an excuse, but the guy tells him to stop lying to his brothers before assuring him that the guy will be released (no minchiate ai fratuzzi :lol:) . Montalbano tells Mimì that someone used him to frame the guy Piscopo and tells him to think twice before believing anonymous phone calls. 

Nicotra-father comes asking about his son, very much worried, and they have to tell him the truth; the poor man needs support in exiting the station. Fazio will drive him to identify the body and then home. He said that he used to visit his son every Sunday, but these last six months he stopped because his son asked him to. 

They thought they'd find the wife's body at home but instead it's empty. There are though many indications that a third person lived there. 

A lawyer, Barbera, informs Montalbano that his Beretta-gun has been stolen, probably by Nicotra to kill his cheating wife. 

Another anonymous phone call leads them to a car set on fire... apparently a message to someone... but here I'm not sure who is that someone and what the message is about. I mean, it was Nicotra's car, but he's already dead so... boh I don't know.

(At the police station there's a group of prostitutes, maybe trying to recreate US movie scenes, because, really??)

As expected, shortly after poor Piscopo has been released, he gets shot. He’s not yet dead, but he’s not granted protection, not enough elements or stuff like that, so Montalbano and Mimì do it personally, as volunteers.

As always in these movies, the hospital is so empty and clean, nothing like any hospitals I’ve ever seen...

When it’s Montalbano’s turn to watch over Piscopo, a man tries to sneak in, they try shooting at each other until a second man knocks him out with a blow to the head. Of course, NOW Piscopo is granted protection...

By chance Fazio discovers a secret basement in the dead guy’s garage (before going out Fazio rang the bell at the wall, just because, and the floor opened up). There’s a big safe down there, empty.

Montalbano has Galluzzo make a phone call to Germany asking for Inge, but they only reach a bar - they mock his poor German skills, but for someone who left Germany when he was only five, he does well enough...

Montalbano smokes a sigarette with the big son of that old woman selling eggs, and they talk. The guy is in love with Inge, and he saw the third man living there, he saw the tattoo of a red sun on his left arm. 

A young man confesses to killing Nicotra, and Montalbano listens to his story of how the lover killed the jealous husband, but he didn’t write anything down; the lawyer with the guy gets angry and Montalbano yells that ‘in this office nobody deduces anything ever’ before sending him to pm Iacono. He knows it’s a fake story to stop his investigation.

Iacono isn’t convinced by the story himself, but has no choice but to arrest him, and the guy Pennisi gets himself killed in prison.

When Mimì remembers the red-sun-tattoo, they know that the third man was Rosales, a ‘businessman’ who had connections and was never caught before, and in order to work here he went into business with both mafia-families, Cuffaro and Sinagra. Montalbano goes to see him with Fazio and Mimì who refused to let him go alone. Montalbano can only bluff, but gets what he wanted. Actually Rosales was sure that there were no proof, but he went along with him because, he says, he’s too tired and wants this chance to take his revenge on the Cuffaro, by ‘accepting’ to fall into the trap, and he reveals everything he knows. 

This is basically the end of the case. I got a bit lost at some point, I admit. Who killed Nicotra then, the Cuffaro? Why, they wanted all the money not trusting to work with the Sinagra? I got it right?

Anyway, what about Inge, is she even alive? 

Nobody knows. 

The last scene shows Montalbano with Livia and her cute dog, swimming in front of his house.

Il commissario Montalbano - La luna di carta

"The paper moon" - I rather liked this one, although I didn’t get the ending, and yet it would have been better if they hadn’t wasted time in low-cheap tricks like showing the girl’s naked butt. They spend a lot of time with her because she’s ‘the lover’, and it slows things down. They should do more with the recurrent characters. They are the strong points of the Montalbano movies. Montalbano should really interact more with Mimì, Fazio, but also the other policemen, why not.

The story:

since Fazio is out because someone died of overdose, it’s Montalbano that listens to Michela; she’s worried for her brother Angelo, a 42-y-o man she hasn’t seen or heard from in two days. Together they go to his house, she has the keys, but he’s nowhere. When he’s about to go away, she goes deep in Hitchcock’s mode, looking up and then running upstairs towards a place where he sometimes goes to read in peace, but she doesn’t have the key to that place and asks him to break the door down. He does (easily...) and they find him dead, naked, but since he’s a man we don’t see anything and only learn about it when they discuss it. Which is good, and would be good if they did the same with females as well, but nooooo.

She faints so he carries her, but the neighbour doesn’t let him in thinking he’s a bad guy who wants to do something to the girl - actually it’s rather understandable that he doesn’t let him in not knowing who he is or what happened, but maybe Montalbano didn’t have a choice, they probably locked the house already and she has the keys not him... anyway, I guess he enters anyway somehow because aren’t they in the neighbour’s house when Fazio arrives??

Fazio tries to calm him down so the guy thinks that Fazio is an accomplice :p

Montalbano lets her sleep there and goes with Fazio to see the body. He then lets her sleep in her brother’s house. Michela tells him of Angelo’s lover, Elena. With such a sex-related case it’s no wonder that Tommaseo is involved, the usual pervert. 

When Montalbano goes to talk to her, Elena opens the door in her underwear... I mean, not only this is Sicily, but even if it was elsewhere, who opens the door in her underwear???

To make coffee and talk to him she wears a fancy dress... she has a much older husband, like 30 years older, Emilio. Later she will explain that Emilio once married a younger girl and had with her the same arrangement he has now with Elena: since he is impotent and she’s young, he accepts that she has sex-friends, but every encounter must be announced in advance to not be considered cheating. When he busted his first wife without the encounter ever being announced, he got furious. Eventually they divorced. Elena was young and a drug addict, lost and alone. She used drugs when she was only 16, she was sent to a community but she escaped. She got arrested but released after they ‘used her’ for as long as they liked. Some time after she met Emilio again, they had met already once before. He remembered her, and from that moment they were always together: he helped her, cured her, never left her. 

She says she wanted to leave Angelo and that that night she was supposed to meet him but instead she drove around thinking. 

At Angelo’s house, Montalbano answers the phone and listens to some strange phone calls from men who didn’t yet know that he was dead. 

He gives Catarella the guy’s computer to look into what’s inside.

There’s a funny, lovely scene with Montalbano and Fazio: (M. tells him to do something) I’m going - Wait! (something more to do) I’m going - Wait! (something more to do) I’m going - what’s the hurry?!? (M. talks some more than shuts up, Fazio stays there silent) can I go now? - who’s keeping you? (Fazio moves to go) Wait!... I’ll go with you. lol. I like that scene. 

M. finds a strange key and an old burglar tells him that it opens a super safe. 

Narcotics chief Liguori comes to talk to them (he talks to Mimì because M. doesn’t want to). There’s been three deaths due to overdose, one of them was a senator. 

Catarella is very persistent but it’s very difficult to find the three passwords to the computer. (this is because he simply tries out various passwords, he should have used a password-cracker)

Angelo was a doctor, Elena tells him he was thrown out of the Board of Medicine and Michela explains the reason: after getting a girl his patient pregnant while she was underage (which apparently is no problem to anyone in this Country) he had her have an abortion. Later Montalbano speaks to her, who now has a good normal life with a husband and son. She tells him that Angelo was happy when she told him she was pregnant, he wanted to marry her but suddenly he changed his mind so she gave him an ultimatum. He said they would get married in a year and that they should celebrate, together with Michela, but it was a trap. Michela and Angelo gave her something to drink that put her to sleep, and then they forced the abortion on her. She slept at a friend’s house but in the morning she had to be taken to a hospital because of an hemorrhage, and so the secret was out. 

Michela keeps accusing Elena, saying she’s evil. Montalbano finds some letters that Elena wrote to Angelo when he sneaks out at night to look at Angelo’s car. That neighbour sees him (well, he sees someone he thinks is there to steal) and shoots at him :p He talks to Elena about the letters while walking on the beach after having lunch together (who knows why she has to walk in her panties, mysteries of Italian movies maybe...). She says that Angelo gave her many precious gifts and that he told her to write those letters to prove to his sister that she loved him. 

They had always been extremely close but now that he had Elena he wanted to keep her at a distance maybe. 

Michela insists that Elena did it, she even tells Montalbano about the letters and tells Tommaseo about Elena. 

Apparently the dead guy had a pair of panties in his mouth before he was shot, and this is the excuse to let us watch the naked butt of Elena as she shows Montalbano how her panties could never choke anyone. :-/ Montalbano tells her to find a good lawyer because being without an alibi she might find herself in trouble. He tells her he thinks she does have one but she doesn’t want to say it, so now she says she was with a man but her husband didn’t know about it. 

Montalbano disturbs poor Pasquano while he’s playing poker :-p

Catarella is able to find two passwords, losing sleep and working on it non-stop, when they suddenly hear him screaming and crying, because the computer finally erased itself, there was a timed cleaning program, so he can’t access the rest of the data. 

Another senator dies of overdose. 

Montalbano finds Angelo’s bank and since the director knows him and is a big fan (although Montalbano doesn’t remember him at all) he tells him that Angelo had 800.000€ on his account, and also that he first came introduced by the two senators that recently died. 

At Angelo’s funeral there were flower wreaths from both senators’ families and also the Sinagra family, but the casket couldn’t be buried because Michela had requested a big one and was too big to fit in the assigned space. 

Montalbano tells Michela that she betrayed herself when she told Tommaseo that he had Elena’s letters, he never told her that, and he says that she knows because she herself put those letters in the car for him to find them, before she also hide Angelo’s safe because it would be compromising for him and she wanted to keep his memory intact.

(This whole bit was a little... you know, forced, not really working, she might have said that to Tommaseo because she wanted to much to accuse Elena, maybe ‘believing’ that he had them but wanted to protect Elena, after all how could she be sure that he would find them since he had to sneak out and secretly search the car? )

Montalbano says that she put the safe in the casket, and inside there’s cocaine, cut with a substance that he used to make more of it, and which caused the death of all those people. He wanted more money to keep Elena with him, but Angelo should have loved only Michela, they had always been inseparable. Once Michela fell in love and Angelo killed the guy, and that time when he wanted to marry the young pregnant girl, she convinced him to not do it, and choose abortion instead. ‘They’ told her that Angelo was dead and she had to hide all the incriminating evidence, but she also added fake evidence in order to incriminate Elena that she hated so much. When Montalbano asks her who told her about Angelo’s death she stands up saying she wants some water to drink but instead she throws herself down the stairwell to her death. 

Montalbano finds out that the gas station that should have been Elena’s alibi is actually closed on Mondays, the night in question, so she couldn’t have met the guy that night (for such a pretty girl she has weird tastes, Angelo and this guy now...). Montalbano talks to Elena at his house, the story of the ‘paper moon’ of the title: when he was little his father convinced him that the moon was made of paper and he believed it, and now he’s done the same, letting these two women convince him of things that weren’t true. When he breaks her alibi, she blurts out “but I told you I had no alibi! I found one as you told me!” which is more or less what happened :-p

Anyway, it appears that that night Elena did go to meet Angelo, after driving around for a while, and she broke up with him despite his pleas not to leave him, but she went away anyway. 

Then.... Michela shot him.. ?!? For real or this is what Elena thinks it happened? What will it be of the guy, arrested because of other stuff, who was suspected of this murder as well according to the news? Who really killed Angelo? Did Michela kill herself because of the remorse of killing her brother or because she couldn’t live without him? Or maybe because she failed in protecting his image? Also failing to obey to what ‘they’ told her to do, so she might also be scared of them?

I’m not really sure about the ending of this episode...