Flashpoint: No Kind of Love

Posted by: S.P. Young • September 30, 2012 @ 12:16am

"Get out. Not everyone gets to."

"No Kind of Life" has one of those stories that despite trying to tug at the emotional strings, it just can not be taken seriously at all. Like many other episodes of Flashpoint, the main antagonist is a sympathetic criminal. In this case, Brendan, is a single father who got involved in a life of petty crime, and has to protect his injured son from a gang.

The thing with criminals, and this is not an official opinion of this website or of our valued advertisers (so please continue to buy stuff from them even if you disagree with this article), is that they are not these good people despite their life of crime. Criminals put their own selfish agendas over everything, including their own children. Sure they care about their children, but never more than themselves and the breaking of the law. But Flashpoint would like to disagree with this opinion.

Not only that, but Flashpoint would also like to introduce to its viewers a revolutionary and effective method of treating drug addiction. First you get a criminal thug. Like Brendan. And then you have him wrap his hands around a drug user's neck, and tell the drug user to leave the destructive lifestyle behind and be a good father. Because nothing works better than a hypocrit's own words.

In reality, this would have never worked. A drug user, like Jason, would have continued to find a way to acquire and use drugs. He would have figured out a better way to obtain drugs, as opposed to waking up because a lowly drug courier put his hands on him. But this little history of how Jason cleaned up because of Brendan, is really the show's way of humanizing the criminals.

Brendan being a single father does not make him sympathetic. It actually makes him more villanous, because it makes his own crimes be that much more potentially damaging to his son. The mother is already out of the picture, and Brendan is risking taking himself out of his son's life as well, by being a criminal. He then got himself deeper and deeper, by kidnapping not only Jason, but Sam as well.
In the dumbest scene of the episode, Brendan was ambushed by his former gang associates as he got out of his truck. There is a total of five armed men that arrived early, and they opened fire on Brendan. Fortunately for Brendan, these men are idiots when it comes to aiming and team positioning, which left Brendan managing to escape into the vet clinic after getting shot only once.
Sam would end up not only having to protect Jason (the other hostage) from the gang, as a wounded Brendan attempted to carry his son through police officers pointing their firearms at him. Sam then proposed bringing the hostage to talk down the armed double kidnapping drug traficker who earlier had pointed a gun at a police officer.

Re-read that last sentence, and ask yourself if that makes any sense. Now what made even less sense, was how Jason thought he could completely circumvent the Toronto Children's Services and adopt Brendan's son, Curtis. Imagine Jason trying to explain that to the adoption authorities. "Years ago, Brendan got me off drugs by strangling me. After he kidnapped a police officer and myself to perform emergency surgery on his son in a vet clinic that we broke into, handcuffed us, and nearly got us both killed by a gang, I now want to thank him by adopting his son."

If there was any true kind of justice, the system would not have failed to the point of relying on the Strategic Reponse Unit to intervene. The system should have caught Brendan and the gang a long time ago, and apprehended Curtis to make him a permanent ward of the system, so that criminals like Brendan, would not end up getting their children shot by their gang associates. But then again, should any system be blamed because an individual chose a bad lifestyle? Share your opinion on the Showbizmonkeys facebook page.

Tags: Flashpoint, No Kind of Love, Person of Interest, Headstones, Power Rangers, Hugh Dillon, David Paetkau, Amy Jo Johnson, Enrico Colantoni, Sergio Di Zio