8 April 2022

If you are a fan of the show Bull and have not watched this week's episode, don't read this entry.

Most legal television shows take liberty with how things really work in a courtroom situation, but Bull perhaps does it more than most.  I know that this is based on the work of Dr. Phil, but you have to wonder does anybody really get a duplicate jury for every trial so you can see how the duplicates feel about the evidence so you have an idea how the real jury is going to vote?  That said, I love the show and have finally stopped thinking of Michael Weatherly as DiNozzo from NCIS and now think of him as Bull.

But I have to admit that this week's show was more bizarre than most.

It starts with Bull and his wife packing to get ready for a short vacation when he gets a call that his former girlfriend has just been arrested for murder.  So he can't go on vacation, because he has to help her instead.

The wife of the man she's having an affair with has been killed.  She was there just before they say the death occurred, nobody saw anybody else enter or leave the house, and the husband arrives shortly after the death occurs, so who else could have killed the victim?  There is also blood of the victim on her sleeve.

OK, so within days they are in the courtroom, with a jury, hearing the evidence.  Now...how many trials do you know that are brought to the courtroom days after the arrest??  Even if the trial is scheduled for much more closely than normal, it takes a day or more to choose a jury.  Heck, Bull and his wife could have gone on vacation while they were setting up the trial date.

But we are into the trial and there are no witnesses to offer evidence that maybe she didn't do it.  If only they could find the knife with which she was stabbed, but though it came from the knife holder in the kitchen, nobody can find it.

Given everything the defendant is saying, the only possible solution they can come up with is that the victim stabbed herself, trying to make the defendant guilty and sent to prison as a punishment for her affair with the husband.

But things went wrong and instead, the victim bled out. 

There is a witness who explains how long it takes for a body to bleed out and it's a couple of hours, so the victim, knowing her husband was about to arrive, could feel that he would be there to save her.

But the victim had some sort of special problem with her kidneys, which made her bleed faster, and she obviously didn't know that.

How than they prove it?  Where would the victim hide the knife if she stabbed herself?

They see a picture of her son's entry into a school challenge.  He has a weather balloon.  Bull gets the idea that maybe the victim stabbed herself, tied the knife to a weather balloon and it floated off.  But how could he prove that?

Well, with a neighbor's safety camera, of course.  We see this little balloon with something hanging from it floating by and then the husband, who was convinced his girlfriend killed his wife, reveals that his wife was a sociopath and has done terrible things in the past and he now believes that she stabbed herself.

The jury votes her not-guilty and the prosecuting attorney admits that even he was kind of convinced that the defendant was not guilty.

I've seen ridiculous plot lines in shows, but this may have been one of the strangest.