Saving Grace is a revolutionary series about faith, as well as a gritty police drama set in Oklahoma City. The show centers around Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City police detective trying to find redemption with the help of a “last chance angel” named Earl. But Saving Grace says a great deal about evil and how difficult it can be to have faith in a world often tarnished by incomprehensible sin.
Evil comes in many forms, often as human beings in the many cases the squad strives to solve. During the first season, Grace and her team participate investigate the disappearance of two young women. The squad discovers the women were murdered after they refused to participate in incestuous relations with both their brother and father. Later in the season, Grace and her team takes part in a raid on a drug dealer and killer’s home. Grace gets shot in the shootout that erupts between the gang and police and it’s her body armor that saves her. A fellow officer isn’t so lucky and dies from his injuries. His death has the squad anxious to take down the gang responsible. As the show progresses, it becomes very clear that evil in Saving Grace is a part of life.
During season two, in “Are You an Indian Princess?” a woman is brutally murdered and her son turns up missing. The young boy is found in a burning car and the squad realizes that the 6-year old boy was intentionally set on fire and nearly burned to death. The squad has difficulty processing the malevolence of this act, and the focus of the investigation soon turns to the father. Grace goes undercover as the child’s doctor in hopes of luring the father to the hospital. After he is finally caught, the squad also has trouble keeping their anger in check in regards to the horrific crime. Handcuffing the father’s hands behind his back as he’s being taken into custody, Grace tells her partners they’re “taking the stairs”. Once in the stairwell, Grace extracts revenge for the entire squad by throwing the father down the cement stairs, breaking his leg. Grace responds that he now a tiny inking of what he’s putting his young son through.
` Grace and the squad put a face evil almost every day, so by season three the series has led up to Grace’s realization that as a messenger from God, Earl has been leaving clues leading her toward an ultimate confrontation with sin. That face of evil is a multi-faceted one, coming in the human form of Hut Flanders. Flanders claims to be a writer working on a book chronicling how sorrow and tragedy often follows miracles. When he first appears Grace and Neely, a crystal meth addict she is trying to help, have just survived a twelve story fall from the roof of a bank building. Letters addressed to the “Angel Cop” are coming from all over the world.
Initially Grace believes she must go to Baltimore to confront this ultimate force of evil. Grace tells her best friend and forensic scientist Rhetta Rodriquez that the Celtic translation of Baltimore means “God’s place” and believes confronting evil is something she does every day, and that she’s up to the challenge. Rhetta realizes the plan God has for Grace and what Earl has prepared her for is to confront that evil head-on in Baltimore. Rhetta believes Hut is Satan and at first, asks Grace not to go meet him. Grace, however, is resolute in her decision and discovers Baltimore is not the city, but the name of a heating and air conditioning company in Oklahoma City.
Grace is waiting to confront Hut Flanders, calmly smoking one of the cigars Earl gave her. When Flanders appears, Grace empties her gun shooting him. Unable to destroy this force of evil with bullets, Flanders tells Grace of his part in every tragedy from the bombing at the Murrah Federal Building and the death of Grace’s sister Mary Francis to the death of the young girl, Esparonza chasing a soccer ball into the street n the path of Grace’s car. He offers Grace a deal – she walks out of the storage locker now filled with ammonia nitrate, and he detonates the bomb on another sun-washed day in Oklahoma City. Refusing to trade her life for an act of incomprehensible evil, Grace tosses the lit cigar onto the piles of ammonia nitrate, sacrificing herself in the process.
But out of evil, hope rises. When Grace’s body is carried out by Ham and Butch, all of the people important in Grace’s life, including Earl, pay their respects with a silent salute. The hundreds of bags of mail addressed to the ‘Angel Cop’, “letters of love” Grace told Flanders, survived the blast, a testament to the existence of faith. Butch, who has not believed Ham’s assertions that Grace has a guardian angel, marvels at the bags of mail untouched. Hut Flanders may have destroyed Grace, but the one thing he could not do was to devastate the faith present in all of those letters.
Grace Hanadarko walked through the valley of darkness many times before, never fearing what might lie ahead. Her death should be viewed as a triumph over that darkness for two reasons. One – she confronted the ultimate evil in the presence of Hut Flanders and was victorious in stopping him, at least for a time. And two, Grace a deeply flawed but loving human being is finally at peace.
Evil is a part of life. But Saving Grace demonstrates the ability of ordinary people to rise about it and walk through the valley of darkness without fear.
Kathryn Schleich is the author of Hollywood and Catholic Women 2nd Edition, to be published through iUniverse in 2012.
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