Please stop trying to "showcase" Anna Belknap's talent. I suspect the writers were aiming for empathetic and conflicted, but what she produced was a noisome clot of self-involvement and wangsty, constipated emo. When talking to a trauma victim, it's not all about you, Lindsay, it really isn't. And you, who had the chance to mete out ultimate justice to the man who terrorized your family, absolutely do not get to sit in high-handed judgment of those who want the same thing. You just don't. Would you have just gone on with your life, utterly unaffected, if Shane Casey had survived to disappear again? You didn't achieve closure and peace of mind until Casey was dead on the nursery floor, and so it was disingenuous of you to stand there and tell Kate that the women had done her no favors by killing her rapist. You know they did. You know they offered her a freedom the half-measure vengeance of the law never could. What they did was wrong, yes, but it will have a positive affect on Kate, who no longer has to fear that her attacker is still out there.
And Mac, I really hate to break it to you, but justice and retribution are the same. Legal justice is the half-measure of acceptable retribution as defined by the law and proscribes the limits of that justice such that society does not descend into chaos as people go about avenging themselves for every slight. It is a necessary conscription against wanton vengeance, but it is wholly unsatisfying when compared to the retribution that is possible when the sterile justice offered by a law of letter and very little spirit is ignored.
So, let us be clear, Mac: you are an arbiter of state-sanctioned retribution. You're just butthurt because the lawyer's idea of just retribution didn't match yours.
Other than Flack getting clocked by Ninja Gaiden in the gym, this episode was dull and self-impressed.
C