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Do you like Kill Bill but hate all the character development, sex, and gore? Have I got the show for you! But you don't have to take my word for it. A sexy woman in a red dress and heels walks into a church and shoots the bride in broad daylight just as she and the groom are pronounced husband and wife. But if you thought you'd seen unaffected, check out our heroine Molly Parker. She's the rootinest, tootinest, vagina-havingest Texas Ranger you've ever seen and she doesn't play by the rules. Did I mention she is all business? Maybe that falls under rootinest.
The San Antonio Police Department sees this murder as an open-and-shut case of a jealous lover. When it's revealed that the shooter, Martina Alvarez, worked at one of the gyms owned by the groom, then confesses to the affair, some douchey lieutenant man is more than happy to throw her in jail. But Molly Parker is a woman and always knows better. She suspects there's more to the story of the murdered Assistant District Attorney, and a calendar appointment with the DEA proves it. Oh, that guy the dead bride had an appointment with from the DEA? Molly is totally banging him in spite of the fact that he texts like a sixth grade girl.
To prove to her sex friend Dan that she's right, Molly visits Martina Alvarez in jail and oops, gets her stabbed in the shower later but at least that proves something, right? Molly snoops around the Alvarez home to find pictures of a daughter and mother that the SAPD somehow missed. Molly finally gets a post-stabbing Martina to admit that she was set up by the Nuevo Laredo Cartel, who threatened the lives of her mother and daughter. This information is finally enough to convince Dan, so the two go on a rogue mission South of the border to bring down at least part of the drug cartel and rescue the rest of the Alvarez family.
The details of all the drug stuff are relatively unsure, and possibly written by someone who still calls the end of a joint "a roach;" but what really matters is that Molly Parker is sexy and shoots guns and blows up gas cans and saves innocent kidnapped Alvarez family members and fights for justice without losing her beachy waves. Molly and Dan do just that, plus a lot more gunfire, before just driving away like, "yeah let's go do it missionary again." The entire vigilante justice experience gives her a high and the strength to demand her abusive politician husband sign those divorce papers. Yeah, she's gettin' hers. You don't need much of a personality, or sexual chemistry, when you have straight talk.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The first thing to try to determine about Killer Women is guessing who it's intended for. Is it for people who love Lifetime but can’t afford extended cable? Is it for fans of Sofia Vergara? Is it for someone who was looking for something to watch on Investigation Discovery and landed on ABC through a title search? Or maybe this just exists as another piece of the "bitches be cray" puzzle we keep accidentally building on TV.
The first episode opens with a sexy brunette standing in front of an Alamo-like building in a red dress. Sexy women don’t just go to the Alamo unless they're there for some killin', I hope. We also see some cowboys and longhorns so, I get it, we’re in Texas. Yee-haw. A longhorn gets roped and surprise… it's a man and a woman! Women can rope and ride, world, this is modern-day Texas. But sometimes Molly Parker's time ropin' and ridin' gets interrupted by the duties of being a woman with a great body and she is called inside to choose a sexy black dress.
As Molly tries on a series of black dresses, her friend (or whoever that woman who Sofia Vergara cast is) tells her to get "Jake" to sign the divorce papers. Back to the woman in red, she stands outside a church where a couple is getting married, crosses herself then stalks down the middle of the aisle and no one says or notices anything until she has already shot the bride. She runs away and escapes in a sports car, in spite of, like, eight dudes shooting at her with automatic handguns. Only the heels are left behind...and a bunch of eye witnesses.
Molly Parker gets the call, and I see clearly now that she’s not Jillian Barberie like I kind of hoped she was in the back of my head. The suspect is described over the radio as an "exotic female approximately 5'4", 115 pounds, wearing a red dress is considered armed and dangerous." Someone put that giant lie on my tombstone, please, in past tense.
After pulling like, six U-turns and crazy SUV stunts, Molly Parker successfully wipes out the sports car they've been tailing. The police are close behind, but Molly is right there in a freaking wife beater with a huge gun. A middle-aged man -- who does not meet the description in any way except maybe exotic in other contexts -- steps out of the car. God, Molly Parker's hair is perfect.
Back at the crime scene, reporters outside the church reveal that the bride was an Assistant District Attorney and we learn from a jacket that Molly Parker is a Texas Ranger. The other law enforcers have a picture of the suspect, saying she won’t get far "with that face and ass." We learn that Molly was promoted from State Trooper to Texas Ranger, and also that she is all business. She talks faster than Olivia Pope in that off-putting first episode of Scandal so this whole scene is just like, "Oh God, not this again."
Molly goes to speak curtly at the groom, who is still spattered with his new/late wife's blood. She assures him that she's been called in by the DA as this is a complex case. A wife beater, big gun and all. The husband hasn't seen the shooter before his wedding day, he claims, even though Molly reveals she works at a downtown location of one of the gyms he owns.
Back at the San Antonio Police Department, Molly tells her lieutenant that according to the groom's mannerisms and eye movement, she believes him. This is just like, level one L.A. Noir lie detecting. The lieutenant says the groom is lying, though, because Martina Alvarez, the identified shooter, called him nine times the morning of the wedding. He decides, on the fly, that we’ve got a jealous lover on the loose and walks away proudly. Molly Parker knows there’s more to it than that, though. Her woman's intuition tells her otherwise.
Just then, Alamo Budget Inn gets a hit on Martina Alvarez and they assemble a S.W.A.T. team to go in. Oh, and they got her, still wearing her red dress. The lieutenant falls into every trap, talking at her real stern in the interrogation room and accusing her of sleeping with Jason Bluford, the groom. Marina bobbles around like a character in L.A. Noir, so yeah, I'm pretty sure she’s lying. Molly Parker is also pretty sure, but the lieutenant thinks he knows better because he’s a man.
The lieutenant buys the jealous lover storyline, but Molly is about to catch her in a lie. She asks if Jason is right or left-handed, and Martina guesses "right." She’s wrong, of course, and Molly furthers her case by saying that Martina Alvarez's nails were chipped and "you shoot the wife of your soul mate without looking like the one he should have picked." Everyone knows men care about chipped nails when they’re choosing who to love. I'm just waiting for Molly to reveal the gym doesn't have a steam room and blow this thing wide open in what I assume is typical Molly Parker fashion.
She will not stand for this injustice. And she's eating a burrito in that scene and now I want one so, way to go Chipotle, I guess.
Molly wakes up with her darling niece and dog, hair perfect as usual. The niece implores for more back story. Did Jake have a woman on the side? Do you have to leave right now, Aunt Molly? The other, older niece wants to wear lip gloss but Molly's personal life is "not something y'all should be discussin' over migas." Longhorns, Texas, see ya!
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Just working on stuff she’s not supposed to, Molly browses through the bride's computer at work. It has photos of her and her fiancé and some pretty easily accessible records and a specific calendar referencing a lunch with the DEA ("Lunch with Special Agent Dan Winston (DEA)".) On her way out on a hot trail, Molly runs into her ex-husband Jake. He seems like a real career douchebag and way too old for her. He tells Molly he’s never going to divorce her and he hopes she finds the self-confidence to believe that. What a crock of shit. Isn't there a way she can trick him into signing?
Molly goes to her boss with her new evidence and he reluctantly tells her to go with it a bit longer. Her first stop is to bring coffee, toothpaste, lotion, and chapstick to Martina Alvarez in jail. She makes another case for her training and her instinct guiding her on this case. Martina says she knew what she was doing when she pulled the trigger. She doesn’t budge and notices Molly trying to catch her. Some other woman from Jail is in frame for a lot of the time.
The event of the sexy black dress arrives and Molly chose the right one with a deep plunging neckline. She rubs elbows with all the old Texas Rangers elite (not the baseball team) and they are all sexist jerkwads as one might expect. God, she's such a fabulous empowered woman, we are supposed to think. Molly gets a text from "DEA Dan" that she's on the top of his "2 do list" and she has no problem giving him the sex in the very scene.
This sex scene is about as hot as the Midwest and East Coast right now, but establishes that these two "keep doing this" and Molly's hair will always look great. She tries to get information out of him the morning but he says it's not her jurisdiction. God, the tartness of her accent is insufferable.
Now that she has something to prove, Molly heads to her SUV to tell her boss she thinks Alvarez is working for the cartel. They chose just the right woman for the job this time, to make it look like a crime of passion. She heads back to Alvarez's house to find all the things the SAPD missed.
At Martina's apartment, she sees the typical belongings of an exotic woman: crosses, candles, and a Spanish bible with photos of her daughter in it. Meanwhile, that woman who was listening in on the conversation stabs Martina Alvarez in the shower. So we have multiple killer women clogging up the joint now.
Martina Alvarez is in the hospital, though, able to identify the girl in the picture as her daughter. Molly also reveals that Martina gives her mother money every month but this month she never picked it up, leading her to suspect that Martina's family was kidnapped by the Nuevo Laredo Cartel. Martina says Molly doesn't know anything, she was almost killed because of her, and she doesn’t need anything. Molly says she knows how it feels to be so desperately afraid that you make horrible mistakes and intimates that marrying Jake was one of those horrible mistakes. He hit her but now she's strong and a Ranger. Still kind of a gringa problem, but whatever, it seems to have worked and Martina agrees to help her save her family.
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The cartel broke into Martina's house, in a very melodramatic Spanish soap opera-style flashback, and threatened to kill her family if she didn't cooperate. They provided the gun and the sexy red dress, telling her to shoot the bride. Molly meets her sex partner Dan at a diner to tell him her new information. He confides that the DA's office had a re-opened murder case against a big player in the Nuevo Laredo Cartel. That's why the ADA was killed. Dan won’t risk his informants for Martina Alvarez's family, puts on his sunglasses and storms out.
Molly makes an appeal to Dan for a big drug ring takedown for him, and justice for her and Women Everywhere. He takes his sunglasses off and says, "We do this, we do it alone. You get one contact. There's a good chance we might die in Mexico tonight." But, haha, this is an eight-part series so the chances of that are slim. We don't even care about these motherfuckers yet.
There's a lot of, like, planning and narrating and sneaking around. Bottom line: drug bust and save the grandmother and child. Molly and Dan wait over shots of tequila, then Kill Bill it up some more to go do some vigilante justice. The first move is to kick down the door and release the kidnapped Alvarezes. The cartel returns so it's all "Move, move, move!" and then they shoot the guy who was helping Molly and Dan. There's lots more Knott's Berry Farm show-style shooting and action until finally Molly shoots a barrel of fuel and there's a big explosion and did they make the drug bust? I don't know or care, as long as someone jumps 200 feet into water to music.
The Alvarez women are reunited, their stab wounds all sewn up, as Molly looks on proud of herself. She drives her SUV to Austin and, not a hair of out place, stomps into one of Jake's Political Meetings to give him the divorce papers to sign "or I'll tell the world who you really are." She leaves, without the papers signed.
The reports of the real story have hit the news and it looks like Parker was right again. Her boss sends her out on her assignment: a bank was hit in Fredericksburg for $1.5 million. He adds that if he ever finds out she crossed the border to free Alvarez's family, he'll fire her.
So, after risking death, Molly and Dan meet up at a country bar to drink and stare longingly into each other's eyes. Unnecessary character detail: Molly plays the trumpet and just goes up on stage with this band to play whenever she feels like it and when she plays it's so good it sounds like two trumpets.
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