White Squirrel City (Season 2, Episode 1)
Premise: Toronto detectives trace the stabbing of a well-liked unhoused man in a city park to three disguised teenage girls and the adult who used them.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 1
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Priscilla Faia as Jade Lancaster, Lola Flanery as Ava Lancaster, Kevin Drew as Mick McCarthy, Julia Ulayok Davis as Shauna Kanuk, Matthew Bennett as Ward Kondas
- Director
- Peter Stebbings
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron
Summary
The Case
“White Squirrel City” opens on a tent encampment in Montrose Park, where Mick McCarthy, the camp’s unofficial mayor, sketches passers-by and clashes with neighbour Ward Kondas over a needle Kondas’s son found. Nearby, stunt coordinator Jade Lancaster films dance videos with her daughter, Ava. That night Mick draws a hooded girl, and moments later three masked figures beat and stab him. Ruth Pearson finds his body the next morning near the charred remains of his tent.
Kondas and a resident called Roger end up facing arson charges over the tent, but Kondas was out of town when Mick died. The autopsy points to several attackers, and the knife carries prints not on file; Mick’s flask holds only iced tea. A documentary filmmaker’s hidden camera shows the attackers: a navy hoodie, a red bandana and a black balaclava worn with costly Bluebird Veloce sneakers. Shauna Kanuk, a young Inuk woman from the camp, says Mick had lost a partner and a little girl years before.
A streetcar livestream and a TSN Collegiate logo identify the girl in the hoodie as Layla, who says she met two online friends in disguise and that the masked one, Iko, sent her to ask Mick for his drink. The screen name Dost Kara, echoing a proverb quoted by Turkish dissident Altan Balik, leads to his 15-year-old daughter, Felice, whose prints match the knife. She confesses but says Iko had shown her it was a harmless prop with a retracting blade.
The Interrogation
Forrester declines to rush an adult murder charge, recalling how, as a boy newly arrived from Jamaica, he was handed a snowball with a rock inside. Jade never returned a matching knife to a prop house, her posts show the Veloce sneakers, and Ava’s birth certificate names Mick as her father. Ava says she was glad when Mick introduced himself months earlier. Jade calls Mick violent, but his medical records show him as the one repeatedly injured, and she left her film set for hours that night.
At the set, Ava mentions that the sneakers belong to her mother. The detectives tell Jade that Mick had been sober for four years and only wanted to know his daughter; she insists Ava does not need a father. When they say the evidence is strong enough to arrest Ava instead, Jade gives in, sends Ava to stay with relatives and tells her she fought back to protect them.
The ending
Spoiler: Jade leaves for the station with the detectives. She never spells out a confession on screen, though her words to Ava amount to one, and the detectives close by wondering what lies ahead for Ava with or without her mother.
Suspects’ fates: Jade Lancaster, arrested; Layla, arrested; Felice Balik, arrested.
Why it stands out
- The second-season premiere, written by Tassie Cameron, who developed the Canadian series.
- Forrester shares a story from his childhood after he moved from Jamaica to Toronto at seven to live with his grandmother.
- The team weighs a possible Lavallee defence, the battered woman syndrome argument, before the medical records turn the case around.