As I noted a few weeks ago, the TNT crime drama series The Closer has long been largely nonpolitical while exploring interesting and important ideas in a fair manner. Unfortunately, as I pointed out at the time, an episode this season broke from that pattern and made an awkward, overt political statement characterizing opposition to illegal immigration as a violent, dangerous impulse.

The showmakers were back at it again last night, this time tarring opposition to affirmative action as the evil du jour.

The story follows the elite LA crime unit led by brilliant detective Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) as it pursues a middle-aged white male who is planning a major mass killing, having failed at an attempt a few years before and escaping capture. In setting up the mass killing, he murders two paramedics, which is how the crime unit picks up his trail. (Note that there are really no spoilers here, as the episode has no whodunit aspect, nor any real suspense of any kind.)

You’ll notice that I describe the killer as white, male, and middle-aged. That’s because the very point of the episode is to convey approval of identity politics. The killer, you see, is incensed about having been denied a position in the Los Angeles Fire Department, and he blames affirmative action for it. Of course, affirmative action policies had nothing to do with it: his psychological evaluation indicated that he was an insane narcissist.

He then commences a plan to kill hundreds of fire department and police officers. All because he cannot get with the politics of the times and accept affirmative action.

As was the case with the immigration episode, this grotesque, politically tendentious premise is played out in a story full of absurdities and gigantic plot holes. I don’t know whether the LAFD does a personal psychological interview-examination of every applicant, but it sounds ridiculously expensive, yet it’s the premise of this episode. The killer is given no personality whatsoever other than his narcissism and hatred of affirmative action. Moreover, if they really did this and found out that he was dangerously insane, it seems likely that they have notified somebody, instead of just rejecting him and sending him on his way. Thus he should have been caught long before this incident.

And instead of the usual fiendishly clever way Brenda manipulates the evildoer into giving himself up or confessing, in this case she simply pretends to agree with him, to distract him until someone can grab the dead-man switch from him and prevent him from detonating a sarin gas bomb. The real gas bomb in this scene is the cliched hostage-taking incident and hoary dilemma of whether the police should try to shoot the bad guy and risk hitting an innocent, which was done to death three decades ago (and which happened again an hour later in the season-ending episode of Rizzoli and Isles, also on TNT).

Likewise egregious is the inconsistency of the story regarding the issue of affirmative action. In recent episodes of the show, a continuing story line has centered on the question of who will be the successor to the retiring Chief of Police. Brenda’s boss, Chief Pope, is in line for the job. He’s a white male, like last night’s killer and attempted mass murderer. Although he has the most experience and greatest job responsibility, he is the first one eliminated from the candidate pool.

The other candidate of whom we know is Brenda herself, who has been pushed forward for the job as a symbol that the department isn’t prejudiced against women. This is made explicit in the dialogue, repeatedly.

In last night’s season-ending episode we find out who the third candidate is: Chief Tommy Delk of the LA Police counterterrorism unit. Portrayed well by Courtney B. Vance (Law and Order: Criminal Intent) Delk is African-American, intense, smart, ambitious ,manipulative, and clean-cut. He’s clearly not as smart as Brenda, however—she’s the one who has all the insights into the case on which they’re working together.

I’ll leave it to you to guess who gets the job. In any case, the storyline has shown affirmative action at work in the LAPD, unless we are to believe that talent, experience, and intelligence are always distributed to people in just such a convenient way as to provide three candidates of different combinations of sex and ethnicity.

So, while the underlying story shows affirmative action does happen (but which is presented too subtly for many viewers to see—it is never stated openly, unlike the palaver about the killer’s motivations), the episode claims that the belief that it has any real effects is fantastic and, in an unhinged mind, leads to violence.

What is most repugnant about this premise, of course, is the fact that the episode comes just a couple of weeks after a madman, James Lee, threatened to destroy the headquarters of the Discovery Network because he found their programming insufficiently concerned about global warming and not sufficiently supportive of statist and world-government responses.

The TV myth, which last night’s Closer episode exemplifies, is that non-leftist thought leads to all sorts of evil and violence. The reality is that in recent years it has been statist left-wingers and Muslims who have been indulging in violence: the Discovery Network bomber, the 9/11 attackers, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczinski, the Greyhound Bus beheader, countless ecoterrorists and animal-rights terrorists, and so on and on.

There certainly is good drama to be made from the issue of affirmative action and people’s thoughts about it. Too bad the makers of The Closer refused to make one.