- Growing the Beard: While jarring for the series to drop Season 1’s (admittedly disconnected) arc of Toby trying to remember his past, Season 2 on focused more on present cases and developing characters left over from Season 1 (Oz, Liv, and Ryder), while giving Toby more developed characters to work with via the IIB, streamlining the series as a whole.
- Nightmare Fuel: The drowning room in "A Voice in the Dark".
- Retroactive Recognition:
- Tatiana Maslany guest stars in “One Way or Another”.
- Lyndie Greenwood plays an admissions nurse in “Inside the Man”.
- Brittany Allen appears in “My Sister’s Keeper”.
- Stephan James guest stars in “The Taking”.
- Michael Mando guest stars in “Buckle Up”.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- In "Desperate Hours," when Toby had to make a choice to shoot the kidnappers or not, the cops came in time to prevent him from doing so, replacing potential Character Development with Deus ex Machina.
- While it’s certainly a shock and a Throw the Dog a Bone to see Toby’s mother alive and well in the Series Finale “In Our Midst”, the fact that it’s Tia who indirectly brings this about in a subplot, rather than Toby himself, who spent the entire first season looking for her, feels quite abrupt and lacking of related answers, namely what happened to his then-baby brother.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Elizabeth Simmonds in “Reckoning” is a telepathically-gifted woman who went through seeing her entire family murdered by a biker gang and survived a gunshot wound to the head. Problem is, her plan to enact revenge on said bikers also involves roping several innocent people into committing murder by invading their minds as well, to say nothing of clearly using her mental abilities to get Toby to kiss her and take her to bed, essentially assaulting him. Naturally, by the end, Toby is mournful of her murder, but is also Angst? What Angst? about what he was put through.
- Values Dissonance: An arguable subversion occurs in “Eye of the Storm” (aired in 2011), after a federal minister’s adulterous sex tape (filmed without her consent) is leaked. The reason it’s not Fair for Its Day is that while Toby and Oz rightfully call out the breach of her privacy, it’s surprisingly Liv and Sandy who never show a similar sentiment, even though statistically they’d know a woman who was put in a similar position as the minister. While they likely didn’t know the tape was made nonconsensually, they still simply agree that “women can stray just the way men do”, even with Liv feeling bad for the minister’s Nice Guy husband. As for Sandy, she essentially deems the leak Laser-Guided Karma for the minister’s championing of government secrecy. Not only have “revenge porn” laws tightened since the episode first aired, but were it written today, the scene would unfold much differently.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheListener
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