‘Tommy’ Episode 9: The chief explores unfair treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and tries to help Norah
We have established from the very first episode of ‘Tommy’ that the CBS crime drama relies heavily on its feminist, left-wing approach to social justice. Take Chief Abigail Thomas (Edie Falco) herself, for instance. She is known to break all norms and rules for the sake of justice and she has proven herself time and again as the first female chief of LAPD.
Tommy is known to support women through any kind of social obstacle that they face and Episode 9 ‘Free To Go’ was a perfect example of this aspect of her.
The plotline followed a freshman student from Saudi Arabia, Norah Fayed, who moved to LA to study law under the supervision of her wealthy businessman father. Feeling oppressed by her family and their allegiance to the Saudi laws, Norah decides to get herself arrested and delay the move back to her country with her parents. She steals an expensive ring from a jewelry store and assaults an officer, only so she could buy time and stay in police custody.
Tommy takes this case up thinking that she can convince the young student to not get dramatic about her family. But when Norah explains how women are treated in her home country and how her father has already exercised control on her elder sister, Chief Thomas rethinks her decision. She is done being politically correct and as someone who has been on the receiving end of injustice, Tommy takes the responsibility of doing this right.
What follows is a fight for social justice and helping Norah have a choice in living her life the way she wants.
This also exposes us to Saudi Arabia’s socio-cultural scenarios and how stringent they are for the modern generation women. It’s not that the world is unaware of the Sharia law, but what people might find shocking is that standing in the present day and age, those rules still apply and continue to suppress freedom for women.
For instance, Norah’s elder sister Areen is living in house arrest after her father discovered an article she wrote about women’s liberation and the girl was considered “rebellious”.
Although he did that only to protect his daughter from death sentence as the Saudi Law proposes, it still was like imprisonment for Areen. Later, Norah pointed out, as did her sister, that they have a male guardian accompanying them (and every woman) from the time a girl is born till they die. This system of male guardianship had become stifling for Norah and she wanted to live freely.
Furthermore, when Tommy interrogates Norah and Areen’s father, on charges of killing Norah’s professor, he simply reasons by saying that he feared sexual relations between them. Tommy later learned that "Sharia law calls for 100 lashes” for unlawful intimacy between a man and a woman.
When it was revealed later that Norah’s mother was the one who got her daughter's professor killed, it became clear that women who play the role of a mother or a senior female guardian to young women, tend to propagate the ongoing oppression more. They tend to enforce the laws all the more on their children and that makes the latter push back and seek liberation, like Norah.
While the episode, like most other episodes of the show, seemed a little too preachy for fiction, we cannot deny that it drove a message home.
‘Tommy’ airs every Thursday, 10pm/9c, only on CBS.