"Weekend Warriors" is the sixth episode of Season One. Shawn and Gus become Civil War reenactors when a carefully choreographed battlefield "death" turns out to have been a real-life murder.
Plot Summary[]
In 1985, Henry is outside of the woods talking to Shawn and Gus, teaching them about the laws of physics. He is setting a rocket on a stand and tells them that the first person to get the rocket gets an ice cream sundae and the loser gets to look on as they eat it. As the rocket launches they both run off into the wood, looking. Shawn notices Gus has found it and they both run back to Henry. However, Gus has only found the rocket's parachute. Henry then reveals that he is holding the rocket. It turns out he found it by taking a shortcut. Henry tells them that if he finds it first again, he gets the ice cream sundae. As the rocket launches into the air, it flashes to present day.
Head Detective Lassiter is in charge of the annual Civil War reenactment. Shawn knows watching the meltdowns at the rehearsals is more fun than the actual show, and so he and Gus, a history buff, show up to watch. Juliet then shows up and asks Shawn and Gus asks if she can join them. Shawn says only if you have a nurses costume and she replies saying she can get one.
This year, they are reenacting the Battle of Piper's Cove, in which a nurse, played by Sally Reynolds, kills Confederate Captain Quantrill, played by Nelson Poe. Sally ends up missing her cue, so Lassiter stops rehearsal to talk to her. As they walk down the ramp they find Nelson laying there seemingly unconscious. After a moment though, Lassiter inspects Poe and realizes that he is dead.
Back at the Police Station, Shawn sees Juliet in a enclosed area inspecting Nelson's bloody jacket and sees a bullet wound on the jacket with an entry and exit wound. He then enters the conference room where the chief is talking to the law enforcement that was there at the time. He stands next to Sally and the two exchange glances with each other several times. Since one of his men went down on his watch, Lassiter is determined to find out what happened, and everything points to an unfortunate accident. Shawn, though, seeing the way that Nelson was shot through the heart, knows this had to be murder. He also knows that Lassiter is having similar thoughts but is not letting on.
Back at the office, Shawn recreates the battlefield plan from memory on an air hockey table, seeing where everyone was placed and therefore who had a shot at Nelson. The only one who had an angle and was in range was dentist George Cheslow.
Shawn makes Gus an appointment and they go check out George. They find out that George's wife once had an affair with Poe, which gives George motive. But they also find out that he's seriously nearsighted, and Lassiter won't let him wear his glasses on the battlefield because they are not "of the period." There's no way George could have landed a shot that accurate. However, the police find love letters from George's wife at Nelson's house and show up to arrest George anyway.
To prove George's innocence, Shawn and Gus join the regiment to find the real killer. To get outfitted, they go see fellow re-enactor Griffin Mahoney, who owns a jewelry store and also supplies uniforms and other memorabilia to the regiments. There, they find Sally Reynolds, who, they learn, is an insurance agent who has written policies for half the regiment, including a multi-million dollar one for Mahoney's store. They find C4 (plastic explosive) - to fudge the "cannon blasts" for the audience, Mahoney explains. Gus also admires one of Mahoney's guns and holds it, only to get disgusted when something sticky gets on his hands.
That night, while camping out with the regiment, Shawn tumbles off of the bridge accidentally and rolls down the hill the way Poe did. While lying on his back, he looks up into a tree and develops a theory as to how Nelson was killed. The next day, he goes back to the place where Nelson was shot, to look for the bullet in the ground. See, Nelson wasn't shot by someone on the field. He was alive when he rolled from his horse and was shot from the tree straight down. Shawn is proven right when he finds the bullet, not to mention an authentic Civil War button that must have come from the killer's uniform. Shawn, then, leads the police to the bullet with a "vision", but still they believe it will point to George Cheslow.
Shawn and Gus know they are missing something, so Shawn climbs the tree and they run through the murder again. When Nelson fell from the horse, he rolled way passed his mark. He wasn't supposed to land anywhere near the tree. Seeing the killer up there was an accident. Nelson wasn't the intended victim. He only interrupted a plot to kill someone else. From his position in the tree, Shawn has a perfect sightline to the medical tent, where Sally Reynolds was stationed. The intended target was Sally, which means someone is still trying to kill her.
The murderer could be anyone in the regiment, so Shawn and Gus steal Sally's uniform and decide to stand in for her and wait for the killer to strike again, catching him in the act. Juliet stands in for Sally but as the battle rages on, nothing happens. No one makes a move. The guys, however, discover a sewer grate near the base of the tree. They follow the sewer and end up on the other side of the camp.
Shawn and Gus check the other side of the camp, where they discover Mahoney's uniform in the Confederate tent - and it's missing a button. Mahoney is the killer. Gus also realizes that the musket in the store was sticky because it had sap on it from the tree. Just then, they hear a blast of C4, and it didn't come from the battlefield. It came from the direction of Mahoney's store. He's there right now and not on the battlefield as everyone believes. It turns out, Mahoney and Sally were in on a plot to rob the store, using the battle as cover, and split the insurance pay out. But Mahoney got greedy and decided to kill Sally and keep the money for himself. With Mahoney and Sally arrested, Shawn and Gus happily return to comforts of the year 2006.
Trivia[]
- The title derives from a term of disparagement originally applied to the Army Reserve, given their limited combat training regimen, but now expanded to encompass many skills practiced only in an occasional or dilettante manner, particularly fighting disciplines.
- Lassiter's list of reenactors includes several names belonging to members of the Psych crew: Jack Hardy (assistant director), Paul Etherington (assistant director), Roger Scott Russell (as "Roger Russell", assistant director), Dan Miller (assistant director), Troy Rudolph (trainee assistant director), Michael McMurray (director and cinematographer), Marco Ciccone (camera operator), Trevor Holbrook (camera assistant), Garth Longmore (camera assistant), Jacky Wilkinson (makeup artist), Myles Lennig (location manager), Jeff Plecas (key grip), Doug Nolin (misspelled "Nolan", best boy grip), Glen Forrieter (dolly grip), Stuart Collison (lighting technician), and James Summers (head greensman).
- Shortly after Shawn references the 1989 historical war drama Glory, Gus asks Griffin Mahoney whether he's seen that film. Mahoney's actor Peter Michael Goetz actually acted in it.
- At one point Shawn is playing a golf video game and says "It's not so much me as it is Mickelson, he's good." This is a reference to a very similar line from the 1996 comedy Swingers regarding (Jeremy) Roenick in NHLPA Hockey '93.
- In the tree Shawn says "That's not a notch, that's a notch" in a reference to the knife line in 1986's Crocodile Dundee.
- A common misconception is that there's a pineapple visible on Shawn's Snapple bottle. However, what's actually depicted are some lemon slices as it's a bottle of Lemon Tea Snapple. Pineapple Snapple is a relatively new flavor that only hit the shelves in 2020. As a result of this, Weekend Warriors is the first episode in the series to not have a pineapple appear in any fashion.
Gallery[]
The gallery for Weekend Warriors can be found here.
Digital Releases[]
