Wow, they are really going out of their way to make us dislike Brenda. She really is willing to do anything to get a suspect, including suggesting to a mentally ill witness/victim that she was in danger and trying to ambush her with the man that Brenda believed had raped her. I love(d) that she is persistent and wants to put the bad guys away, but these blinders are ridiculous.

yeah, and while I suppose it can be argued this is Brenda's trajectory, I think it is going too far.

I'm not sure this is going too far. I think the writers have decided to make it clear that Brenda is one of the bad guys. I suspect that at some point someone looked over the her history, realized that she really was a serial killer, and decided rather than ignoring to make that the theme of the series conclusion. (And kudos to Buffisitas who spotted this long before i did.) I think they are showing that Dirty Harry (or in this case Dirty Harriet aka Brenda) is a monster.

I agree at what they are showing, I don't agree that the Brenda we have now is the one who showed up in the pilot.

Fair enough. But one could say that she changed without either us or her noticing it. She stepped over lines the Brenda in the pilot never thought she would step over. Amd we only realized it in retrospect. She had just huge justifications for each one of them that she never looked at what they meant in context, setting up bad guys to be killed over and over again. And when she did realize (the wine/blood on the papers thing) she repressed it and became even more end-justifies-the-means in her day to day worklife.

I think that there is a difference between pushing the boundaries of one's work (all judgment calls) and being a sociopath and I think they are going with the latter for Brenda.

She had some problems in DC (Atlanta) before she came to LA, so did she not learn from her mistakes at all? I have been ambivalent about the character because the way she treated Fritz has been kind of unreal, but the last year or so seems to be quite out of bounds. It's like the show went "Mentalist" on me, and I don't like that.

It's like they want to remove all subtlety of what occurs in confessions to make a larger point - about which I don't know.

She's not a sociopath. She is a bad guy. what it comes down to is she has always been willing to push certain boundaries to get the bad guys. But there were limits. At some point she started getting the bad guys killed if she could not get them convicted. And as the whole lawsuit confronted her with what she had become, instead of accepting it and resolving to do better (which give her particular ethos would have had to involve confession) she started crossing other lines.

Mind you, she was always willing to cross certain lines with innocent witnesses, but up to now with unsympathetic ones. For example she set up one innocent witness into lying to an FBI agent (Fritz) then scratched his expensive car as a way to trap a killer, then dropped the charges of lying to an FBI agent in return for his not filing a claim for the scratch. So she maliciously made an innocent witness she disliked eat damage to his car. And, among other things, that means she was playing around on murder investigation for petty personal revenge for someone being an asshole.

But of course you are right that none of this was adequately foreshadowed. I'm pretty sure they never intended her to be a bad guy, and then one day looked at how many people she had killed and decided they had inadvertently turned her into one. But at the same time, this is only a few steps past stuff she has done in the past. She has always been willing to pressure witnesses, and in at least some cases has ruined witnesses lives. This goes beyond what she has done in the past, but not by that much. And again, bad guy, not sociopath. The witness was completely a real person to her, and Brenda was horrified at what had happened to her. But Brenda simply was not willing to let that get in the way. If we accept that her character is still crumbling under pressure then maybe....

But I do get what you are saying. Murder of a bad guy is more believable of Brenda than complete indifference to a sympathetic witness's welfare. (She never cared much about the welfare of innocent witnesses she did not like.) And she seems to care more about getting her target than catching the actual guilty party. She caught the second rapist, and was horrified rather than triumphant because it was not rapist she wanted. In the past, she has gone out of her way to catch the real perp if she realized the one she had a case against had not committed the crime.

I have always rooted for her to get a huge comeuppance. I'm thrilled to see a cop show that shows that the "I have to be tough for the tough streets" ethos has a very ugly side. I've never liked shows where the cops smugly dance on the rules and we're supposed to like them for it.

Consuela, I agree, but I also think that Le Nubian has a point that some of how they are handling it is bad storytelling. I don't think it is as bad story telling as she thinks, because I think some of what Brenda is doing is only a bit beyond the type of thing she was already doing by the 2nd or 3rd season. But still it is that bit beyond... What is beyond is not Brenda the serial killer, but some of her lesser sins.

Typo Boy,

perhaps it is a nomenclature thing, but if I am calling someone a serial killer that person by definition is a sociopath. Further, she had to pledge various oaths as a police officer and for good or for ill, she has broken those over the recent seasons.

Connie,

I agree about showing us the ugly side, but I am surprised the writers decided to go in THIS direction. For example, there are all kinds of innocent people in jail because of false confessions. That seems like a more natural transition into establishing the moral gray of Brenda. You need not be a "serial killer" to be a problematic cop. Since her mode is confession, I can see all kinds of ways to get to this point of Brenda needs to resign (or wherever they are going).