Few 21st century TV shows have been able to balance the winsome, over-the-top humor and irony-free sincerity quite like the buddy-detective series Psych. Driven primarily by the off-kilter chemistry of faux-psychic man-child Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and his life-long friend and phobia-ridden crime-stopping partner Burton “Gus” Guster (Dulé Hill), the running tension of each episode revolved around how they will solve cases without people realizing there is nothing mystical about their methods.
This pattern played out over eight seasons, most episodes set in a fictional Santa Barbara, California bearing only some resemblance to the actual city. The show sets the detectives’ antics against a cast that seems to genuinely like each other. Uptight Detective Carlton Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) provides an increasingly complex foil to Shawn’s eccentricities, Lassiter’s partner Juliette O’Hara (Maggie Lawson) a love interest who doesn’t know his secret, while Corbin Bernsen’s hard-nosed father Henry Spencer and Kirsten Larson’s straight-laced Captain Karen Vick provide a stable, moral center to the Psych universe.
It is more than a little ironic, then, that the best episode of the show—the opening installment of its final season—features no psychic moments of insight, almost none of the core supporting cast members, and only two scenes take place in fictional Santa Barbara.
However, not a single episode over the show’s long run pulls together the best elements of what made it special as well as “Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels and Burton Guster’s Goblets of Fire.”
In brief, the episode features Shawn traveling to England for a case at the behest of an Interpol detective who turns out to be one of Shawn’s recurrent nemeses, international art thief and con man Pierre Despereaux (played pitch-perfectly by Cary Elwes). Gus agrees to go with Shawn because it coincides with a convention for fans of Harry Potter at which he hopes to finally meet Ron Weasley actor Rupert Grint.
Once there, Despereaux sends Shawn undercover into criminal plot to steal from a member of the royal family that isn’t what it seems. Gus, as usual, is drawn into the danger against his better judgement and never makes it to PotterCon, though he remains dressed as a Hogwarts student for the entire episode.
Complicating the issue is the possibility that they are being conned by Despereaux, a common occurrence and a suspicion left ambiguously unresolved by the episode even as he helps Shawn and Gus foil the robbery-turned-murder plot.
What this episode does best is its intense focus on the two character elements that matter most in Shawn and Gus. And, it is only because of the absence of the rest of the regular cast members that the story can keep these elements center frame.
Shawn’s best moments over the run of Psych are when his whimsical irresponsibility and desire to remain an emotional adolescent give way to moments of clarity that mature him against his will. This happens at a pivotal moment in the episode when he sees his immaturity makes him “incorrigible” in his own words, something the entire series has built to and finds a natural place for in this moment.
Even more critically, “Lock, Stock…” places heavy storytelling weight on Gus’s obsessive fascinations, the primary of which here is his devotion to Potter Culture. However, there are ample callbacks to other Gus-isms such as his enduring love of meat (he steals a meat pie), his fumbling nature with women (seen in his failed attempts to hit on Despereaux’s assistant) and his belief that Pluto needs to be returned to planet status (which returns here in his awkward pick-up line “Have you heard about Pluto?”).
The call-back culture of Psych energizes the second element of the show’s formula in an exceptional way here. Over the course of the series, several characters returned to test Shawn and his cover story of being a psychic with increasing consequences. In this case, Despereaux returns and I’d argue he is the show’s most interesting antagonist because he’s truly better than Shawn and they both know it.
This creates a very unique condition: there are no moments of “psychic” insight from Shawn in this episode because Despereaux knows he’s faking it and so the drama is driven not by his identity but by whether or not he will be able to solve the crime and outsmart the smarter man. That element is less present in episodes with other opponents like Ally Sheedy’s serial killer, Mr. Yang.
Gus’s turn as a Potterhead also bridges neatly into the show’s penchant for 80s and 90s pop culture references, the most obvious of which is that this episode is an homage to the underground comedy heist film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, right down to the Ritchey-esque slow-motion flashback action recaps and tight shots on small details along with the casting of Vinny Jones (“Big Chris” in the film) as the crime boss.
Psych did 12 different full-episode homages during its run. So why is this better than say the Twin Peaks episode “Dual Spires” or the Blair Witch send up “Lassie Jerky” or the show’s take on It’s a Wonderful Life, “The Polarizing Express?” Frankly, because it connected this specific story’s plot more completely to the series’ aims than the others, a set of connections made clearer and fresher in the absence of some of the show’s most people, places, and tropes.
In essence, as late as it came in the show’s run, “Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels and Burton Guster’s Goblets of Fire” managed to refresh all of the elements that made it the fan darling it was. And that’s why it was Psych’s one perfect episode.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and narrative nonfiction whose work has appeared in publications such as Pleiades, The Other Journal, Angel City Review, and Relief among others. He is also the co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations, both from Bloomsbury Academic. He lives and works in the Los Angeles area.