Private Eyes West Coast Episode 1 recap: ‘Changing Tides’ brings Shade and Angie back to work
Jason Priestley as Matt Shade and Cindy Sampson as Angie Everett in promotional artwork for Private Eyes West Coast.
Photo credit: Global TV
Global’s Private Eyes West Coast begins its new Victoria chapter with “Changing Tides,” the Sept. 30 premiere of the Private Eyes spinoff. Five years have passed since the original series, and Matt Shade and Angie Everett are now married, living in Victoria and raising their baby son, Declan. They have also closed their old P.I. firm, although Episode 1 wastes very little time establishing that Angie, at least, never really stopped investigating people.
We first see her at a playgroup, where story time has somehow turned into Angie diagnosing the problems of the other parents. She has opinions about cheating husbands, dishonest business partners and the best way to catch a pathological liar off guard, all delivered with the confidence of somebody who still thinks like a private investigator — licence or not.
Shade is making a more public effort to leave that life behind. He is promoting his hockey memoir to a class when one student admits she skipped computer science because she wanted to hear about his P.I. work instead. Shade insists that he is focused on the next chapter of his life, although Jason Priestley hesitates enough to make it clear that the old job still has some pull.
The premiere has a fair amount of domestic setup to get through. Shade and Angie are married, Declan is keeping them short on sleep, and Angie’s half-brother Will has become a regular presence in their home. Will is new to this series too: Angie connected with him through an ancestry kit, and she spent time in Victoria helping him after a rafting accident before Shade moved west.
Even knowing that, Will’s introduction feels abrupt. He walks into the house with the familiarity of somebody we have known for years, which initially made me wonder whether I had missed something. Considering how much information a premiere like this has to establish, though, I can forgive some of the early info dumping.
One of the smaller moments also seems aimed squarely at returning viewers. When Angie comes home, she and Shade share a lingering greeting kiss, filmed in a way that gives the moment a little more attention than a hello peck deserves.
Will eventually pushes them out for a date night while he watches Declan. At the restaurant, Angie spots Priya, who owns the baby boutique she likes, and learns that Priya’s boyfriend, Ben Moore, is taking her to Provence. Priya is excited about the relationship and tells Angie that she thinks Ben might be the one.
The date night ends almost immediately after Ben is stabbed to death. Priya is found holding the knife, making her the obvious focus of Detective Violet Xiao’s investigation, but Angie is convinced that she did not kill him. Her first argument involves the coral lipstick Ben bought Priya, which loses Shade almost as quickly as it lost me, although Angie’s certainty also comes from personal experience.
Before Shade moved to Victoria, Angie was pregnant and staying there while helping Will after his accident. She went into Priya’s shop while having a bad moment, and Priya helped her through it. That places Priya firmly within Angie’s Victoria life and explains why Angie feels she owes her something now.
Shade is considerably less enthusiastic about getting involved. Their earlier P.I. career included a kidnapping, an armed robbery and a shooting, and now they have baby Declan to think about. Angie nevertheless gets hold of the guest list from Ben’s surprise birthday party and persuades Shade to follow a single lead, which predictably expands into a full investigation.
Ben turns out to have had a much more complicated life than his whale-watching business suggests. Before taking over the struggling Orca Spirit Adventures, he was a wealthy real-estate executive working with Eduardo Molina. Ben left that world shortly after their company won the bid for a major luxury-hotel development, and when the development later ran into trouble, Molina became an obvious person for Shade and Angie to investigate.
This is where the episode initially lost me. About 15 minutes in, some of the performances and situations felt broad, while the dialogue was carrying a conspicuous amount of exposition. Without the affection that longtime viewers already have for Shade and Angie, I was still trying to work out how much of the exaggeration belonged to the characters and how much represented the tone of the new series.
The answer becomes clearer when Shade and Angie impersonate window washers to get into Molina’s office. The mechanics of the plan do not stand up to much scrutiny, particularly once they are dangling outside a building and then somehow manoeuvring around the office and balcony, but realism clearly is not the point. When they wind up hiding behind a large portrait with their hands sticking out while the painting moves, the show more or less announces the level of silliness it intends to operate at.
Inside Molina’s records, they find another potential suspect: Siobhan Callahan, a former executive who was let go after Ben left the company. She had sent Molina an angry email saying Ben had left her with a mess and that she could kill him, which gives Shade and Angie enough reason to track her down at her hotel.
Siobhan is played by Laura Mennell, and I spent part of the gym scene trying to work out why she looked so familiar before placing her as Charlotte from Haven — I adore that show. Angie questions her while pretending to exercise, and Siobhan explains that Ben had walked away from his previous career because his son, Zach, was struggling after the death of his mother.
The scene also contains one piece of physical comedy that did not work for me. Angie winds up trapped beneath a barbell across her throat after Siobhan walks away, and the situation looks dangerous enough that I found it more uncomfortable than funny.
Zach becomes the next possible suspect, especially when Shade and Angie follow him and discover suspicious activity involving one of the whale-watching company’s boats. Their surveillance is complicated by having Declan in the back seat, and eventually all three of them fall asleep. When Shade and Angie wake up 90 minutes later, the boat and Zach are gone, although exhausted-parent priorities briefly take over when they realize Declan has connected his sleep cycles.
Their investigation eventually turns up drugs connected to one of the boats, but Zach insists he was not involved. He also rejects the idea that he resented his father, explaining that Ben gave up his old career to be there for him and that he owes his father his life.
The drug trail instead leads to Amrit Basha, whom Ben had reported to authorities the day before his death. By this point, Xiao has also done some investigating of her own and knows exactly who Shade and Angie are. She heads Major Crimes, knows their histories and makes it clear that operating as private investigators without licences is going to be a problem.
She formally tells them to stay out of her case. Unsurprisingly, this has little effect.
Amrit eventually admits to the smuggling operation, but his alibi for the murder checks out. Priya remains in custody, and the police have now discovered another damaging piece of evidence: Ben made her the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy only two months earlier.
Shade, Angie and Will decide they need to know what else the police have, leading to the sequence where the episode finally clicked for me. They stage a distraction at the station so Angie can get into the case file, turning the whole thing into a small heist. Will and Shade create chaos outside while Angie invents a stolen-bag story inside, and she has to work around the same desk officer she had already fooled when she pretended to be Priya’s lawyer.
It is ridiculous, but by this point the ridiculousness has momentum. The characters are working together, the setup information has mostly been cleared away, and the comic tone feels connected to the investigation instead of interrupting it. This was easily my favourite section of the premiere.
Back at home, Shade and Angie go through the evidence again and notice something in the photographs taken at Ben’s surprise party. Siobhan was wearing blue heels before the murder, then black flats afterward, even though she told police that she had remained with colleagues until she heard the scream.
They break into Siobhan’s hotel room and find the shoes, along with a message that reveals she and Ben had been having an affair. Siobhan had spent months waiting for her divorce to be finalized so they could finally be together, while Ben had meanwhile started a relationship with Priya.
Emma had invited both women to the surprise party without knowing what was going on. Siobhan then overheard Priya talking about Ben taking her to Provence, realized that the future she had been waiting for was gone and confronted him. Shade and Angie conclude that she grabbed a steak knife and killed him before returning to her room to change her shoes.
Xiao is unimpressed when they interfere yet again, but the evidence holds up. Blood has seeped into the leather of Siobhan’s shoes, and Xiao arrests her for Ben’s murder.
Priya’s life-insurance policy also has an innocent explanation. Ben wanted to make sure she would be financially secure if anything happened to him while leaving the rest of his family estate to Emma and Zach.
I had called Emma as a possible killer earlier in the episode after she made an offhand comment about her father having to be reminded to buy gifts for the children while he travelled. That went nowhere. The actual solution brings the story back to one of the more obvious early suspects, so “Changing Tides” is not an especially twisty mystery.
The case does give Shade and Angie the reason they need to reconsider retirement. Angie admits that helping Priya gave her back something she had been missing, while Shade has plainly enjoyed the investigation despite spending much of the episode insisting that their P.I. days were behind them. He has already obtained a new business licence, and they decide they can set up the agency from home and find a version of the job that fits their life with Declan.
I was much more interested in Private Eyes West Coast by the end than I had been during its opening stretch. The first part has to introduce a marriage, a baby, Will, the Victoria setting and the couple’s post-investigation life while also launching a murder case, and some of that material arrives more obviously than it should. Once the episode stops explaining quite so much and lets Shade, Angie and Will actually work together, the chemistry and comedy become easier to enjoy.
The police-station sequence was the turning point for me, and by the final scenes I found the show considerably more charming than I had expected 15 minutes in. I am not fully sold after one episode, but “Changing Tides” did enough by the end to make me curious about Episode 2.
