Another week, another double homicide in Los Angeles, and wouldn’t you know it, Hondo and the S.W.A.T. team are smack-dab in the middle of it. “Hot Button” starts with the seemingly straightforward murders of two healthcare workers at women’s health clinics. The easy assumption? Politically charged, anti-abortion violence. After all, a website called “United For the Unborn,” run by one John Clayton, has been helpfully naming and shaming medical staff. Seems like a convenient culprit, right? Wrong.
As the team digs – and let’s be real, they always dig deeper than the LAPD brass would like – they uncover the tangled mess of a personal vendetta fueling the violence. Turns out our killer isn’t some ideologue, but Paul Hayes (Todd Grinnell), a garden-variety abusive husband seeking payback against anyone who encouraged his wife to ditch him. The clinics were collateral damage in his twisted revenge plot.
Naturally, things escalate. Hayes takes his kids hostage, because what’s a good revenge story without a tense standoff? Hondo (Shemar Moore), ever the cool customer, pulls off the inevitable save, disarming Hayes and rescuing the kids. But “Hot Button” isn’t just explosions and heroics (though there’s plenty of that).
The episode attempts to tackle tricky issues, contrasting Deacon’s (Jay Harrington) quiet faith and pro-life stance with Clayton’s over-the-top rhetoric. It glances – and I mean glances – at the complexities of belief. There are even brief detours into Miko’s baffling dating choices and Powell’s (Anna Enger Ritch) complicated relationship with her biological son. Subplots, you know, to keep things interesting.
So, did “Hot Button” succeed? It delivered the action goods, but the social commentary felt a bit like a side dish. The domestic violence angle packed more punch, mainly because the writers actually gave it some room to breathe. The whole Clayton misdirect felt a bit perfunctory.
S.W.A.T. airs Fridays at 8/7c on CBS.
