Cold Case/Tear Jerker: Difference between revisions

* Another episode with gay themes is ''Forever Blue'' about two gay cops in love and having a secret affair in 1968. One of them is shot, and the other hides his true feelings until the case is reopened. Even then, he denies he's gay and in love with his partner, right up until the very end, where he admits it with tears in his eyes. He tells Lily that he's still in love with and missing his partner. The end montage features the Byrds doing Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" with the lyric 'Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now'. Saddest thing this troper's ever seen.

* Only [[The Heartless]] wouldn't react to the reunion of Max and his mom in ''Ghost of My Child''.

* In ''World's End'' there's the case of a woman murdered during Well's ''War of the Worlds'' radio show. {{spoiler|And her old lover was still alive, as well as her now very senile husband and murderer, who died towards the end. The final scene with her and the old flame dancing always reduces this troper to tears.}}

* ''Fly Away'', about a mother and child who apparently fall to their deaths out of a high window. {{spoiler|It turns out that the mother was so desperate to prevent her child being taken away by a pedophile social worker that when she thought she heard him coming, she grabbed her daughter and jumped. The child died. The mother survived.}}

* ''Stand Up and Holler''. That episode just made this troper cry.

* The end of ''Family''.

* ''Wishing'': It's about a mentally disabled teenager who was murdered on the train tracks while wishing for his dying mother to get better. It's pretty heartbreaking throughout, but the identity of the killer makes it a million times worse.

* ''Rampage'', an episode about two teenaged misfits shooting up a mall. In the beginning, I was expecting a stock Columbine massacre ripoff. [[It Got Worse]]. {{spoiler|The whole sequence with the identity of the 'third shooter' was absolutely heartbreaking. The girl realises exactly what's been done and you see her ''break'' again-- amidst quick shots of the carnage and the screaming and cutbacks to a scene earlier where she's frantically trying to talk a security guard who's been shot in the chest out of dying. Then, once it's over, you see the two boys come forward to one another, congratulate each other the ways teenage boys do, [[Ho Yay|for a split second just look at each other, giddy and scared,]] and then you hear the shots. Keep in mind that you get this whole flashback while Lilly talks the girl in question (eleven years later) out of shooting herself as well in the same mall.}} All the teenaged flashback actors have bad skin, mall-rat hair, and hell, actually look a lot like people I know. I cry like a fool for the rest of the episode, of course. The worst part? It all started {{spoiler|because the girl wanted revenge against a specific group of other boys who had just gang-raped her in a back room at the mall.}}

* ''Family 8108'', set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Seeing the father get murdered by the man who was once his friend literally made this troper die inside the first time he saw it, especially after it becomes clear that the killer still feels guilt for what he did.

* ''Boy Crazy'': An early-1960s teenage girl looks, dresses, and acts like a boy but still likes boys, so her classmates ridicule her and her only friend, another boy, shuns her when she reveals her feelings for him. After she gets expelled from school, her widower father puts her in an asylum. She rebels against the doctors' attempts to make her a "lady," so a guilt-ridden nightshift nurse (who was also the high school's nurse) lets her friend into the hospital to help her get out. {{spoiler|He finds that they've given her enough electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) to brainwash her and leave her half dead in a red dress. He then smothers her with her pillow and drops her body in the lake to fulfill the pact they made there to "never let them change us--be free or die trying."}} It's an absolutely heartbreaking look at the fluidity of gender and sexuality and the pain that comes when it's met with harsh intolerance.

* ''Saving Patrick Bubley''. Over the course of six years, 4 Bubley brothers all have been shot to death and the mother turns to drugs to deal with the pain. Patrick is the only brother left and Lily is determined to save him. She finds out why his brothers have all died and it was because {{spoiler|some Latino gangbangers stole Patrick's scooter that he won in an essay contest when he was a little kid. He wrote the essay about W.E.B. DuBois and thus he and his brothers named the scooter WEB D. The oldest brother was shot trying to get the scooter back. All of the other brothers were shot by the same gang members for various reasons but they all led back to that scooter.}} It's a tearjearker because it really shows how sensless violence is and it's bawling at the end when Patrick decides to go back to school and he sees his brothers at the fence watching him and cheering him on.

* Oh, boy... ''Daniela''. One of the only cases {{spoiler|that turned out to be something other than murder (suicide, in this case)}}, it tugged on my heartstrings painfully hard. All the title character wanted was to be loved for who she was, not what she was. But after her boyfriend lied about his activities with her out of shame in front of his dad, she kicks him out. And he returns. {{spoiler|Just in time to hear the gunshot that she fired into her own head.}} No live action show has made me come closer to crying than this episode. Hell, I'm tearing up just typing this.

* ''The River'' consists of a Doctor who looks like an adult version of a friend of mine, who (the friend not the doctor) was suffering from Cancer (He got better), and the fact that the Doctor died to protect his family from his self-caused poverty, and the fact that at the end, Valens beats the crap out of a man who, is only accused of being a Paedophile, mercilessly.

* The episode about the mentally handicapped teenage boy. In the episode, he was accused of sexual assault and beaten, when {{spoiler|the girl actually let him kiss her, but then her boyfriend walked in}}. His mother was dying of cancer, and his father didn't want him. In the end, he's told by someone who had been helping him and his mother to {{spoiler|stand on train tracks and make a wish for his mother to get better, as a train fast approaches...}} It seemed to be more sympathetic than an actual murder. And it was just saddening.

* The episode titled ''A Perfect Day'', in which, near the ending, we see {{spoiler|two little girls, one of which is the episode's focus, being held by their abusive father over a large body of water. Their mother cries for the father to let them go, and when she reaches to get them from the father, she only manages to get one, Laura. The victim, Vivian, falls in the water. She drowns.}} Me and my sister watched the episode together, and by the end we were both squalling.

* This troper can not watch the episode ''Committed'' without bawling like a baby. The combination of the friendship between the girls in the asylum, the sheer likability of the victim, and just how much she loves(and ends up doing for)her son, makes me breakdown weeping halfway through the episode, every time. The fact that they play The Platters' ''Only You'', which this troper has a strong emotional tie to, at the end, doesn't really help matters either.