I know that I’ve said this before, but ‘The Good Guys’ on Fox continues to settle into its groove, getting a little bit better episode to episode. Last week’s episode, ‘The Dim Knight’, starts with a (literal) bang. As Jack and Dan walk to their car, oblivious to the people fleeing frantically from the house behind them, that house explodes. In characteristic fashion, the episode then rewinds back to show us the events leading up to this development. As usual, it’s a small crime that leads to a bigger one.

In this case, that small crime is a string of dog deaths in a neighborhood. Dan suspects a budding serial killer, and wants to find and bust the punk. In fact, it turns out that the dogs were accidentally poisoned by a dim-witted do-gooder. The bigger crime here is a meth ring in the neighborhood. One aggrieved father named Steve has lost his daughter to the drug. And by “lost,” I mean that she’s gotten some piercings and is dating a drummer –Yes, a drummer! Well, with that, Steve decides to take matters into his own hands. He takes a job as a delivery driver for the shady chemical company supplying the meth labs, and tampers with the chemicals so as to make the drugs inert. He got instructions from the internet and everything. The problem is that Steve is kind of a bumbling dumbass, and erroneously mixes chemicals that will, #1) cause dogs and small animals in the vicinity to die from exposure, and #2) make the meth labs blow up. Whoops.

With a downturn in business, the chemical company brings in a “fixer” from the home office in China to find out who’s tampering with their product and take care of him. Said fixer (read: hit man) doesn’t speak a word of English. So the company assigns a meek translator (who had no idea they were doing anything illegal) to tag along and assist against his will, sort of like Jamie Foxx in ‘Collateral‘. This is a pretty hilarious conceit and is played for a lot of good laughs.

Dan and Jack are on the case, of course. In fact, they do such a good job following the trail of clues that their captain is (gasp!) actually impressed with their work, and officially assigns them this case. If they can crack this one without screwing things up too badly, she might just start assigning them more interesting cases in the future.

Naturally, all of this plot must culminate with a shootout in a warehouse. I’m pretty sure it’s the exact same warehouse that has hosted shootouts in every previous episode. The cops, the meth runners, and the Chinese hit man with his assistant all come in a-blazin’, with poor incompetent Steve caught in the middle.

By episode’s end, Dan and Jack feel so bad for Steve that they let him go, and claim in their report that he overpowered them to escape. This puts them back in the doghouse with the captain, who isn’t buying the story. So much for getting better cases.

Something tells me they might find their way into an interesting new predicament in the next episode anyway.