Back at the precinct, Jonathan can’t help but strike up a conversation with the Captain. He explains that he sees himself and Jared like Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide—two detectives with double lives. “They’ve got homicide,” Jonathan says, “we’ve got movies. We clock out of real cases and moonlight as movie investigators. Same thing, just cooler jackets.”

The Captain humors him, but Jared isn’t buying the comparison. To prove a point, Jared dives into the history of Hollywood Homicide. What he finds makes the precinct corkboard creak under the weight of red string: the film was loosely inspired by the wave of high-profile hip hop murders in the 1990s. Jared lays it out in grim detail—Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, and a string of unsolved killings that defined a generation of rap. The glitzy buddy-cop comedy suddenly looks like a tone-deaf cash-in on real tragedies.

Jonathan still insists the movie has charm (“I mean, c’mon, Ford chases a suspect while on a cell phone call about real estate—classic!”), but Jared hates it. To him, it’s another Hollywood example of turning genuine pain into popcorn entertainment. The precinct is split: is Hollywood Homicide just harmless buddy-cop fluff, or a tasteless exploitation of unsolved murder cases?

As the detectives argue, one thing is clear—the Gumshoes can’t even investigate a movie without digging into the real crimes hiding underneath.