Let's Talk Television: Product Placement

The wrong people are kissing again.

New This Week

• 9-1-1: Lone Star (Hulu)

• FBI (Paramount+)

• FBI: Most Wanted (Paramount+)

• High Potential (Hulu)

• Chicago Med (Peacock)

• Elsbeth (Paramount+)

• NCIS: Sydney (Paramount+)

• The Pitt (Max)

The Good

These are the episodes I recommend watching.

FBI

The episode summary on P+ starts “Jubal’s longtime confidential informant,” and part of me slotted this into Good with that alone. I make fun of Jubal (Jeremey Sisto) and his two character traits of Dad and Drunk all the time, but his episodes tend to be better written, and there was always the possibility that the CI would provide a third character trait. He did not, but he built on the two, and it was very effective while also giving Sisto lots of opportunity to emote. He’s no Christopher Meloni (Meloni is the Emperor of Emoting), but he’s good enough to propel his show into Good.

The plot is centered on Jubal’s longtime CI, Faheem (guest Omid Abtahi), who is kidnapped and used to smuggle an infected thumb drive into FBI HQ with the ultimate goal of infecting all FBI servers with malware. Our FBI avoid this by going into a safe room and connecting it to an air-gapped computer. They also successfully track the trap to a terrorist group identified by their tattoos of Nordic runes. I expect it to be recurring.

The story of this episode is that Jubal’s alcoholism interfered with his professional life and personal relationships. I’ve lost count of how many episodes are about this—it is THE well on this series—but this one works for me. The relationship between Jubal and Faheem is set up nicely. They’ve been meeting together long enough that a random server has nicknames for them. Jubal has to wear his wedding ring because it’s company policy to be the same guy every time you see a CI. Jubal is terrified when Faheem goes to his home but remains wary of trusting Maggie (Missy Peregrym) and OA’s (Zeeko Zaki) intel against Faheem. We learn that one night, Jubal messed up a meet that Faheem set up because he was drunk. Faheem covered for him and personally got him sober. Jubal was so out of it, he has no memory of it happening, but he believes it did. Faheem calls Jubal his friend, and though Jubal disagrees, he not only convinces the team to save Faheem’s brother, he literally shields the brother’s body with his own. Jubal is sad that he has to hand Faheem over to a new handler and never see him again, and I am sad for him.

Finally, Jubal tells his ex-wife (whose name I should know by now, but I don’t) (I also don’t know if they’re divorced or just separated) that he’s sorry his job put her in danger again, and he’ll move out. But instead, she kisses him. I am happy for Jubal; this seems to be what he wants, but they really need to give this woman even one personality trait if they want me to care about her.

High Potential

Yas, the show is on the up swerve! In this episode, our LAPD team has to consult with/for (depending on your perspective) the FBI and specifically Karadec’s (Daniel Sunjata) old partner Ronnie (guest Jocko Sims). After plenty of posturing on both sides, and a good deal of bullying from Ronnie, Karadec makes a deal that if the FBI hands over all their intel and Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) comes up empty, PD will back all the way off over the case. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH for Morgan and for Karadec, who tells Selena (Judy Reyes) that Ronnie sees Morgan the same way he did when they first started—and he was wrong. Ronnie agrees, so Morgan and Karadec head to the FBI to dig through their many terabytes of data. Ronnie gives up after some hours, but Karadec and Morgan stay through the night and figure out who made the poison that killed their vic, who is again not at all sympathetic—he was a tech overlord who created an AI-Feepfake app that ruins lives.

We get so much great character work in this episode. It’s a treasure trove for Karadec. We learn about his past success with Ronnie and their bad split up, all of which also sheds light on why he’s reluctant to see Morgan as a partner. We also see Morgan dig in with Karadec but also respect his boundaries and trust him to tell her when he’s ready, which he does. Growth! It’s beautiful to see! And we get moments with Oz (Deniz Akdeniz), Daphne (Javicia Leslie), Ludo (Taran Killam), and Elliot (Matthew Lamb) that are also gold. Finally, the case is cracked once Ronnie, Karadec, and Morgan all work together instead of at odds.

NCIS: Sydney

I started watching NCIS: Sydney because absolutely nothing else had new episodes due to the writer and actor strikes. But I actually really enjoyed its nonsense, and I’m excited it’s back. This episode starts right where we left off at the end of last season: JD’s son is safe, but Colonel Rankin is implicated in the kidnapping. Both JD (Todd Lasance) and Mackey (Olivia Swann) are suspended for going rogue and losing their prisoner, international crime goddess Ana Niemus (guest Georgina Haig). Rankin had a convenient heart attack before he could be questioned, and JD considers murdering him in the hospital, but Mackey reminds him they’d never get answers that way—and then they HUG! I am a living heart-eyes emoji!

The hug is followed by them pretending to be married to get info from Rankin’s doctor and then heading to Mackey’s apartment to have a drink and bond. I am totally normal about it. We and JD learn that Mackey has a son, too, 17-year-old Tre, who lives with her mom in the USA. He was born when Mackey was 17 herself, but they are both doing better than she worried they would at the time. Then JD falls asleep on her couch because he feels safe for the first time in days (weeks, months), and I am totally normal about it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team finds a data storage tattoo on their dead guy and decides to reanimate the corpse so they can download the information (like you do). The intel turns out to be his financial ledger on the blockchain. They track his payoff to kidnap JD’s son and discover the same person paid Ana to try and steal nuclear tech by pretending to be a pregnant party guest last season. I love this silly show. The bad guy can’t be Rankin because he’s in a coma, and Ana was just paid again.

Blue (Mavournee Hazel) and Rosie (William McKinnis) figure out that Rankin’s pacemaker was secretly a listening device, but Ana threatens JD’s son to get Rankin’s location so she can kill him. This, of course, obviously, results in JD and Mackey pretending to move Rankin into an ambulance, followed by Ana running them off the road, blowing up the ambulance with a grenade, and taking a random kid hostage so she can escape. However, Ana gets distracted monologuing at JD (literally), so Mackey shoots her in the shoulder, and they take her into custody. Everybody is reinstated, and they have a funeral for Rankin, but he is secretly in a coma underground. I love this silly show.

The Bad

Bad equates to “I don’t have much to say about this.”

Chicago Med

As expected, we catch back up with Mitch (Luke Mitchell) and his grief arc. It’s not clear exactly how long it’s been since Sully’s death, but Mitch has been hanging out in a bar drinking irresponsibly with a bunch of shouty guys he and Sully knew from back when for some nights in a row. Hannah (Jessy Schram) joins him at the start of the episode, but she leaves after being sober-shamed and borderline sexually harassed. Mitch promises to leave soon, and we can all see where this is going. The episode then ends with Mitch arguing with Hannah about drinking too much being her issue, not his, and then getting into a brawl outside the bar—which, for those of us paying attention, is his issue.

In between those two scenes, we have a day at the hospital. Maggie (Marlyne Barrett) complains to Lenox (Sarah Ramos) that she has too much to do, to which Lenox tells Maggie to delegate. So Maggie leans on Doris (Lorena Diaz), and Doris mistakenly gives a child a morphine overdose. Lenox wants Doris fired, but Maggie knows it’s partly her fault and tells Lenox that if Doris goes, Maggie goes too. Lenox hears her and agrees to bring the hiring shortage to the board and get it handled.

Hannah treats an unconscious pregnant woman who needs an emergency C-section after a fall. When the mom wakes up, she admits that she heard a voice telling her to jump. Horrified, her husband files an order of protection, but Dr. Charles (Oliver Platt) advocates against it, and they win supervised visits. Jackie (Natalia Zea) takes the whole plotline personally because her soon-to-be-ex-husband is suing for full custody in response to her own psychiatric problems, and he intends to move far away with their kid. Charles says he can get her a better lawyer to fight back, and then they stare at each other like they want to kiss but do not.

An additional storyline is discussed in the Mental Health Sidebar.

The Pitt

I don’t think this episode is a decline in quality, but for the first time, I struggled to follow the storylines. So much is going on that it starts to be too much going on. My notes are over 700 words! So instead of me trying to translate that, here are the bullet points.

• Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) treats a teen boy with testicle torsion and impresses his mom so much that she asks her to be their PCP.

• Javedi (Shabana Azeez) is embarrassed by her important doctor mother in front of her peers and Cassie (Fiona Dourif), who tries to help by faking a patient emergency.

• Langdon (Patrick Bell) and Santos (Isa Briones) tell their seizure patient that a worm laid eggs in his brain, but don’t worry, both worm and larva are dead now.

• Samira (Supriya Ganesh) treats a young woman who got DIY butt injections.

• The stolen ambulance crashed last week, and the frat boys who stole it are treated under the watchful eye of law enforcement. Collins won the betting pool and is excited to buy a fancy stroller (I am worried for her pregnancy).

• Garcia (Alexandra Metz) continues to be weirdly invested in Santos until Santos accidentally pierces Garcia’s foot with a scalpel. Santos starts to break under the pressure and yells at Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Javedi but has a moment with Robby (Noah Wyle) at the end that suggests she’s learned something.

• Mel (Taylor Deardon) is upset that the daughter of her elderly schizophrenic patient may have abandoned her. Dana (Katherine LaNas) helps her calm down, and toward the end of the episode, Mel talks to her patient and then calls her sister, who also has a disability.

• Cassie wants to follow up on the potential school shooter from the pilot. She’s ready to call in the police but Robby doesn’t want to ruin a kid’s life over a thought crime. He agrees to talk to the mom and convinces her to talk to psych.

• Admin wants to bring in an oversight committee because of low patient satisfaction. Robby tries to implement better patient care and asks people to add everything they ruled out to the chart so people can be billed for thoughts. Which sounds like a thought crime to me.

• The overdose teen’s test shows he is, indeed, brain dead. Robby gives his parents privacy to grieve and brings in a family support specialist to discuss organ donation. The kid had indicated he wanted to be an organ donor on his license, but his mother freaks out, yells never!, and runs away. The dad apologizes.

• The episode starts and ends with Christie, the teen who wants an abortion. Her mother refuses to allow it, but Robby convinces her to stay and talk about it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work; when they come out of the room together, the mom says the abortion is still off. Christie gets sick and then locks herself in the bathroom and texts her aunt to do something. Collins tries to talk to Christie through the door while the aunt gets into a shouting and shoving match with the mom. They knock into Collins (it was not a big shove, but again, I am worried for her pregnancy!) and the episode ends.

Elsbeth

Alan Ruck guest stars as twins, and the evil one kills the good one. Sadly, this plot is not nearly as fun as that sentence suggests.

Meanwhile, the Van Ness mess progresses and resolves(?). Back during the divorce trial, Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) didn’t ask too many questions about the alleged abuse until she realized the other lawyers on the team had suppressed evidence of it. But she can’t talk about it due to attorney-client privilege. Carter (Christian Borle) warns Elsbeth that his firm is blaming the suppression on her. They write a press release to that effect, and Elsbeth tells Wagner (Wendell Pierce) she resigns, but her coworkers believe her truth, and they work together to trick Van Ness into threatening her so they can arrest him and she can legally defend herself. Everybody is happy about it (except Van Ness, but he’s a domestic abuser so good).

The Ugly

Don’t bother.

9-1-1: Lone Star

This sad excuse for a series finale is brought to you by Verizon. I legitimately want to know how much they paid to be the cell service provider responsible for getting 9-1-1 working again after an asteroid hit all the cell towers in Austin.

Anyway, the professor in charge of UT Austin’s nuclear reactor takes a bus across campus for flan but instead gets a text that an asteroid is going to hit Austin, and importantly, the nuclear reactor. Cell service is down (damn you, Verizon!) so he runs all the way back to push the big red stop button and very nearly makes it—but he slips and cracks his head open on the floor.

Lucky for us, Tommy’s alive and stubborn enough to go to work. She does a very illegal craniotomy, not worrying that she’ll be charged with manslaughter when he dies because she’s dying, too. Convenient. The professor relays where the big red button is, and our firefighters rush to find and hit it. The reactor starts to go. The entire squad is hit with exploding shrapnel and bleeding out in a giant pile of love and we catch back up to the cold open we saw last week: Owen scrambling to hit the button.

He does. Owen stops the meltdown, and all of Austin is saved. Rescue teams rush in to help our heroes, and they find Owen unconscious and not breathing.

We flash forward to five months later and wrap up all the storylines that began in the last two episodes. T.K. quits his job to be a stay-at-home dad to Jonah. Matteo tells the judge to kiss his ass at his deportation trial and is fast tracked to citizenship. Marjan is pregnant. Judd is captain. Tommy is alive and cancer-free. Owen is also alive and back in New York as Chief of Fire.

FBI: Most Wanted

In the cold open, our heroes chase down a twentysomething man who appears to shoot a random woman in broad daylight, and it turns out, in full view of the FBI, for no reason. The chase is shot to be very cinematic, and it works to an extent, but it also feels cheap in comparison to actual cinema.

Remy (Dylan McDermott) is incensed that their breakfast out was interrupted by random violence, and even more so when it turns out the shooter is a gamer playing a murder game with real murders. It’s a competition between two antisocial young men who film their crimes and post the videos on an anonymous message board chat site that FBI Cyber (coming next year probably) has been trying to take down with no luck.

Original shooter Jay, a white orphan with anger issues, starts to feel guilty about all the murder and tries to call off the competition with Jared, an Indian trust fund kid abandoned by his dad. Instead, Jared decides to win by killing Jay in a live stream from his basement. Remy pulls a Remy and tries to talk him down, but Jared is too far gone, so they breach, stop Jared, save Jay, arrest them, and turn off the stream.

This episode lands in Ugly because I don’t know what I am supposed to get out of it. Remy’s anger is over the top throughout (and kind of this whole season), and it’s unclear why. Both the direction and the script are very disjointed. I have to call out this weird af exchange when Barnes (Roxy Sternberg) says Covid messed up Jay and Jared’s generation, to which Remy replies, “I don’t blame Covid, I blame the internet” (Ok, Boomer), but then thirty seconds later calls Barnes “my dude,” followed immediately by “bro”. Whoever wrote that should be fired.

Also Watching

A few episodes of For the People (2018), but I was too busy for extra TV this week.

Mental Illness Sidebar

Sharon (S. Epatha Merkerson) asks Dr. Abrams (Brennan Brown) for a brain scan after her attack a couple of weeks ago. He doesn’t find anything, so he refers her to a neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Hess (guest CCH Pounder), who turns out to be his aunt. Sharon admits she’s seeing a vision of her attacker watching her. Hess diagnoses her with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), an anxiety disorder that occurs after a trauma. She wants to refer Sharon for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Sharon balks and asks for medication. Hess agrees to discuss SSRIs but stresses that meds are not a magic fix. Sharon tries to back out of any treatment at all, and Hess says she understands the impulse, but she can’t outrun the problem. And she’s right; Sharon continues to see the vision wherever she goes. We see what she sees, and it is actually super scary.

All of Sharon’s scenes in this episode were really good, and the storyline is definitely not over yet. I just hope they stick to the “no magic fix” concept because it is accurate and important to say. But this is a TV medical show so magic fixes happen all the time.

Ship of the Week

It was a week for partners (it’s either irony or appropriate that the Laws and Orders took the week off). In Los Angeles, Karadec called Morgan his partner for the first time, and in Sydney, JD and Mackey got personal. But FBI’s Maggie and OA took the partners-to-lovers-in-my-head crown. When they track Faheem’s kidnappers to a rich tech guy’s mansion, Maggie inadvertently steps on a bomb trip wire, activating a spring-loaded IED. OA saves her in the style of Indiana Jones in the first seconds of Raiders of the Lost Ark—he exchanges a random pillar for her weight. When it worked, they looked at each other, and I screamed out loud NOW KISS. Also, later, Isabel (Alana de la Garza) says she trusts Jubal and I would rather he kiss her than his wife (Isabel has a personality).

Meanwhile, FBI: Most Wanted starts with Barnes whining that her mother set her up with a dating profile and ends with Barnes making out with the cyber crimes lady. It went like this.

Me mid-episode: Barnes and Cyber Lady have sparks.
Barnes and cyber lady at the end of the episode: put together a midafternoon plan to have a drink in the park, which turns into midafternoon sex in her apartment.
Me: That escalated quickly.

In Chicago, Hannah and Mitch are embroiled in the Sully drama I predicted, and Archer (Steven Weber) breaks up with his addiction support girlfriend again (he ghosted her the first time). But most importantly, Jackie’s soon-to-be ex-husband also thinks she has a thing with Dr. Charles too AND WE ARE RIGHT. Oh the many ways that could go horribly.

In Pittsburgh, Robby and Collins have lots of little moments. As did everyone in Texas, but that episode was so bad I don’t even want to shout them out (Matteo and Nancy are the cutest tho).

Since it’s up to me, Maggie and OA for the win!

Show of the Week

High Potential

What are YOU watching?