Numb3rs Season 2, Episode 1: Judgment Call
Notes:
– Sabrina Lloyd (Terry Lake) has left the show
– Diane Farr makes her debut as Megan Reeves
– Navi Rawat (Amita Ramanujan) is now a regular cast member
Recap:
Opening has a woman arriving home and parking the car in the the garage. We see that the permit shows “Federal Judge”. Feet walk up, and a shotgun is used to blast through the windows.
Don, David and new agent Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) arrive on the scene and find out that the judge, Franklin Trelane (Alan Rosenberg) is working on a high profile case. The question Don has is if the judge was the intended target, or was the wife?
Opening credits
Megan, a new profiler, has assembled a large list of potential suspects, and Charlie takes that and creates a “filter” to narrow down the list of suspects to who is likely to murder a judges’ wife.
Don interviews the judge, while Colby and David interview his current case, Duc Le Phan (Art Chudabala), leader of the JFM gang. He lets on that his right hand man, Raymond Hmong (Robert Wu), might be behind the murder.
Back at the courthouse, Don runs into the prosecutor in the Phan case, Nadine Hodges (Sarah Carter), and learns that if the judge thinks that Phan ordered the hit on his wife, he’d have to recuse himself and cause a mistrial. We learn that Terry has moved back to Washington to try and give her marriage another shot. Nadine looks to be making a move on Don, but Charlie arrives at just the wrong moment to take that away.
David and Colby talk to Raymond, at the JFM “hideout” and Colby’s impetuousness threatens to turn things violent until David calms things down. David tells Raymond that Danny’s trying to set him up for the murder, and that maybe he should coopeerate.
At the Eppes household, Charlie talks about Nadine’s interest in Don, although Charlie has never been good at reading those types of signals. Amita (who if you watched last year obviously has a thing for Charlie) wholeheartedly agrees. Larry somehow manages to relate dark matter to dating, signals, and a girl who had a crush on him in fifth grade. All this somehow gets around to the possibility of Nadine becoming a target for the gang.
At the FBI, David is complaining about Colby, and Don notes that David was the new guy last year, and he improved, so give the guy a chance. Colby comes in and delivers a file noting five domestic disturbance calls from the Trelane residence since 2001, with Trelane being asked to leave the premises twice. Don thinks that maybe they’ve been looking at things the wrong way.
Ad Break
Don visits Trelane to ask about the disturbances. Trelane admits to having drinking problem, but is in a program now to control that. His wife had left him, but they’d reconciled and he admits that it’s his work that got her killed. He tells Don to do whatever he needs to do to clear him and then find out who killed his wife.
In Charlie’s office, he and Megan discuss the list of suspects, and how he’s narrowing things down. He notes that he’s there to simply as a tool to help her do things her way, but more efficiently. At the courthouse, Don tells Nadine that additional security measures have been taken, as the JFM gang may be looking to make another hit. The FBI stages a strike on the JFM hideout to see if they can make like Pokemon and catch ’em all. But it looks like they haven’t, since a biker tries a drive-by shooting at the Federal Building, but it’s unclear if his target was Trelane, Phan or Nadine. They catch him, and it turns out to be Hmong.
Ad Break
At the FBI building, Don and David interrogate Raymond. Raymond denies killing the judge’s wife, but admits that the bullet was for Danny, as “self defense”. As it turns out, Raymond’s DNA is negative for the Trelane murder, so the judge is free to continue with the case, and Don is back to square one for the murder.
At Charlie’s lab, Megan gets stuck in a room with three PhD’s. Amita and Charlie come up with the two most likely suspects for the Trelane murder. One is Orson Hardee, a cop killer who keeps trying to get a retrial. The second is Lance Dolan (Stephen Quadros… yes, the Pride FC commentator), who is connected to the murder via a Crimestoppers tip.
Don investigates the Hardee angle by visiting Erica (Marguerite MacIntyre), the wife of the dead cop, Josh Kalen, to see if he can find anything there. He finds that it’s hard being associated with a public figure. Which leades to the Eppes family talking about relationships at dinner, and how Don finds it hard to put someone else at risk because of him.
Meanwhile, David and Colby talk to Hector Machado (Gary Perez), who has a knack for “hearing things”. Hector relates how he met Dolan and got him drunk to get some info out of him. Don finds out that Lance has a girlfriend, Stacy, and they stake out her place to see if Dolan shows up there. But Don needs to know is why they’re chasing after Dolan based on a tip and a psych profile. Charlie admits that there is some unknown variable that causes Dolan to show up. He relates this to pi, which seems to pop up in all sorts of theories but noone can explain why. So how does he relate to the case? Well, apparently he stabbed Machado last year. And there’s your pi.
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David and Colby are interviewing Machado again, and they really don’t get much other than that Dolan is worth giving up for the Crimestoppers reward. Hardee seems to be cleared because of his sociopathic nature, so that brings the agents back to Dolan. Larry visits the FBI building, to talk to Don about his love life, with about as good a result as you’d expect from a guy who talks in quantum physics-ese all the time. And not to nitpick, but how does Larry have access to the FBI building without a badge of any sort?
The agents have Hector call Stacy, so they can scare her into leading them to Dolan. Which it does, and they find a gun that may be the one that killed Alison Trelane.
Ad Break
In the interrogation room, Dolan lets the agents know that the hit was a straight contract killing, a guy who wanted to kill his wife. Which brings things back around to Machado. Charlie, after some analysis, comes to the same conclusion. Machado mentions that he only introduced Dolan as a favour to Josh Kalen, whom he was a regular informant for. And as it turns out, Dolan was hired by Erica Kalen to take out Alison Trelane so that the Judge could understand the suffering that her family had been through since her husband’s murder.
In the end, we see the Eppes boys heading out to dinner, with one additional guest – Nadine.
