The fifth season of the crime drama spin-off focusing on an elite group of New York cops continues. In this week’s instalment, a young computer whizz is found dead –but is the suspected killer entirely to blame for his actions?

Robbie Boatman (DJ Qualls, ‘Road Trip’, ‘Cherry Falls’) is a young employee of trendy technology company RevoComp Media. Working late one night, he gazes out of his window at the goings-on in the neighbouring office, into which rival company UbiCool has just moved –and is surprised to spot his colleague, Kevin, over there.

The next night, Robbie spots UbiCool employee Aidan clambering up onto the roof and attaching something to an air duct. After a noisy party at UbiCool, Aidan is found dead in a subway station. In an effort to discover how these events could be connected, detectives Goren and Eames first go to check out Aidan’s office at UbiCool. They discover that his strange roof-climbing activities were down to his attempts to get round his paranoid boss’s policy of limiting the flow of information to the outside –he was making an antenna to get phone reception. A special coating on the windows, designed to stop wireless signals, has also been tampered with. Could somebody at UbiCool have objected to Aidan bending the rules?

Wondering if anybody from RevoComp saw anything, Goren and Eames head to the offices and speak to Robbie and Kevin. Robbie claims to have seen nothing, but the detectives suspect that he knows more than he is letting on. When they track him down later, Robbie confides that he thinks Kevin is up to something –but Goren and Eames soon realise that Robbie is spinning them a conspiracy yarn in order to hide the truth.

It is clear that the detectives are dealing with someone who has been trained in lying convincingly. They discover that Robbie has learned various techniques from therapist Dr Katrina Pynchon, who had been recommended by Robbie’s sister, Siena. Dr Pynchon has a military background in training soldiers to withstand interrogation and psychological torture –but she has also spent some time overseas, training soldiers to apply these methods in the torture of their own prisoners.

Siena is horrified when she finds out what her brother has been subjected to at the hands of Dr Pynchon. She explains that she had hoped Robbie could get help for various problems, but had no idea what Pynchon had planned for her patient. She adds that she told Robbie to do what the doctor said –or she would move out of the house. “What did I do to him?” she asks, tearfully.

It soon appears that Robbie had snapped after a fortnight of Dr Pynchon’s treatment. “After two weeks, Robbie was an open wound,” Goren tells ADA Carver. “He was on the verge of a psychotic break. All he needed was a trigger.” This trigger seems to have been the loud, pulsating music played over at the UbiCool party –the same type used in Pynchon’s interrogation techniques.

When Dr Pynchon is brought in, she eventually admits that she had used her techniques to get Robbie to trust her, but acknowledges that she went too far –and when her tactics resulted in Robbie killing Aidan, she tried to protect him from the authorities. Can the therapist be held responsible for Robbie’s actions –or will he alone take the blame?

Tuesday 4th March at 11:00pm on five