Numb3rs

Sneakerhead (14/23)

Friday 10th April 10.00pm

Continuing this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. When a pair of valuable sneakers is stolen from a diplomat in this week’s instalment, recovering the luxury footwear proves far more complex than the team expected. Elsewhere, Liz is offered a promotion – but is she ready to move on?

Don, David and Nikki are called to a break-in at the residence of Brazilian diplomat Consul Nespola. With Nespola out of town, the team needs to hack into his voice-activated vault to free his security guard. Back at the base, Charlie hunts down the right combination of sounds using clips of Nespola taken from YouTube. “It’s like walking into a junkyard,” he says. “You start collecting parts until you find a combination that runs.” Thanks to Charlie the team is able to rescue the guard. They also realise a unique pair of final edition ‘Primer’ sneakers has been stolen from his vast collection.

When Don and Liz interview Nespola, he admits he paid $250,000 for the one-off shoes in an auction. “The other collectors can kiss my Converse because nobody was supposed to know I had those Primers,” he rants. Nikki and David visit the Primers store and speak to La-La (guest star Eve), the assistant who organised the auction. She admits there was tension between Nespola and Vic Moritz (aka DJ Bit O’ Nutz), the only ‘sneakerhead’ with a collection bigger than Nespola’s. The pair visit the DJ, who insists he had nothing to do with the crime. “I don’t need to steal from a re-seller like Nespola,” he says, dismissively.

David and Nikki are then called to a murder scene in skid row. Bizarrely, the unidentified victim is wearing one Primer. “Who gets jacked for one shoe?” asks Sinclair. Eye witnesses confirm the victim was chased and shot by a white man in his 20s, but the gun is nowhere to be found. Charlie deduces that whoever pulled the heist must have had experience of operating voice- activated safes. Nikki re-visits La-La, who remembers receiving a call about the bids. A trace on the call reveals a man matching the description of the skid row shooter – Lee Diddums. Further investigation reveals Diddums also served time for internet theft using audio files.

David discovers the skid row victim is an illegal immigrant from Albania called Zetroc. Meanwhile, Nikki tells Don they found the skid row gun, which confirms Diddums killed Zetroc. David traces a call from Zetroc’s phone records to a warehouse on skid row. David and Nikki find Diddums in the warehouse but he takes a huge jump and escapes. “Gotta be the shoes,” sighs Nikki. “Yeah, but which ones?” asks David, as he discovers a mountain of Primers in the corner.

The team discovers the warehouse is a sweatshop staffed by illegal Albanian workers. Liz and Don interrogate Nadroj Ria, the ringleader of the gang. Ria admits Diddums stole the Primers from Nespola, and he and Zetroc paid him $20,000 to borrow the shoes. “We can knock out a hundred counterfeits in a day,” he gloats, before admitting they then switched the shoes on Diddums.

Desperate to retrieve the genuine Primers, it seems Diddums murdered Zetroc. But who paid him to steal the shoes in the first place? And with hundreds of sneakers to search, can Charlie find a way to identify the true Primers?

Elsewhere, Liz has a tough decision to make when she is offered a big promotion in Denver. Her colleagues are reluctant to let her go, but she feels she has no choice. “It could be three years before I get this chance again,” she tells Larry sadly. But a pair of old shoes could be just the thing to change her mind…

Trouble in Chinatown (13/23)

Friday 3rd April 10.00pm

Continuing on Five this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. In this instalment, the team is drawn into the hunt for an undercover agent who has gone missing in Chinatown. Don reluctantly accepts the help of a self-proclaimed psychic in the investigation, which encompasses two warring gangs and a macabre ancient ritual.

A routine trip for take-away food turns into a bloodbath for David and Colby when they find themselves caught up in a gunfight at a Chinese restaurant. The agents return fire and take out the attackers. When the smoke clears, they learn that two rival gang leaders, Harvey Yoon and Jimmy Lin, are among the four dead bodies. It appears that Jimmy ambushed Harvey’s restaurant because he thought his enemy had stolen some of his ‘girls’ – sweatshop workers imported from China.

The gunfight is soon connected to a whole string of missing Chinese women – including an undercover agent named Kim Hsiao. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Alice Chen arrives at the FBI to ask for Don’s help in locating Kim. “She was undercover when she and two other women disappeared tonight,” she says.

Kim had infiltrated Jimmy Lin’s sweatshop at the time of her disappearance. She made a call to her bosses just before she was abducted, but her words were partially obscured by firecracker noise. Charlie and Larry set to work cleaning up the recording of the phone call to see if it will yield clues as to Kim’s kidnappers. Kim was also wearing a tracking beacon – but unfortunately, the agents have to be within one mile of her to pick up the signal.

Meanwhile, Charlie is disturbed by the reappearance of Simon Kraft, a self-proclaimed psychic who claims to have knowledge of the case. Kraft is a former CIA spook who once helped Don with an investigation. Don has doubts about Kraft’s abilities, but Charlie is positively hostile, as the concept offends his rational beliefs. “He’s a fraud,” he asserts, when Don suggests that the CIA found Kraft useful. “I will not be convinced that he wasn’t complicit in every single crime he helped solve.”

Nonetheless, Kraft gets the FBI’s attention when one of his sketches of a Chinese dragon with two dead girls in its belly comes to life in a most uncanny way. Colby is called to a crime scene where a dragon float from the New Year parade is found to contain the corpses of two young Chinese women. “A dragon float, two dead girls,” he says. “It’s just like Kraft’s drawing.”

The coincidence is enough for Agent Chen to enlist Kraft’s help in the search for Kim. “It’s my agent who’s out there missing and I want all the help I can get, no matter how unorthodox,” she tells Don. Kraft joins Don and Colby in a ride-along and soon uses his abilities to direct them to a cemetery. The agents are stunned when the signal from Kim’s beacon begins to bleep. They stop in front of a fresh grave and dig a barely alive Kim out of the ground.

Further investigation soon uncovers dead Chinese women buried on top of coffins all over the cemetery. The women are dressed in wedding gowns and have been interred in the graves of unmarried Chinese men. It would appear that the missing women from Chinatown have ended up in the cemetery as ‘ghost brides’ – partners for men who died before they could marry. The men’s relatives have been paying someone a lot of money to provide these brides – can the team put a stop to it before more innocent women die? And can Kraft’s mysterious powers provide further clues?

Episode 13

Thursday, 9 April 2009, 9:00PM on ITV3

Don and the team take down an inner-city meth lab, but it is Don’s FBI instinct that leads to the arrest of a bystander who is discovered to have a greater scheme in the works.

Episode 12

Thursday, 2 April 2009, 9:00PM on ITV3

Don and his team work to track down a serial rapist who is using his position as a police officer to lure his victims.


 

Episode 11

Thursday, 26 March 2009, 9:00PM on ITV1

Charlie becomes the target of physical intimidation aimed at
disrupting his work on the case of a missing investigative journalist.


 

Jacked

Friday 27th March at 10:00pm on five

Continuing on Five this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. In this instalment, a bus full of tourists is hijacked by gunmen demanding $18million. With the help of a video feed from inside the bus, Don and the team race against time to waylay the hijackers.

Don’s team is put on high alert after a Hollywood tour bus is hijacked by four heavily armed gunmen. At FBI headquarters, the agents pick up the bus’s location via GPS and prepare to use a remote ‘kill switch’ to stop its engine. But the switch fails and the vehicle keeps moving, closely followed by police cars. Don then receives a phone call from John Buckley, the leader of the gang. “Eighteen hostages –we want $18million,” he says.

The agents have just four hours to comply with Buckley’s demands. Charlie arrives and quickly determines that the hijackers have hacked into the bus’s onboard computer – which is how they managed to override the kill switch. The agents are now locked out of the system. “The question is, can we get back in? Can we stop the bus?” Don asks.

While Charlie tries to break back into the system, David learns that they are receiving a video phone signal from inside the bus. A holidaying Miami cop named Jack Shuler happens to be on the coach and is filming the hijackers. Shuler’s fiancée, Caitlin, arrives at the FBI, desperate to know if he is safe. Charlie succeeds in breaking in to the computer system and the agents bring the bus to a stop at a roadblock. A furious Buckley threatens to shoot a hostage if Don does not reinstate his control of the vehicle. As the tension mounts, Shuler identifies himself and offers to take the hostage’s place. “I’m a cop! I’m worth a lot more to you than anyone else here – take me!” he says. Buckley turns his gun on Shuler and tells Don: “You give me my bus or I give you a body bag!”
Don buys himself time by pretending that they need an hour to get the bus moving again. The vehicle is surrounded by snipers ready to shoot the hijackers, but the gang has painted the windows to stop anyone seeing in, and the FBI cannot use thermal imaging because the heat is turned up high.

Charlie proposes a 3-D modelling program which, coupled with the video from Shuler’s camera, will enable the snipers to target the hijackers. Charlie puts his program into action and Don gives the order to fire. However, when the FBI storm the bus, they are stunned to find it empty – except for the terrified driver. “Wrong bus, Eppes!” gloats Buckley. It transpires that the gang swapped buses in the minutes after the hijacking, before the FBI had a lock on them. They left the driver to lead the agents on a wild-goose chase around town. Worse still, Buckley has been aware of the cop’s video signal all along. He shoots Shuler dead and tells Don he has just an hour and a half to find the ransom.

Shuler’s death is a bitter blow for the agents, who know that Buckley has tricked them. “That guy totally played us,” Don says. But Liz provides a breakthrough when she grows suspicious of Shuler’s fiancée, Caitlin. A background check soon reveals that Caitlin is an impostor working in league with the hijackers. “She’s in on it,” Liz says.

“Watching our every move, stepping out to make calls to Buckley to keep him in the loop.” David finds another piece of the puzzle when he works out the connection between the gang members. They were all arrested in Miami by one Jack Shuler. The agents realise that Shuler must have put the gang together. Viewing the video of his death again, they notice that Buckley’s gunshots are out of step with Shuler’s wounds. Buckley was firing blanks – and Shuler is still alive. “These guys put on a show and we bought it!” says David. But where is the bus now? And can the agents rescue the real hostages before the deadline expires?

Episode 10

Thursday, 19 March 2009, 9:00PM on ITV3

Don and the team come under pressure when a former FBI subcontractor shoots an agent inside the FBI headquarters and takes one of their own as a hostage, leaving them with a severely restricted plan of action,

 

 

Arrow of Time

Friday March 20 at 10:00pm on five

Continuing on Five this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. In this instalment, the team hunts three escaped prisoners. Don is forced to confront his past when he learns that one of the trio is a troubled teen who blames him for killing his girlfriend.

Don’s agents scramble when they receive word that three hardened criminals have escaped from jail. One of them is Buck Winters, a 19-year-old killer who was originally caught by Don (see the season three episode, ‘Spree’). Buck’s escape brings Don’s guilt flooding to the surface. The last time they crossed paths, Don resorted to some tough interrogation methods to make Buck tell him the whereabouts of his girlfriend, Crystal, who had kidnapped one of Don’s agents. Later, Don was forced to shoot Crystal dead.

Don has little doubt that Buck is seeking revenge for Crystal’s death and wants to do anything to avoid another confrontation. He steps back from the case and lets his team chase down the leads. Both David and Charlie are frustrated by Don’s distant attitude and his refusal to discuss Buck’s reappearance. It is only with his father that Don can express his true concerns. “I’m scared that if I have to go out there, I’m going to have to kill this kid,” he admits.

The agents quickly establish that the three prisoners climbed out of the jail using a rope made from hundreds of strands of dental floss. Charlie calculates that this would have taken around nine months of preparation. He also notes that the rope was very skilfully designed so that it would not cut the prisoners’ hands when they climbed down it.

“This rope wasn’t built, it was engineered,” he says. It seems likely that the escapees had an accomplice, as none of them has the necessary expertise to fashion such a rope on their own. David determines that the accomplice must be Tim Pynchon (Andre Royo, ‘The Wire’), a former cellmate of Gray McClaughlin, one of the fugitives.

When questioned, Pynchon admits that he came up with the plan and then sold it to the escapees. Both David and Colby suspect Pynchon is being a little too helpful, so they keep his apartment under surveillance. Sure enough, they catch Gray McClaughlin going to pay him a visit. After a furious gun battle, Pynchon and McClaughlin are arrested.

At FBI headquarters, the agents force McClaughlin to tell them the whereabouts of Buck Winters and his accomplice, Rafe. “Buck wants to kill some cop, but Rafe doesn’t want to,” he adds.

A SWAT team descends on the motel where the pair are hiding, only to find Rafe dead in the bathtub. It seems Buck has decided to go his own way – but more shocking still is the discovery of his cell phone nearby. David notices that the last incoming call on the phone is from Don’s number. “Don called Buck!” he says.

David confronts his boss, who admits that Buck called him and gave him his number to arrange a place to meet. David cannot believe that Don has been withholding information. “You can turn me in or you can leave,” is Don’s blunt response. Suiting up with a bullet-proof vest, Don prepares to meet Buck at the appointed hour. A dozen FBI snipers train their weapons on the fugitive when he finally arrives, but the last thing Don wants is to gun the lad down. Can he convince Buck to turn himself in without further bloodshed?

Episode 10 - Frienemies

Friday 13th March at 10pm on five

Continuing on Five this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. In this instalment, the agents intervene in a feud between a group of vigilantes and a gang operated by a ruthless criminal. To crack the case, Charlie calls upon the expertise of an old rival.

This week, Don’s team is on the trail of a gang of vigilantes who have foiled a series of break-ins. The mysterious members of the ‘Vanguard’ overpower the thieves and leave them tied up for police to find.Charlie believes the vigilantes are using high-tech equipment to eavesdrop on the villain’s calls and
find out where each robbery will take place.

But Don realises the confrontation is escalating out of control when a Vanguard member is shot dead while trying to thwart a burglary. “Looks like we got ourselves a feud,” he says. The dead vigilante is identified as Peter Hathaway, a highly educated graduate student – not the sort of person who would normally be tackling a criminal gang. “We need to find the rest of these guys before they get themselves killed,” David says.

The situation becomes even more urgent when Nikki learns who is running the gang the Vanguard have taken on. The kids committing the robberies are in the employ of Vic Tooner, a villainous gang boss. “Smart – but he’s also crazy,” is Nikki’s description of Tooner, who rules his local neighbourhood with an iron fist. “He uses kids because he knows if they get caught, they’ll be back on the streets in a few weeks,” she adds. “Just like old Fagin,” Don replies.

Charlie proposes a sophisticated plan to monitor the two gangs’ cell phones. To this end, he calls on the help of an expert in the field – Marshall Penfield (Colin Hanks). Charlie refers to Marshall as a
“friend”, but Amita is quick to correct him. “More like a ‘frienemy’,” she says. Charlie and Marshall have been rivals for years – constantly bickering and fighting. Can they put aside their differences – most of them trivial – to solve the case?

The agents take a step closer to cracking the Vanguard’s organisation when they find the group’s
website and arrest a Vanguard member, who refuses to give his name. “We don’t use names. Just codenames,” he says. However, the young man does reveal that members receive their instructions from their anonymous leader via the website.

Don and Nikki are struck by the fact that both gangs– vigilantes and criminals – seem to be under the sway of a charismatic boss. “They both have the same methods,” says Don. “One is pure evil and the other is trying to play hero,” Nikki observes. But who is controlling the Vanguard? Larry hits upon a
way to find out when he notices that both the Vanguard members they have encountered so far were graduate students. Charlie and Marshall set up a computer program to identify other students that fit the Vanguard profile.

Meanwhile, Vic Tooner makes his presence known by volunteering to talk to the FBI. Tooner drops
some ominous hints that one of the Vanguard crew may have just committed suicide. Acting on his clues, David and Colby rush to a local college, where a graduate student is found hanging from the ceiling, exactly how Tooner described.

Tooner’s message is clear – he knows who the vigilantes are and is prepared to pick them off one by one. But he inadvertently sets the agents off on a new track when Nikki discovers that he was recently implicated in the rape and murder of a college girl. David wonders if the Vanguard was set up to punish Tooner for the girl’s death. “You really think this is revenge for one murdered girl?” Nikki asks him.

David’s theory is borne out when the team finally identifies the leader of the Vanguard. At the same time, Charlie and Marshall follow a lead of their own to a computer shop. But the pair of genius
mathematicians suddenly feel out of their depth when they interrupt a robbery and find themselves face to face with the evil Tooner…

Conspiracy Theory (9/23)

Continuing on Five this week is the fifth season of the Los Angeles-based crime drama series. Numb3rs follows the work of FBI agent Don Eppes and his brother Charlie as they solve complex cases using mathematics. In this instalment, the agents investigate when a series of bombs go off at a charity’s headquarters. The FBI must explore the philanthropic foundation’s credibility when it emerges that it has several enemies.

Don and his agents head to California Pacific House, where a meeting of the Global Enhancement Organisation (GEO) has been targeted by a bomb. No one was harmed in the attack, and security footage retrieved from the conference room shows a blurred image of the suspect.

While Colby examines the scene inside, Don and David speak to witnesses in the car park. It comes to light that the explosive device used in the attack was home-made. Suddenly, another series of bombs is detonated. Fortunately, Colby is able to escape the blasts, but two rescue workers are killed.

Back at HQ, further investigation into GEO reveals that the charity is focused on giving aid to the world’s underprivileged children and endangered wildlife. But several websites slam the group, claiming that it is just a front for greedy billionaire businessmen. “Blames them for everything from rising gas prices to Katrina,” says Colby.

As the authors of the websites use aliases, the agents are unable to track them down. However, larger offshore terrorist organisations are ruled out as culprits because of the amateurish nature of the bombs. David points out that their suspect could be “any home-grown nut with a library card or the internet”.

In the hope of finding a lead, Liz asks Charlie to take a look at the fuzzy images of the man who the agents suspect is the bomber. Using face- recognition software and the city’s CCTV footage, Charlie is able to trace the suspect’s movements after he left the crime scene. The man is identified as one Roy McGill, a rampant conspiracy theorist and film-maker, who has a criminal record for threatening a federal agent.

When Colby and David pay Roy a visit, the paranoid man does not believe they are real FBI agents. Eventually he gives in and goes down to HQ for further questioning. Roy insists he is innocent and that he was only present at the GEO’s meeting to expose the organisation’s illegal activities with his secret cameras. “They plan how the stock market will perform, decide presidential elections, even who will win the Super Bowl,” he insists.

Ballistics results clear Roy of any involvement in the bombings, so Don goes to visit GEO founder Brett Hanson to see whether there is any truth to Roy’s outlandish claims. “For every wacko you produce, I have three thankful mothers,” says Brett of the children he provides with aid. However, he refuses to divulge the names of the group’s members, saying that the information is classified.

Eager to help the FBI bust Hanson, Roy recovers another of his hidden cameras from the conference room. Film from the night before the bombings shows a prowler, who Roy recognises to be one Jeff Jonze, leader of extremist organisation White Alliance.

When they ransack Jeff’s house, the agents find him in possession of a cheque for $50,000. “I guess his reasons for the bombings were financial, not political,” concludes David. If this is the case, who hired Jeff for the job? Is Hanson’s charity just as crooked as the crazed conspiracy theorists claim? And if GEO is responsible for bombing itself, what would it stand to gain from such destruction?

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