NUMB3RS: Season 4, 401 "Trust Metric" and 402 "Hollywood Homicide" from the TV GUIDE blog of the television series, 28 September/5 October 2007

Further rescues from my "drafts" file of copy for my TV GUIDE blogs, formerly linked at the bottom of my links list (the current TV GUIDE website instead redirects to barebones information on the series, etc.).

Pluto TV offers "free, with ads" streaming of these and other episodes (for whatever reason, they have season four's second episode listed as  its third), and the series repeats are currently broadcast on the H&I network in the US at 3am ET, daily...mildly amusingly, head to head with repeats of the Scott Brothers, then Ridley alone. series The Good Wife in the US on competing Start TV network. Albeit H&I is more or less pitched at men, Start at women. Decent viewing for insomniacs.

In Numb3rs, to give it its preferred logotype, Cheryl Heuton and Nicholas Falacci have created an almost perfect machine, taking the eccentric detective series, whose roots go back at least as far as the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle but which is perhaps best represented on US television by Columbo, and combining that with the ensemble workplace/family drama, which came to its mature form in the US with such 1980s series as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. In addition to good to excellent scripts, sly casting and performances and impressive design, the two extra strokes of brilliance in the makeup of Numb3rs are the gimmicky but nonetheless enjoyable use of applied mathematics in the characters’ crime-solving and, less obviously, the splitting of the eccentric detective into a team of eccentrics, making at least some of the FBI agents at the heart of the show nearly as odd as the mathematicians and physicists (and a city-planner paterfamilias) who aid them. That the Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley, were willing to co-produce the series and occasionally, as with tonight’s fourth season premiere directed by Tony, to take an even greater hands-on interest, is hardly surprising, beyond that a pair of somewhat competitive brothers are the heart of the show. Even where Numb3rs is unbelievable, and it is frequently in small and sometimes large ways, it remains entertaining.

Tonight’s episode [401; "Trust Metric"] picks up from last season’s finale and its quasi-cliffhanger, wherein an ex-military member of the FBI unit directed by Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) was discovered to be a traitor, selling sensitive data to the Chinese government, and perhaps willing to kill to protect his secret. Disgraced and incarcerated agent Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) somewhat unsurprisingly turns out to be not truly a “mole,” but apparently a triple agent deeply undercover to help ferret out some true double agents in the US Department of Justice. One Mason Lancer (no relation), played with sufficient dead-eyed menace by Val Kilmer, is flushed out thus.

As often on the series, there wasn’t too much sophisticated detective work involved in these events, and some of the law enforcement practice displayed is questionable at best, such as when an attempt is made to recapture Granger and his old Army buddy at a subway station with police are employed on only one side of the tracks, allowing the fugitives to easily escape…even given that Eppes and his inner circle are uncertain as to whether they should let Granger remain at large, surely someone among the police agents at the subway station would’ve said, Say, shouldn’t some of us be over on the other platform, too? But the interaction between the academics and the primary FBI agents under Epps, including the characters played by Dianne Farr and Peter MacNichol (for varying reasons missing from too many recent episodes), is often the greatest strength in Numb3rs, and so too in tonight’s. Farr is particularly good with bits of business that add texture to the drama, as when her Diane Reeves character doesn’t quite suppress her irritation when mathematician Charlie Epps (David Krumholtz) pulls a cube of ice from her glass of tea to use as a visual aide. Tony Scott’s contributions to “Trust Metric” include the unusually large number of jump cuts and quick edits even for this series, which will often engage in those for the sequences set in the Los Angeles FBI headquarters, usually bathed in a blue light (or at least shot through a blue filter), versus the relatively sedate editing and camera movement in the sequences set at the Eppes family home or at the CalTech analog that serves as the home base for Prof. Eppes and his fellow academics, including computer scientist and romantic partner Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat).

[402: "Hollywood Homicide", 5 October 2007]

This was a consolidating episode for the series…easing the Colby character back into the team, showcasing the romances of the Eppes brothers (David Krumholtz’s Charlie with Navi Rawat’s Amita, and the slight edge in Charlie’s voice in response to the gentlest of nudges from his womanfriend; Rob Morrow’s Don with Aya Sumika’s Liz Warner, neither yet good at defusing the workplace/relation tension), giving nearly everyone in the cast a setpiece. It also gave the show an opportunity to mock [then-current HBO tv series] Entourage and to make a few inside jokes about Numb3rs itself…as when mildly starstruck Charlie and the less-impressed Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) demonstrate how they use calculations of water displacement to determine the size of a murder suspect, only to be told by their audience of a film actor and his lifelong friend that their efforts are just like something out of the movies…”only not as cool.”

Aside from the Eureka! moment that led up to that exercise, the math in this episode was rather light; the A and B storylines for this one were still wrapped up in questions of identity (and here’s where serious spoilers begin). Aside from various members of the FBI detail, most obviously Alimi Ballard’s David Sinclair, still trying to come to terms with Colby’s long-term deep cover, the primary mystery of the episode involves what turns out to be two prostitutes who’ve undergone plastic surgery to look nearly identical…one murdered and the other apparently the intended target of that murder.

Kelly Overton excels in the small role as the latter, flint-hearted Andrea Barton, who has been blackmailing the actor and his entourage with information her “twin” had picked up and passed along. It turns out that the actor, who makes much of his brother having been killed in a carjacking some years earlier, actually killed the brother himself in a drunken accident…more twinning, or almost, and more deception.

Aside from being well-paced and only rather slightly far-fetched, the strength of this episode is, as I suggest above, in reinforcing or reintroducing several of the themes that have run through the series, not least the relation between Amita and Charlie. Charlie can be remarkably abrasive at times, while he dithered over whether he wanted to pursue a relation with Amita (if she would have him), and one of the strengths of the series is that this rarely felt like a gambit on the part of the producers so much as genuine unresolved tension within Charlie’s slightly maladjusted soul, which is mirrored in a similarly rocky romantic life for his brother. Leaving aside the affect the death of their mother might have had on the brothers, it also suggests what life with obsessive people, whether ingenious mathematicians or dogged FBI agents, can let one in for.

Ben Blacker's  The Writer's Room podcast, with Heuton and Falacci, among others...