CSI: Cyber 1.05 “Crowd Sourced”

Well, CSI: Cyber, you did it. You wore me down. Like that girl with the perpetual bad breath and the crazy eyes that pursues you relentlessly and then she catches you on a bad night with one drink too many and the next day all anyone on campus is talking about how you made out with Henrietta Halitosis at that dive bar last night. As much as I hate to admit it, this episode of CSI: Cyber held my attention. It had its flaws, to be sure. For one thing, I’m fairly certain the plot was derived from the rejected script pile for Speed 3. But, in all fairness, I actually wanted to know how it ended. And it made me feel dirty (not in the good way).

We open in a movie theatre somewhere in Washington, DC, where two of the moviegoers are in the middle of an altercation. One guy is accusing the guy in front of him of using his cell phone during the movie. An employee of the theater (do they have ushers anymore?), stepping in to defuse the situation (you’ll see what I did there in a second), finds that the glow coming from under the accused’s seat is, in actuality, a bomb (see?). The bomb has a tablet attached to it which is counting up, rather than down.

Simon shows up on the scene with Avery and Mundo. He’s freaking out because he has to brief the White House about the explosion. I don’t know what he’s worried about. The guy’s primary function on this show is to recap plot points periodically throughout each episode. He can do the briefing in his sleep.

Back at the office, Mundo and Brody sort all the bomb parts that were recovered from the scene. After all the bits and pieces are separated into tragically OCD piles, Mundo orders that all media be taken to “The Cave.” Krumitz joins them in said “Cave.” The Cave is a fully integrated, sensaround virtual reality room that they use to determine what’s missing from the bomb pieces. The hard drive is missing, by the way. Of course the piece that would actually do them the most good is the one that’s missing. Murphy’s Law, knowumsayin’? Using technology that I can only hope becomes available for home entertainment, if only so that I can experience the party scene from Eyes Wide Shut in an entirely different way, they are able to determine where the missing hard drive went in the explosion. Krumitz and Mundo lam out of the room, leaving a baffled Brody behind. If Brody were an X-man, the Professor would definitely flunk him out of Danger Room 101.

In the morgue, Mundo pulls the hard drive from the side of a former bystander’s body like a cyberpunk reverse Saint Longinus and they are able to fully reconstruct the bomb.

Avery, who suddenly feels the need to take part in this case, shows up to try to explain how a millennial would never use a shoe box and duct tape to make a bomb. And then she prattles on for a bit about media addiction. The mad bomber, it turns out, now has a website counting each time it is viewed. When it reaches one million views, another bigger bomb will explode. The counter’s already at 400,000. At that rate, I’m pretty sure this episode will be over before the second commercial break.

The Who plays the theme song at the thirteen minute mark. It took nearly one quarter of the hour to establish the story this time around. Just in case you’re keeping score (I am). Also, this episode of CSI: Cyber is sponsored by LifeLock, which I find sort of funny for the same reasons it would be funny if Man Versus Food was sponsored by Alka-Seltzer.

As we return from commercial, we are edified with this week’s CSI: Cyber vocabulary word of the week:

Crowd sourcing – Connecting a group of personal devices to perform a specific task.

You know, like blowing shit up.

As we enter the meat of this episode, I am bemused. The showrunners have so many balls in the air right now. Perhaps we’ll see development of some of the earlier plot threads. Maybe something will happen between Krumitz and his parents’ recently-paroled killer. I’m sort of waiting for Krumitz to abuse his government position to mess with that guy’s life. Mundo and his ex-wife just rekindled at the end of the last episode in the most undramatic, awkward, and hurried fashion I’ve ever seen in a show. Maybe we’ll get to see that flesh out a little. Raven’s been hanging around since episode one, but has served barely more of a purpose than that office furniture. Maybe it’s finally her turn to shine. This hour (well, three-quarters of an hour now, but who’s counting) of television is rife with possibility.

Yeah, not so much.

While Mundo and Krumitz try to break through the mad bomber’s firewall and get Cobra Commander’s logo off their screens, Avery is reminiscing about the guy named Tobin who betrayed the team a couple of years ago.

Oh, right. She and Mundo had a fifteen second conversation about this guy near the end of the last episode. Well, I guess this is the thread we’re pursuing.

Thanks to Avery’s wig collection, we are able to flash back to five years ago when Tobin was introduced to the hacker rehab program known as CSI: Cyber. Avery, sporting the Jennifer Aniston extensions, brings Tobin into the fold, only to have him sell intel to one of the bad guys that they were chasing. Tobin, by the way, looks exactly like what would happen if Brendan Fraser and Chris Kattan combined their genetic material and grew a clone.

Back in the present, and seemingly spurred by her flashback, Avery pays a visit to Tobin in prison. She thinks he can help them with this bomber thing. He can. But he won’t. Nope. Not gonna do it.

No, wait. He is going to help, after all.

Oh. No, he’s not.

Oh, hey, he will after all.

Avery, watching Tobin changing his stance like she’s a cat staring at an oscillating fan, finally pulls her trump card and threatens to ensure Tobin will be some inmate’s salad bowl by morning. Tobin wants access to the prison library in exchange for his help.

Back in the office, Mundo steps up with a reasonably good plan to produce several clones of the bomber’s website, so that some of the web traffic will land on them instead of the one that’s connected to the bomb. Raven gets to work on it. She might as well, right? She has, like, five lines of dialogue in this entire episode.

Krumitz and/or Brody are able to pinpoint an address through some online chicanery. Mundo takes a tactical team out to swarm the place. Once inside, a voice coming through a Darth Vader voice modulator informs them that the bomb will now explode at 750,000 hits instead of the million and then blows up the place.

We’re now at 565,000 hits and counting. I sort of wish the website would make that loud ticking sound that the clock on 24 made. It would really add to the drama, you know?

Simon feels the need to recap the episode so far. While he’s doing that, Avery takes a minute to psychoanalyze the bomber and is left with the conclusion that Tobin might be able to help them. I guess she can’t remember which side of the fence Tobin landed on in their conversation either, because she drags Brody along to help her translate Tobinese. It’s sort of a good thing, too, because the two of them launch into an entire conversation in their Leetspeak gibberish, ending with Tobin offering to type in the password himself. Brody’s too smart for that. He types it and fails to notice that Tobin just laid his inhaler right next to the laptop. It’ll be important later. I’m sure of it.

Krumitz comes through again with a name and address for the bomber. He’s left hanging with that high-five, though. I feel ya, Krumitz. The bomber, it turns out, believes we are all addicted to technology and wants to help us help ourselves by staging these incendiary interventions. And then Mundo shoots him, just to be a badass.

We go to commercial with the counter at 698,000 (and counting).

TICK (boom) TICK (boom) TICK (boom)

When we return from the break, the counter is over 712,000. Jeepers.

While Krumitz comes through yet again, Mundo can’t be bothered to notice for all the self-flagellation he’s performing over shooting the bomber earlier. And Avery feels the urge to go see Tobin again. Are these conjugal visits they’re having?

Avery cuts Tobin the deal and grants him his prison library card so he can finally get his hands on a copy of that Orange is the New Black memoir everyone’s been talking about during his cellmate’s book club meetings. It turns out the password for the mad bomber website is AveryRyan. Yes, Tobin has been corresponding with this guy for months.

Also, his inhaler is sitting next to Brody’s laptop again. Why is no one noticing that the seemingly chronic asthmatic keeps putting his inhaler just out of his own reach? I’ll cut them some slack. It’s not like they’re professional investigators or anything. With access to the bomber’s website, they are able to determine that the bomb has been planted at some big cell phone conference in the center of the city.

The counter is over 730,000 now. Dammit, Mundo! Drive faster!

Krumitz and Mundo play party poopers at the rave/cell phone conference, find the bomb and get it out of the building. Then they embark on what could prove to be the shortest, most anti-climactic buddy road movie ever. With Brody talking to them on the phone, Mundo driving like he’s in a Vin Diesel flick, and Krumitz trying to defuse the bomb, things are pretty tense. Krumitz gets the idea to rewire the car’s starter system to feed off the tablet’s battery. Cool idea, but I have to think even the most expert techie would take longer than ten seconds to carry through on such an idea. Not Krumitz, though. As the counter hits the foreboding 750,000, Brody professes his feelings for Krumitz (in a manly “you’re about to die and I want to assuage my guilt when I take the cool stuff on your desk” sort of way). But the trick works, the bomb doesn’t blow, and Krumitz gets that affirming fist bump from Mundo he’s been seeking for the past hour.

Avery flashes back to two years ago and Tobin’s arrest. You can tell it’s another flashback because now she has Lisa Kudrow hair. This whole scene between her and Tobin really plays like a college acting class partnering project where the two students are reenacting a scene from Silence of the Lambs. Yawn.

In the prison library, Tobin’s master plan is revealed, as he was hiding some sort of microchip device in his inhaler all along! And now that he’s cloned Brody’s laptop, he can access the library’s mainframe with his inhaler! Of course! Geez, I feel foolish for having missed that. But Avery didn’t miss it. Tobin is dragged out of the library by the guards. It’s for the best, though. The overdue fees on that copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he took out a year and a half ago are astronomical. Back in his cell, Tobin receives a mash note from Avery.

Actually, it’s “GOODBYE” written in binary code. Tattoo idea?