In this week’s second episode of CSI: Cyber, we get a more in-depth look at the darker side of online dating sites, where brown-haired, blue-eyed young women are being abducted. The episode began with a shadowy figure dumping a body in a wooded area underneath a bridge in Syracuse, New York. The body was then found about a month later by a couple hiking off-trail with their dog and was identified as Elizabeth Marks (guest star Rachel Fox). There was just one problem: her Friend Agenda page (a made-up version of Facebook) had been updated after Elizabeth was killed. Enter the cyber team, who discovered that Elizabeth hadn’t been reported missing by her family, and they thought that the Friend Agenda status updates were posted by Elizabeth. Upon investigating the page updates, the team found that the tone of the updates went from negative to positive, which was a bit odd considering most of Elizabeth’s page updates were on the negative side. So the obvious conclusion was that the killer must have been the one who was writing the updates to cover his or her tracks.
A closer look at the virtual 3D version of Elizabeth’s body in The Cave revealed a series of numbers tattooed on her lower back, and some were crossed out. The numbers were descending, starting from seven. It seemed to be a ranking system of some kind, and Agent Ryan deducted that Elizabeth wasn’t the first girl that the killer had abducted; Elizabeth’s number, which was five, indicated that she was in her abductor’s good graces, and she must have done something to anger him, or her, which ultimately led to her murder. Agent Ryan then suspected that the abductor(s) would want to replace Elizabeth with another girl very soon.
Using the physical appearance traits of Elizabeth Marks to search and eliminating the missing girls who don’t have similar traits, the team narrowed it down to three girls, and the Friend Agenda page of a girl named Missy Bowers (guest star Jonna Walsh) was the only one that was updated after Elizabeth’s death. Unlike Elizabeth, Missy’s mother had reported her missing, ignoring the constant status updates, convinced that it was not posted by Missy herself. After a touching scene in Mrs. Bower’s bathroom in which Agent Ryan promised the emotional mother that there was still hope that Missy was still alive and that they ould find her and bring her home, it was revealed that both Elizabeth and Missy used the same online dating site called “TrueLoveWaiting.com” before they got abducted.
This then led to a Dr. Palermo (guest star Michael Irby), who admitted that he talked to Missy but that she was looking for something more serious than he was, so they parted ways. He had an alibi for the time that Missy went missing, which was working an 18-hour shift at the hospital, so the team found another thing that the girls had in common: the fact that they took lots and lots of selfies. The team figured out that the killer/abductor must have used the location services metadata from the countless selfies that both Elizabeth Marks and Missy Bowers had taken on their smartphones so that he/she could get a sense of each girl that he/she were planning to abduct and track their every move down to their home addresses. So remember to turn your location service feature on your phones off, ladies!
Missy, for instance, frequented a karaoke bar outside the university that she attends. The team looked into the street cameras around the area, and they found footage of Missy being abducted and saw the face of the abductor. The problem was that it wasn’t the actual face of the person who abducted Missy, because the abductor was wearing a lifelike mask to protect his/her anonymity. Agent Mundo and a team of local police officers burst into an office conference room, after finding out that the face used to create the mask belonged to a man named Barry Tipton. However, they only discovered that the people seated around a table were all wearing the same face masks as the abductor from the street camera footage. It was spine-chilling and very disturbing scene.
The real Barry Tipton (guest star Patrick Cavanaugh, no relation to Tom Cavanagh) was revealed when the other people in the room had taken their masks off. He based the mask design on his own face for a company he ran “No Persona,” where if everyone looked the same, in this case, like Tipton, what they were up to was none of Big Brother’s business. It allowed for them to maintain their anonymity and do whatever they please. Fortunately, the team took another look at the footage of Missy’s abduction and noticed that the masked abductor was female and that she had the familiar number tattoos on her lower back. The team then concluded that the person in charge must have sent his highest ranking girl, Vanessa Gillerman (guest star Grace Phipps), to do his dirty work.
Agent Ryan then talked to Vanessa’s sister, Juliet (guest star Aja Evans), who had some survivor’s guilt of her own, having run away from home at an early age to escape her abusive pedophile father’s clutches, only to leave her sister Vanessa at his mercy during her absence. Agent Ryan had Juliet send a Friend Agenda message to Vanessa, in the hopes that she might have had access to a computer as the culprit’s “Number One” girl, reminding her of her forgotten and buried past. The trick worked, causing Vanessa to flip out and expose herself to the team, who were able to track her down and arrest her.
As she was being interrogated, Vanessa’s behavior was borderline insane; she yelled and raved in Agent Mundo’s face and was enraged that he spoke poorly about her “Master” as she tried to free herself from her handcuffs. Her sister Juliet looked on, horrified that Vanessa would defend the psycho who took her. Agent Ryan said that Vanessa was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome because she had stayed with her abductor for a long period of time; essentially, she was brainwashed by whatever her abductor had told her and had submitted to his every whim. Eventually, it was revealed by Missy towards the end of the episode that Vanessa was the one who killed Elizabeth. After she had risen through the ranks to become the “Number Two” girl, Elizabeth was given “outside privileges” and was allowed to go to the grocery store with Vanessa, where she tried to escape by calling for help before Vanessa ended up catching her in the act–that was all she wrote for Elizabeth Marks.
The real culprit was a man named Jasper Cross (guest star Brett Rickaby), who apparently had a God complex (hence the number seven). The team tracked Cross to his home, where he had holed himself up in the basement along with all of the abducted girls. He had an AK-47 rifle and opened fire on the SWAT team led by Agents Ryan and Mundo, threatening to kill them and all the girls if they came any closer. Agent Ryan approached Jasper from the side and chistizes him about how he’s afraid of women. Cross once again took the bait, much like he did on the online dating site when he input his search criteria for women, and came just enough out of hiding for Agent Mundo to gun him down before he could do damage to Agent Ryan or the girls. Agent Ryan was then able to reunite Missy with her mother towards the end of the episode, as she had promised.
In addition to the main storyline, we also got a subplot that shed a lot of light on Agent Ryan’s past, as it revolved around one of her former patients, Danielle, whose private information was among those that were leaked when Agent Ryan’s patient records were hacked into, an event that led Agent Ryan to quit her job as a psychotherapist and become a cybercrime specialist. Danielle was survived by a sister, Trish, played by Arquette’s own real-life sister, Rosanna Arquette, who, having gone off her meds, went on a bit of a rampage herself when she dug up Danielle’s grave, refusing to believe that her sister was dead. Agent Ryan tried her best to juggle Trish’s grief while concentrating on the case, and I have to say that she did a pretty good job as she managed to get Trish back on her medication and joined her at the cemetery as they laid Danielle to rest for the second time, burying a heart-shaped necklace and a silver cross bracelet with her in the graveyard soil.
I also liked the scene where Agent Ryan stepped out of her comfort zone to acknowledge how much she valued Agent Krumitz’s contribution to the team and gave him a big bear hug, much to the shock and appreciation of Agent Krumitz. I also laughed out loud when Agent Mundo scared both Brody and Agent Krumitz with the Tipton mask as the latter was dancing/celebrating over the fact that they had tracked down the abductor’s “Number One” girl and when Agent Krumitz said “Right-a mundo!” in that scene where the team was comparing the Face Agenda pages of Missy Bowers and Elizabeth Marks. Way to work Agent Mundo’s name in there, writers!
In all, this episode of CSI: Cyber, in my opinion, is the best episode the series has done yet. The show has taken the comments made by the critics and online commentators and presented their response, in a way, through this one episode. Yes, there’s still room for improvement. Look no further than that scene where Assistant Deputy Director Sifter showed Agent Ryan Elizabeth’s Friend Agenda update, which said “We just bought a flat outside of Paris…” but later, the words “HIP HIP HOORAY!!” were added to the post. Aside from that, this was defintely a step in the right direction. Here’s hoping that the writers keep up the good work so that nothing unfortunate will happen to it later on, if you catch my drift.
What did you think of this second weekly episode of CSI: Cyber? Were you impressed, or is the show still not your cup of tea?
[Photo credit: Neil Jacobs/CBS]
