It’s Fast and Furious meets Grand Theft Auto in this week’s episode of CSI: Cyber. A driver by the name of Smokescreen races another driver by the name of Blaze in an illegal street race in the streets of Los Angeles. The race seemed to be going in Smokescreen’s favor when the car that he was remotely controlling drove off course when the LAPD showed up and the remote controlled car crashed head-on with another vehicle and claimed the life of a young man, Brian Harper, who was on his way home from work.
Agent Ryan, Nelson, and Agent Mundo arrive onto the scene of the crash to figure out who Smokescreen really is and stop him before anyone else gets hurt in his deranged thirst for speed and adrenaline rush. Agent Mundo extracted the car’s event data recorder to figure out how the hacker managed to hack into the car’s computer system while Nelson downloaded data from the car’s CAN-Bus to figure out what happened prior to the collision. D.B also has a mystery of his own to solve as he ponders why all the springs from the pens in the Cyber Division have gone missing.
The team then managed to track down Blaze at a local car repair shop in Los Angeles, and it was revealed that she was an undercover cop trying to get initiated into Paul Martinez’s gang of car thieves. I’m not sure if the rest of you saw it when watching the episode, but I definitely noticed the small nod to the Fast and Furious movie franchise.
Later in the episode, Smokescreen struck again, this time taking control of a car that had a driver inside the vehicle. Thankfully, the driver wasn’t injured too badly when his car crashed into another, or Team Cyber would have had another homicide on their hands. A lead finally presented itself when the team discovered that the hacker used what is called a Car Hacking Tool to infiltrate into the car’s computer system and took control of the car remotely. This lead then led the team to a car wash, looking for Smokescreen, who happened to be an employee at the car wash. The timing, however, was seconds too late as the hacker left the car wash in his wheelchair and drove off in a black convertible.
I liked how D.B used the Automatic License Reader Database to narrow down the car that the hacker owned, and it also makes me a little paranoid that everything that goes on in a person’s life is being recorded by the places that they go when driving their cars everywhere. Agent Krumitz is right: cars are definitely like computers on wheels these days with their fancy navigation systems and media systems and whatnot. There’s even a car that can drive itself when programmed to. It’s great that technology can allow us to do so many innovative things, but a self-driving car kind of takes the fun out of being behind the wheel.
The scene where Nelson suggested that the team use his car to race when Blaze didn’t show up was a great plan. Using a driverless car against another driverless car to provoke the hacker to protect his reputation was ingenious. Shame the plan went a bit sideways when Nelson got trapped in the hacker’s car when the race began. Good thing Agent Krumitz didn’t crash Nelson’s rental car or else the car rental place was going to have a field day dealing with the insurance papers. Guess you shouldn’t have sprung for the premium package when you rented the car, huh, Nelson?
Back in D.C., D.B finally found the name of the hacker, Kevin Cane. Agent Ryan and Agent Mundo then rushed to Kevin’s location and arrested him for what he had done. Kevin was a street race junkie, and after losing a race to Paul Martinez (which landed Kevin in a wheelchair), the car wash employee/hacker decided to get revenge by setting Martinez up with a planted cellphone in Martinez’s car that was used to build the car hacking tool used by Kevin/Smokescreen before going off to seek his next adrenaline rush.
The missing pen springs mystery was also solved when D.B dusted and photographed the prints found on every pen in the Cyber Division and found the person who took them: Agent Krumitz. Turns out Agent Krumitz was building a remote controlled battle robot with his new best friend, Artie Stein. All was forgiven as the boys played with the battle robot, laughing and having the time of their lives, and Agent Ryan, despite her earlier protests about accepting the Deputy Director job, got the job anyway. Te Director said that she is allowed to stay in the field apart from running the Cyber Division. Congrats, Agent Ryan! Cyber is now in your capable hands!
[Photo credit: Jessica Brooks/CBS]
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