This week’s episode of Limitless had all of the right puzzle pieces. It had another agency kidnapping Brian for their own purposes. It had the FBI all together working as one to save him. It had more than enough Ferris Bueller’s Day Off references. Unfortunately, the moving parts didn’t all seem to quite gel together.
What actually happened in this week’s episode was that Brian pretended to be sick. (On a side note, wasn’t Bradley Cooper’s character in the movie able to remember stuff he learned on NZT once he was off it? I thought that’s what I remembered.) Now, I know that a teenager could come up with it (first nod to Ferris Bueller!) but you would think that Brian would maybe up the ante a little bit. After he gives the audience a morning full of quotes (second nod to Ferris!), he get kidnapped by three men and finds himself in the woods. Basically, they’re from the CIA and have tracked a terrorist leader to these forests and need Brian to help them get the exact location so they can find him. Brian immediately knows something’s up, because in all the documents they give him on the guy, almost everything’s redacted.
Back home, the CIA has a meeting with Rebecca, Naz, and Boyle and politely asks if they could borrow Brian. When Naz says no, they tell her we have him anyway. She’s immediately goes on the defensive. She gives Rebecca information that could blackmail the CIA if need be, because apparently two government agencies do not have an inter-department sharing of Brian. Both Brian and Rebecca find out that the guy everyone thought was the bad guy was actually a good guy. Now, it’s up to Brian to turn the men against one another while Rebecca finds him. In the end, the three CIA guys end up dead, Brian takes Rebecca home to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the good guy gets picked up by a school bus and takes a seat, a la Principal Rooney.
Separately, all of these things worked great. I loved the storyline with Brian in the woods. I loved how he figured out all of these things that he wasn’t supposed to know. I loved how he was doing things he was not supposed to be doing, just like back home in the FBI offices. I didn’t understand what the CIA was going to do with guy who got captured. In the episode, it’s clearly stated that the home country wants him dead or alive, and they’ll give a dollar reward for it. I wasn’t aware we sent crazy mercenaries to take care of this sort of exchange. Also, what was the CIA going to do with the money? Donate it? Put it back into FBI fund?
Secondly, what was Brian trying to accomplish with that scream at the end of the episode? Was he just trying to let someone he was in the woods or was that another Ferris Bueller reference? If so, that was one I missed.
Lastly, while I did like that Limitless was seemingly trying to continue the “Do we trust Naz?” storyline from last week, it was very hard to do with her actions this week. Not only did she say “no” to her counterparts at the CIA for Brian, but then she went and gave Rebecca that information as well had a heart-to-heart with Brian at the end of the episode. The character I can’t place is Boyle, Rebecca’s partner. He cares but he’s annoyed with Brian, but he’s also invested and that’s why he’s in the CIA meeting? I don’t get it.
Finally, the amount of references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was amazing. Besides the ones I mentioned, there were some that were taken straight out of the movie; they all made me laugh. When Brian was about to get in the shower, he quoted Ferris by saying, “Life goes by really fast. If you don’t stop and look around for a while, you could miss it.” There were the visual cues, like how he had the towel arranged on his head. There were the constant comments throughout. However, what really made me laugh nonstop was when Rebecca came to Brian as an NZT version of himself. She was wearing Sloane’s outfit and commented on her dress. Brian replied that Sloane was the best.
Not the best episode of Limitless, but certainly not the worst either. Here’s hoping next week is better.
[Photo via CBS]
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