Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 13

Sacrifice

A college kid misses a bus because he can’t pay the fare, another college kid on the bus looks at him standing outside of the bus and then it explodes….oh did I forget to mention that these college kids were of middle-eastern decent and probably Islamic?  No..sorry they are.    The Lightman group is brought in to try to help with the problem of finding out who might be responsible.

We are turned over to a scene where an islamic man is being interrogated by Deputy Messler and Doctor Lightman interrupts her because he knows something and Doctor Lightman has a better way of doing things to reach the truth.   Doctor Foster and Torres arrive to interview members of the Mosque where Jamal went.  Another suicide bomber in Virginia…I am very glad that this isn’t really happening in America,but it really could only be a matter of time.

Lightman and his daughter have a scene and this shows just how deep their relationship with one another is and then he has one with Torres because she didn’t see anything.   Lightman reveals that he has made mistakes as well in the past and that sometimes they just do get by you. Basically he’s telling her that everyone is human and humans are not infallible.

Lightman gets a call from the secret service, Torres’s boyfriend might have been one of the people who was maybe killed in the bombings.   Torres and Foster go to speak with the family of the second bomber.   They see the two bombers and what is going on with them, neither one of them is acting like a bomber.    Someone set these kids up as suicide bombers because of remote detonators.   They speak with the leader of the Mosque who reveals a former FBI agent who he informed to about some people who might be responsible for things.

Dupree is not dead but he’s not in good condition as well and Torres finds out that Lightman was keeping things from her.  On a side note-I love Zoe, Cal’s ex-wife its a shame that I know now that she’s not in many episodes.   On a side note: why does Chloe wear a key around her neck?  Did I miss something that added to her character.   I can’t wait to watch the second season as Chloe is more involved.

The former FBI agent had tapes that he recorded and now the group is working on finding out who on these tapes might be responsible for the bombings.  Doctor Lightman interviews the father of the second bomber while Loker and Reynolds try to figure out what the bomb was made out of.  This leads to finding out who is really behind the bombings and they have to convince him to tell the truth about the ones who really did it.   They get to the person who is really responsible right before he blows a whole bunch more bombs all at once.  One shot to the head from Agent Reynolds and its all over but for the aftermath.

Foster and her husband separate officially at the end of this episode, my guess is that the husband wasn’t getting better despite his promises.

“do you know what they call a place that breaks the law every time there is an emergency: a dictatorship” -Cal Lightman

“you have a talent and its time for you to realize that it doesn’t belong to just you anymore.”  -Cal Lightman to Ria Torres.

Rating: A++

End of Season 1 of Lie to Me.

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep. 12

Blinded

10 years ago: a woman meets a man, is raped and blinded….then we move to the present where we learn that this man did this to 12 women and now in the past six months a copycat has been doing the same thing.  We go into the jail and see Doctor Lightman there dressed in prisoner red where he gets beat up  while others watch on.

Agent Ben Reynolds (Mekhi Phifer) gets introduced to the show adding another dimension as I’ve thought they need a regular character that was outside of the Lightman group who we would see on a regular basis and he gets introduced here. Lightman slowly begins to work on the serial rapist inside the jail but the man realizes right away that Lightman isn’t a criminal.  He tells them where the copycat is and wishes them luck and leads them to the next victim…oops.

This is finally an episode to prove what I knew they would do eventually, there are perfect liars out there, or so near perfect that not even someone trained to see liars and how they lie can read someone like that.  They go talk to the man who has been writing to Jenkins and who is a fanatic fan of his to the point that he follows his career and also the career of his copycat.   It comes out that one of the guards is perhaps the copycat and then we move to where Gillian is putting two women who were attacked by the rapists together for the first time.

The guard was passing letters between Jenkins and the copycat the entire time that was how he and the copycat got to know one another.  Doctor Foster is attacked by a man as she’s leaving the house of one of the girls attacked by the copycat just as Lightman and Reynolds show up to save her before she’s taken.

Torres brings in a former victim (the lady in scrubs from the beginning) to try and make Jenkins uncomfortable though it doesn’t appear to be doing anything other than arousing him.  Lightman interrupts and yells at Torres and then looses his cool with Jenkins a few seconds later.  The three Phase of the Mentor/Protege as displayed by Lightman and Jenkins to push Jenkins and he did it all from the beginning of the episode playing Jenkins to reveal what Jenkins was really like and to uncover what was really going on.

The husband of the nurse victim is in fact the copycat killer who was a fan of Jenkins from before the two of them met.  The man married Michelle the nurse just so that he could be close to what Jenkins did as he was that much of a freak.  They catch the copycat and I imagine he’s going to jail for as long as his mentor.

“Thats the guy that out lightmaned lightman?”  -Eli to Torres

“IF he was better than me I wouldn’t have been able to find you.”  -Lightman

Raiting: A+

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep. 11

Undercover

The Episode begins with two undercover cops chasing a subject, again another totally different story than the one before it. The subject finds out that they are undercover pretty quickly and one of the cops shoots at the subject they are tailing to begin the episode.   Cal and Gillian are having dinner with her husband whom Cal has believed for a long while now is cheating on Gillian and he wants to find out so he follows him and watches as he meets a girl and Cal walks up to where they were to hand him the glasses.

This part of the story has been building for a while, Cal Lightman knows that something is going on with Alec Foster, he’s cheating obviously to me and to Cal and also Torres but Gillian Foster doesn’t know and Cal doesn’t want to tell her, I think because he doesn’t want to ruin her marriage.    Doctor LIghtman and Torres are called in by the Mayor’s office to investigate if the cops actually did see  a gun in the kids hand or not.

Lightman interviews the cop that fired the gun and his partner as well.  Kuransky was lying it turns out because he was so exact about things as if he had rehearsed what he was going to say before and he repeated it.    The other cop Adam Duke was telling the truth, he was telling it as he really remembered it.

Torres’s boyfriend comes back into the episode which I think it’s about time, we need to know more about Torres and her life outside of the Lightman group, just as we do about Eli Loker and Doctor Foster.   This episode has the great DB Woodside in it from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s last season where he played Principal Wood.  Then comes the shocker, the group is being sued along with everyone else involved with the loss of money for the pension funds to employees due to the boss of the company loosing all of the money in Ep 8.

This of course was Eli’s doing, he did something he shouldn’t have and cost all of these people their rightful money especially when the man whose daughter was responsible was going to get the money back for the employees and turn himself in as well to protect her.  Eli lies and now he wants Torres to lie as well so that he doesn’t get caught for doing something that he shouldn’t have done.

Turns out that Kuransky has been lying for a while now and at the same time the FBI wants to talk to Lightman which ends up putting a whole new deminsion on the case.  The FBI is working on a case of their own to bring down Al Qeuda members who are working within the police forces, and they believe that Adam Duke is one of these men, a sleeper within the police who they are using to identify the others.  This explains why Kuransky has been lying.

The FBI are framing Andre and the reason why is to cover up their secret agent within the police force of D.C. so that he can keep his cover to try to take down this sleeper cell.   At the same time we see Wrexler interviewing Eli and while his lies seem believable perhaps to the lawyer to me they don’t come off as real which if Lightman sees it I am pretty sure he will notice it as well…interesting building of characters here.

So someone in the FBI has gone rouge and is framing people for his own purposes, which is not too surprising and its also not too surprising that its Kuransky either.  He had a daughter who was killed over in Iraq and he wants to get back at the government because they are responsible for her death in his eyes because they lied about everything including how she died.

Lightman was testing Torres and wanted to talk with Loker about what he did and he made Loker stay on with the Lightman Group as an unpaid intern if he wants to stay on the job.   The revelation on Alec and Gillian’s relationship is that he was addicted to drugs before and the woman with him was his sponsor all along so it wasn’t what we thought it was or what Dr. Lightman thought it was, in the end Gillian was aware her husband was lying because he was lying to everyone but her because what he was going through was private between them until Lightman followed him in this episode.    A great story with a final good ending to some storylines I’ve been wondering about for a while now.

“You haven’t been lying long enough to be any good at it.”  -Torres to Loker

“There is always going to be another bad guy, always another kid they’re going to sacrifice.” -Lightman to Foster

Rating: A

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 10

The Better Half

When Doctor Lightman’s ex-wife shows up for help on a case you can’t help but instantly like her.  I get that the two of them didn’t work together and I’m pretty sure we’ll find out why they didn’t work out together.  She brings him in on a case of a burned down house where a grandmother died and the rest of the family almost died as well and the daughter is in the hospital.

It turns out that the reporter named Jack Garcia and Fran Ambrose used to be friends who had lost contact with one another, thus adding another layer to the past between the two of them and why Jack Garcia would do something like this to him.

On the other side of the coin, Torres and Doctor Foster investigate a member of a rappers entourage that was killed in a drive by and the cops are looking for who might be responsible for taking him down.   The rapper himself might have killed the man for reasons that we’ll find out I am sure.

There is a great scene with Doctor Lightman, Doctor Foster and the young boy in the family with the burned down house where they sit in a small room with the kid and Doctor Lightman pretends to have an imaginary friend which is pretty funny sequence.   Then comes the surprising revelation that Frank’s wife Cheryl was cheating on him with Frank’s former friend Jack Garcia which adds another wrinkle to the entire case.  So now it might be a reason for Jack Garcia to burn the house down but I don’t believe it and neither does the mother of the two kids.  Although its obvious that the daughter knew something about the affair because she was angry at her mother over it.

Lightman and his ex-wife and their reasons for divorce surprise me a little, it wasn’t that they stopped caring for one another as far as I can tell and they both still care very much for their daughter as well whom I love because she seems to sort of be like her father in a lot of ways though not fully.   Lightman and Zoe got divorced because she couldn’t take him analyzing her every second of every day….thankfully he steps back a little bit with their daughter.

The parents get interrogated and the entire time I’m watching I am well aware that neither Frank nor Cheryl did the burning down of the house.  I already knew who burnt the house down and when it was revealed I was not surprised at all:  The daughter Maggie Ambrose claimed that Jack Garcia burned down the house and I knew it from the first time Eli talked with her and she had one tear in the eye.   This all comes out in the scene where the parents find out that the daughter knew about the mothers affair and how broken up by it she was, how afraid she was that it was all going to ruin her family.

Back on the rapper front, Dante Edwards was killed because he was gay.   The rapper that they thought killed him wasn’t homophobic at all, he was just acting like he was for his music just as he plays tough to sell his music as well which is true for most rappers, they aren’t any tougher than  you or I they just play as if they are.

The daughter did not burn down the house, another house is found in flames shortly after burned to the ground by a serial arsanist….yet Doctor Lightman knows something and wants to talk to the husband.   Torres talks again to the rapper and his cousin turns out that Dante was dating Caden the rapper and the two of them were in love.  Turns out that his cousin did it which was a little surprising to me but not much.

It is not Jack Garcia after all but his wife, Sarah Garcia who did it because he was cheating on her and she wanted revenge and the revenge was to burn down the houses of the women that he was cheating on her with.

-let me tell you Lie to Me has a great soundtrack, whoever is responsible for the shows music should be rewarded it is very well done and strong, showing character as much as the rest of the show does.

Lightman and his ex-wife end up sleeping together at the end of teh show and their daughter comes home right after they finish which is great and gave me a nice laugh at the end of such a dramatic episode.

Quotes:

“Do you not remember what it was like after she left ? You wore the same shirt to the office every day for a month!” -Doctor Foster to Doctor Lightman regarding his wife.

“Someone who doesn’t study my eyebrows while I’m wearing a thong”  – Zoe to Cal

Overall: A+

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep. 9

Life is Priceless

Doctor Lightman arrives at a FEMA disaster site where a building has collapsed and once again this show starts off with a unexpected way.  I never really know what the group is going to be investigating again and again.  It’s never what you think its going to be.  Sure they do investigate murders and other such things as that, but this time its a problem with a building and who is lying about how it collapsed and why.   It always amazes me what Dr. Lightman can uncover about what is going on in any situation just by what people are not saying instead of what they are saying.

While Doctor Lightman and Doctor Foster are investigating what happened at the building site Eli and Torres are busy helping a man who invented a  social networking site and if the woman that he met loved him or his money.   What they uncover about it is interesting for sure, that she does love him and his money and she did know about the money before she met him.

Back at the site they find out that methane is down where the men are trapped and the drill is going to hit the methane pocket and ignite it killing the men down below and also damaging the site even more.  This happens as I knew it would almost instantly and Dr. Lightman is too late to stop it from happening despite the warnings.

Episodes like this make me watch Lie to Me, it’s not a typical show at all, most procedural dramas are formulaic following the same arcs over and over again, Lie to Me changes with each episode.  It’s always a question of what’s going to happen with each character and with the new people (guest stars) that you get introduced to.  This episode is another example of that.

The surprise at the end is always there, who really was responsible, or whats going to happen next.   This time its the Mayor, Meredith Fallon who is responsible, she lied to cover up the methane and paid a city contractor to cover it up as well, at the end of the day she goes to jail and the men in the shaft get saved all but one, the same one who everyone blamed at first for causing the collapse.

Final Grade: A-

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 8

Depraved Heart

An Indian woman jumps from a bridge killing herself and its found out almost immediately that her sister jumped from the same bridge only a few days before.  I like Cal Lightman’s relationship with his daughter Chloe, he doesn’t hide her from the truth of the world, he shows her the world and this is evident in this episode as he doesn’t lie to her about the women that committed suicide.

Lightman begins to investigate with a female officer who is a friend of his ex-wives and Torres.  The three of them work to uncover why these women would commit suicide.  At first its thought to be because they stripped at a strip club and were filmed and put on the internet, but this turns out not to be the reason when a third woman commits suicide by jumping in front of a subway car.  This leads them to the immigration officer who is a little shady as well and also to the fact that these women were surrogates for women who couldn’t have babies.  Turns out the immigration officer was using these women and not paying them anything, just leaving them out on the street.  In the end it comes out that he was responsible for these girls deaths.

The second story about the SEC fraud actually has a much more lasting effect on the story than the first one, because this one deals with Loker and his lies.   A wealthy man involved in a pyramid scheme who took all the money of his employees is not actually responsible for the money disappearing.  It turns out that his daughter did it and after they find out about this Foster and the man want to keep it hidden so that they could pay the money back to the employees.  Instead Loker goes behind their back and reveals who really was responsible and thus no one gets a cent this will later come back to haunt Loker in another episode.

Rating: A

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 7

The Best Policy

When one of Cal Lightman’s friends who works for a drug company we begin to get a better view of what Cal Lightman was like before he founded the Lightman Group.   He doesn’t believe in using his skills on his friend or digging to deep into rather or not his friend might be involved in this problem.   When it comes to light that the woman who is responsible for stealing the formula for the drug to sell it to someone else and this is causing people to have strokes and die.   She claims that it is the real drug that is doing it as well as the imitation one is the same drug exactly.

Eventually it comes to light that the second study done on the drug really was falsified and the drug never should have been put on the market.   Cal’s friend is dating the woman in charge of the company but he is unaware that she paid to have this study falsified so that the drug could be put on the market.   Thus she is taken down and I am pretty sure that Cal looses a friend because he did things in this episode to his friend to protect him but he did it deceitfully.

Meanwhile Foster and Loker help with negotiations with Yemen for the release of two young americans who were taken prisoner.   Its revealed during this time that the sister is in fact a spy for the CIA and that they want her back at all costs even the death of her brother.   Eventually Foster finds out a way to get both of them freed by giving the Yemen Negotiator the rights to go to a white house dinner.  This closes out this episode pretty quickly.

I have noticed watching this first season that the main story is always the one that Doctor Lightman is working on not the one that anyone else is working on.   Sometimes there is only one main story but usually there is a second minor story that Loker and Torres work on or sometimes Loker and Foster.  This helps flesh out their characters as well which is a good thing.

Rating: A

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 6

Do No Harm

Lightman and Foster are tapped to find a missing girl who the police believe the parents are responsible for killing.  She is adopted and they believe that her adoptive parents might have been abusive.  After meeting the parents Doctor Lightman knows that they didn’t kill their daughter and that they are truly worried about where she might be.  He continues to investigate uncovering the truth by talking to a few of the girls friends including a little older boy who was hiding her backpack so that if she decided to run away she would have stuff she needed.  Instead she disappeared before she could even take the stuff with her.

Eventually it comes out that her and her mother had a fight and the girl got hurt, she still visits the hospital once a week to have her dressing changed on the burn and this leads them to finding the girl who breaks down before them crying and saying she can’t tell them who had her.   Her mother eventually convinces her by talking with her and this leads Doctor LIghtman to get the girl to tell him who had her without her really saying who it is.   This leads them to the psychiatrist who was talking with her and who kidnaped her and another girl because they reminded her of her own daughter who died.

At the same time Loker and Torres interview a woman who wrote an autobiography about being in North Ugandan and rather or not she was telling the truth about never being involved in the violence there.   Loker likes the woman and even goes out on a date with her before Torres finds out the truth and reveals it to him, Loker confronts her and she admits to the truth telling them that someone has to tell the story, but it’s not true and it never gets published.  This was not a bad sub-plot story as it did help form a relationship between Loker and Torres to show that they are becoming friends but over all nowhere near as important as the main story about the missing girl.

Rating: A-

Lie to Me Season 1-Ep 5

Unchained

I never really took into account all the different kinds of jobs that the Lightman group might be involved in and this episode shows a new side to this.   The first is Lightman and Torres interviewing a man who was a former gang leader who killed a cop before he was taken into custody.  Now the Mayor and his people believe that this Gang leader is a changed man who wants to help bring down the gangs that he helped foster before.

Lightman believes that the man has changed, Torres who has a history with violent men (her father was abusive we find out in this episode) does not believe that violent people can change because of this history.   She insists that he hasn’t changed and that they shouldn’t release him especially after the wife keeps insisting that he has changed but showing signs that she doesn’t really believe it.

This of course leads to the gang leader being released and going back to his house where we see the wife come before him with a gun just as the cops pull up because Lightman knew that this was going to happen.   The former Gang leader and really changed man stands before her not afraid speaking to her, telling her that he knows and understands slowly he walks towards her and she collapses against him crying.   He proves once and for all that he has changed and LIghtman tells Torres that sometimes people do change, not every person but those that truly do want to change will change.

Meanwhile Foster and Loker investigate the death of a firefighter who may or may not have been killed on purpose.  They uncover hazing which is not too surprising and the fact that most of the other firefighters didn’t like the man, this all comes to the revelation that the second in charge at the fire house is responsible because he found out that the man was sleeping with the captains niece and it was a racial thing, all together a good sub-plot case but not as good as the main gang case.

Rating: A-

Lie to Me Season 1- Ep 4

Love Always

By the time I watched this Episode I was already hooked on Lie to Me but this episode made me unable to stop watching the show for good.   This was the first real episode to deal with just one case and one thing happening, and it also showed that the show was going to start growing its legs.   The episode deals with the wedding of a Korean Ambassador’s son, who has been targeted for assassination.   the thing is he wants the wedding to go on because he wants his son to have a life with the woman that he loves.

At the reception as a speech is going on a Korean man tries to attack but is taken down by the police and Doctor lightman. At the same time the son is shot and taken to the hospital and now its time to reveal who might have been responsible.   The man who tried to stage an attack had a bottle with gasoline in it and a lighter he was going to set himself on fire not shoot someone, someone else shot him.   They study the tapes but don’t find anything that could point to who did it.

Eventually they find out who did it and the reasons why from talking with the new wife.   It turns out that she had another name and she changed her name to get away from a man who was abusive to her.  It is one of the camera men that did it and he is arrested.  At the end a new family is made that day and we learn a bit more about the mystery that is Gillian Foster’s husband,  all signs point to him being a man who cheats on his wife.

Rating: A