First, let me apologize for not getting this done last week. I didn’t forget about you! Last week’s episode of Intelligence, Patient Zero, had a plot that’s been used in many science fiction books, movies and shows – a man-made virus is affecting the general public. How and who? But Intelligence was able to find some interesting twists, and of course, the discoveries about the “how” and the “who” were made by accessing the chip in Gabriel’s head, as well as a cool drone operated with hand gestures (and a goofy looking thinking cap!).
Gabriel and Riley are sent to Texas, over some objection to putting Gabriel in harm’s way, to find the origin of a deadly virus that broke out at a music festival. Using facial recognition software and the DMV database, Gabriel is able to pinpoint the likely source of the virus – a man who had been executed by the State days before. They discover that the killer had been the unknowing victim of a military experiment – the lethal injection machine was tampered with, so that the execution never happened, and the killer was whisked off and injected with the deadly virus – and he then escaped from the military facility. Unexpectedly alive, he finds his former partner, who turned against him, and kills him. He unknowingly infects several people at the music festival, and finds his wife, looking for a way to hide out and evade recapture.
Lillian is able to track the plot to a high-ranking Army general, but her communication with Gabriel is intercepted, and Gabriel and Riley are captured as they track down the former Death Row inmate. The military tries to kill them to eliminate them as witnesses, but of course that doesn’t happen! When they do finally track down the killer, he dies from the virus, but they are able to get a sample of his blood to have a vaccine created from it (and frankly, this bothered me a little – there’s no possible stretch of the imagination where a vaccine could have been made that quickly, but hey, this is a fictional show!)
Riley and Gabriel talk about the path that led Gabriel to become CyberCommand’s guinea pig. He tells her that there were others before him – two are now dead and one is paralyzed. She asks him why he would agree to volunteer with that kind of deadly history – and he says that he would have done anything to try to find his wife, Amelia.
With Gabriel and Riley safe, Lillian has the general arrested.
(And in a funny coincidence, I’m taking a screenwriting class – in our class last week, we were creating a plot to demonstrate several steps in script writing – and our plot came very similar to this episode, even using the phrase “patient zero”!)
Tonight’s episode, Size Matters: When Gabriel and Cybercom learn microscopic robots are infecting and killing artificial intelligence scientists, they must find who’s delivering boxes containing the malicious nanites before Cassidy is the next target.
