At Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology, grad student Kirsten is being grilled about accusations of academic sabotage. She’s supposed to have negatively impacted her roommate Camille’s research, all in the name of getting published first, and Camille wants her to face academic suspension. Although there’s no real proof that she was the one who harmed the work, and even though she fixed the research herself, Kirsten does get suspended by Professor Hardwick as a way for the school to cover its tracks. If that wasn’t enough for Kirsten to deal with in one day, once she gets outside following the meeting, LAPD Detective Fisher informs her that her father Ed Clark died. They think that he killed himself, but even that possibility doesn’t bring on an emotional response from Kirsten, given that she has temporal dysplasia.
Detective Fisher brings Kirsten to the station and informs her that everything about the crime scene points to suicide, even though Ed shot himself in the chest. He questions her about her muted response to her father’s death, yet before she can give an answer, a report comes on the news about an explosion at Applied Holographics. During the report, Kirsten uses her phone to take a picture of the crime scene photos on Fisher’s computer before splitting back to her house in Echo Park. But once she gets there, she finds Camille packing up her things, eagerly about to push her out of the house they share together. With Kirsten’s academic suspension keeping her accessing the school’s wifi, she asks Camille if she could use her laptop to hack into the LAPD’s database and access the police records from the case she’s involved in. Stunned at the request, Camille incredulously tells Kirsten that she’d have a better chance at breaking into one of the offices at school and Kirsten, not the best at picking up on sarcasm, decides to do just that.
Kirsten quietly and quickly gets into the office and hacks into the LAPD database without much difficulty. However, while she’s in there, a group of armed men burst into the room and kidnap her. They take Kirsten to a Chinese restaurant where she meets Maggie Baptiste, an employee at a federal agency that has been tracking Kirsten for a long time. They need her to come in and use her temporal dysplasia (specifically her inability to perceive time) to help solve a serious crime, yet Kirsten understandably didn’t take kindly to being picked up by people she didn’t know and transplanted somewhere she wasn’t made aware of. Maggie reminds her that there’s nothing to go back to, that she doesn’t have a home and that her doctoral plans are pretty much in the gutter, so Kirsten relents and allows herself to be escorted to the lair of the Stitchers program.
Rather than giving her a psych evaluation, the team only has 20 minutes to prep Kirsten for her mission. During prep work, she bickers with neuroscientist Cameron before learning that the Stitchers program involves a live consciousness being inserted into a recently deceased body. With consciousness lingering for 30 seconds after death and there being a 10 minute window before the brain begins deteriorating, the program looks to pick up fresh samples in order to find the missing piece of information they were looking for. Therefore, a live consciousness makes it easier to access and interpret the brain’s bio-electrical aspects. The case this time is that of bomber Peter Brandt, who more or less majored in explosives in college; he died in an explosion at his apartment, with the second bomb coming at Applied Holographics. Supposedly, he purchased enough supplies to create four bombs, so the Stitchers have to account for the missing two bombs before they’re set off.
In stitching, the mind of the stitcher projects an image of themselves in the memory, with a special catsuit designed to keep the connection with the lab’s sensors. Kirsten isn’t exactly thrilled to be looking like Catwoman, but bio-electrical engineer Linus assures her that she has it easier since stitching was originally supposed to be naked. Not having any time to waste, Kirsten gets in the Fish Tank and receives a reminder to keep her feet on the pads and her hands on the keyboards to her side. If she needs to bounce from the memory, she has to type her username (Kirsten) and her PIN code (iheartlinus) before she’ll be able to get out. With a wing and a prayer, Kirsten bounces into Brandt’s memory and immediately begins hyperventilating. She goes into a state of shock that threatens to have her removed from the memory, but she eventually manages to calm herself down and begin looking around the apartment. She is to be on the look out for anything out of place, anything that could point the team in the direction of the two missing bombs, and she ends up following the sound of a cell phone to Brandt’s bedroom. Images of him and his girlfriend Julie are on the bed and when Kirsten touches Julie’s body, it sends her brain into overdrive.
Kirsten is then hit with a barrage of images, including Julie being hit by a bus three months ago after saying something about being stolen from. There’s a scuffle at her funeral, which Brandt is involved in, before she sees the bomber set up a bomb in his apartment, walk back to his seat across the room, and blow himself to kingdom come. The bomb wasn’t an accident like law enforcement thought; he committed suicide for reasons that none of them know yet. With that, Brandt’s brain begins shutting down and Kirsten manages to bounce her way out of there just in time, though her cerebral temperature was unusually high. After she gets out, she’s very obviously impacted by the experience, so medical personnel Ayo and Cameron help her back to the latter’s apartment for a night of rest and rejuvenation.
Unfortunately, Kirsten has no memory of what happened when she emerged from the stitch, though Cameron assures her that there was no funny business between them. The two head back to the lab where they learn more about Julie and Brandt from Linus; the two met during grad school and everything was okay until the incident Kirsten saw during the stitch. An electrical engineer working at UC Santa Monica, Julie thought that her work had been stolen by Applied Holographics, with Brandt blaming her death on them and using the bomb at revenge. 
Kirsten then brings up two things she saw during the flurry of images she endured – Sepulveda Boulevard and a bright blue door. The team had already been dispatched to look for blue doors on 43-mile Sepulveda, but Kirsten believes she can find it herself, so she sets off with Cameron and Maggie hot on her heels. Maggie warns her that if she steps out of bounds whatsoever and goes against the stitching protocol, the entire operation could be dismantled and they could all find themselves facing a severe punishment from the government.
Still, Kirsten goes along with her plan that, as she explains to Cameron, involves a face recognition software she wrote. All she has to do is rewrite some code in order to get the software focused on blue doors, so she heads over to Echo Park with Cameron in tow. Rather than lying to Camille about what they need her help for, Kirsten is straightforward (to Cameron’s chagrin) yet does manage to get her former roommate on board to help. An initial search by Kirsten doesn’t produce anything, but Cameron simplifies the search and finds Jane Peeka, a Dean at UC Santa Monica, the head of Blue Door Consulting, someone with a connection to Applied Holographics, and a figure that Kirsten saw in her stitch. This, they believe, is the woman who stole the research and funneled it to Applied Holographics, so they track her down in Santa Clarita right as the third bomb explodes in her house. Thankfully, she wasn’t inside when it happened and could give them the name of Fred Castellano, an employee in the UC Santa Monica science department.
Kirsten and Cameron surmise that Jane got rich from stealing Julie’s research, while Fred likely received a finder’s fee for bringing the research to Jane’s attention. In order to locate Fred, Cameron pulls the fire alarm and pours over the map looking for his classroom, but Kirsten has it handled – she knows that the bomb is in the basement. What she doesn’t know, though, is that Fred is attached to the bomb. He’s holding a detonator that, if moved at all, would cause the bomb to explode; exhausted from two days of holding it together, Fred expresses his guilt at what he did to Julie while Cameron points out that a cell phone is a part of the bomb. Kirsten goes back into her memory to remember the tones she heard while in the stitch and manages to defuse the bomb using 5-8-5-4-3 – a sequence that spells out Julie. She sheds an unexpected tear before Detective Fisher and the bomb squad make it into the basement, with Fisher particularly suspicious about what she and Cameron were doing there. They try to explain that they were in the basement studying before Maggie comes along, flashes her badge, and takes the two back to the lab.
Instead of being impressed, the agency thought about yanking the funding for the program, a decision they recanted when Maggie convinced them that something like this would never happen again. Upset, Kirsten goes to leave and explains to Cameron when he catches up that this experience made her feel things she never felt before. She never knew what grief, anger, and love felt like and now that she does, it’s incredibly overwhelming to deal with. But before Kirsten can leave, Maggie delivers a trump card – the next case they’re working on is about the death of the research scientist who helped develop the stitchers technology with his partner.
The man? Kirsten’s non-adoptive father Ed Clark.
His partner? Daniel Stinger, Kirsten’s biological father who left her with Ed when she was a child.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Can I get you anything? Cold drink? Restraining order?”
-“Maybe it was that horny TA you screwed for an A? He seemed threatened by how smart you are.”
-“He died of…explosion.”
-“Okay, Stretch. Into the drink.”
-“I heart Linus.” “Yeah, you do.”
-“Well, if it makes you feel better, I don’t feel like kissing you now.”
-“Unsocialized nerds and girls in catsuits need not apply.”
-“And I am too old to do a stint in Gitmo.”
-“The man with the motion-sense detector is sobbing.”
-So, this is a different look for ABC Family, no? In addition to the show’s procedural structure, I don’t think they have a similar genre series in their repertoire. The closest analog to Stitchers in the ABC Family annals might be Kyle XY and even that’s a bit of a stretch. If nothing else, this show will be important for ABC Family stretching its creative boundaries and figuring out how it can continue to evolve while remaining true to itself.
-I really like the idea of introducing an acerbic, asshole-y character and humanizing them through their experiences in the show. A lot of characters in the Kirsten vein would stay exactly how they were in the pilot or, at least, wouldn’t evolve enough to show any real progress, so it was nice to see that after one stitch, she was beginning to put the pieces together regarding emotion and human connection. And it’s perfectly understandable that after 20-something years of being in her own little bubble that feeling what it’s like to be in human and in touch with your emotions would be too much for Kirsten to deal with.
-Also interesting: the show having Cameron get the blue door/Sepulveda connection. Characters like Kirsten are often in the “cranky genius” category, wherein people around them tolerate their eccentricities because they produce results. Already in the premiere we’re seeing that she’s not infallible and that she’s not going to be some magic oracle who can produce every answer the show needs at the 39 minute mark every week. That’s the type of writing that keeps a procedural fresh, which is a welcome sign to someone like me who doesn’t watch that many procedurals.
-I’m not in love with the visual effects here. It might be a case of getting used to a show’s palette, which can sometimes take a few episodes, but from the bombing within the stitch to Kirsten’s first moments after the stitch, I wasn’t that into that aspect of the show. I did, though, like how the characters within the stitch looked and I think the lab itself has a fun aesthetic that could be of great use later in the season.
-After some light research on Google, I don’t think temporal dysplasia is a thing. There’s cortical dysplasia, but that’s associated with seizures. This isn’t a criticism of the show, though; I was just curious whether what Kirsten had was a real thing or something drawn up by the show. It’s probably better that it’s not tied to any specific medical condition, because the show can do whatever it wants with Kirsten’s condition without fear of internet nitpickers like myself.
-Having a Chinese restaurant as a front for the lab is silly in the best way. Personally, before my consciousness can jump into the consciousness of a dead body, it has to be filled with crab rangoon. But that’s just me.
-I love that the show had Camille join forces with Kirsten and Cameron in the first place. It would’ve been very easy to sideline her for most of the season and maybe reveal what Kirsten is doing in the summer finale, but it’s much more fun to have someone as playful as Allison Scagliotti as near the main plot as possible. And it shows me that the show isn’t going to be setting up mysteries with no intention of solving them or more focused with secret keeping vs. any of the interesting things it introduced in the pilot.
-I’m very curious about Marta, the stitcher mentioned multiple times. A lot of the danger of stitching was danced around in this episode, so getting more specifics will add some interesting stakes to every stitch that Kirsten undergoes from there on out.
-Although I did find Linus funny, I’m hopeful that we’ll occasionally see a more serious side and/or that most of his humor isn’t built around being a horny nerd. That’s such a limited characterization and it’d be a shame to strand a talented actor in a somewhat stereotypical role.
-The actual stitching itself was really fun. I didn’t even mind the exposition dumps or anything because the stitching was compelling and made me excited for all the places the show could go this season. It’s an interesting device for a procedural to have in its back pocket and something that I hope the show will take as much advantage of as it can.
-Going forward, I’m most curious about how the show will handle the Ed/Daniel mystery. With the right execution, this could be a great way to force Kirsten to confront her past and for her to make the emotional breakthrough that she needs, which would be excellent from a characterization standpoint and rewarding from a viewer standpoint. It all depends, though, on how long the show will keep Kirsten in the dark about her father’s reasons for leaving her with Ed and whether it will be ready to dispatch this particular through line once it’s ran its course.
-Next week on Stitchers: The team investigates a deadly drug and finds itself on a collision course with Detective Fisher.
