While going through the enormous amount of boxes that Ed left Kirsten, the closest thing he had to a living relative, Camille finds a handful of pictures and a classic stereo system. She’s more concerned with getting the system hooked up, but when Kirsten goes through the photos she finds a picture of Ed with her biological mother. The only problem is that the photo is ripped, meaning that he didn’t want anyone to see the person that was on his other side.
Kirsten brings the photo to the lab and interrogates Maggie about who this mystery person is. Maggie simply tells Kirsten that Ed and her biological parents are the architects of the stitchers technology and that they were all friends; however, Kirsten isn’t buying that Maggie is somehow clueless about the dynamic depicted on the photo, so she lets her boss have that copy, given that she has a photographic memory. Kirsten then goes to the employee lounge-type set up at the lab and finds Camille, Linus, and Cameron talking about the stereo system. Camille wants to set it up with Kirsten, but Linus tries to override her wishes and get himself and Cameron a ticket to Echo Park to save the day. Cameron tries to chime in with the notion that women listen to music for meaning while men listen for sonics, an attitude that causes Camille to bring up how her educational background makes her best suited for something like this. Linus doesn’t get the hint, though, and winds up inadvertently pushing her away.
Before she can get too entrenched in the latest drama at work, Kirsten is rushed to the fish tank to stitch into 25-year-old Lily Ross, a newlywed who was murdered on her honeymoon with husband Scott. The two were at the Santa Monica Pier when he left to “plan a romantic surprise” and later found her body; she subsequently died from head trauma with none of her jewelry on her person once she was found. Though the possibility of a robbery gets brought up, Kirsten challenges that notion with the fact that 70% of women who are murdered meet their end from a romantic partner. With the husband sedated and the head trauma possibly making the stitch more difficult, Kirsten bounces into Lily’s memory, where she finds the happy couple on the pier. Scott leaves after forgetting his phone and Lily is grabbed not long after, but it turns out that Scott did, in fact, have his phone, as he started calling someone while still in Lily’s field of vision. Kirsten then gets thrust into an earlier argument the two had at the hotel, which seems to be about Lily finding money that Scott had hidden away for some reason. Although the evidence points to Scott’s guilt, Kirsten bounces out and proclaims to the team that she feels like he’s innocent.
At home, Kirsten tells Camille about her instinct that Scott is innocent and about how the cognitive dissonance between his actions and Lily’s feelings makes her want to sit in on the police questioning. As Camille asks Kirsten about what she thinks about Linus, Kirsten finds a tape in the old stereo system of Ed’s labeled “For When I’m Gone,” which she knew about since she was a little girl. After Fisher gets through with Scott’s questioning, Kirsten comes down on him for not mentioning the envelope of money or the way he was treating his wife, two things that Fisher could not have explained his knowledge of if Scott had pressed him. She then tries to bring up Scott not calling a lawyer, only for Fisher to recount that Scott had taken out a life insurance policy on Lily the week before the wedding. With the positive emotions from the stitch still lingering, Kirsten waits until Fisher steps out to steal his ID badge and make her way into the interrogation room. Once in there, she brings up the fact that Fisher thinks Scott might’ve killed Lily and makes mention of the money and the argument, with the latter drawing a big reaction from Scott. He kicks her out of the interrogation room and Fisher subsequently chews her out for being over her head. But it’s Cameron whose reaction is more severe, as he’s beginning to worry that the residual emotion she’s hanging on to from the initial stitch is interfering with her sense of reason.
Back at the lab, Camille approaches Linus while he’s looking into the nanobot technology that helps keep everything running. But she’s not interested in hearing about nanobots; she wants to know what type of wine he wants her to serve when he and Cameron come over that night to set up the stereo. Although Camille claims that she could easily set up the stereo herself, she knows that it’ll be much faster with more manpower. As Kirsten and Cameron arrive back at the lab, she expresses anxiety to stitch back into Lily before bringing up Cameron’s worry about her getting hurt. But the refraction period on Lily is over and that means that she has to bounce back in in lieu of confronting the complicated emotions that come from her relationship with her co-worker. Once in the second time, Cameron works to slow down the memories and Kirsten finds out that the argument and envelope of money are non-starters – the “argument” was a cutesy exchange that she didn’t hear the end of, while the money was for a necklace that Scott was going to buy her. She then sees Scott present the necklace later on, accompanied by a kiss near the hotel pool, and Lily fixing Scott’s collar at the pier before he leaves.
With time running out, Cameron is anxious for Kirsten to bounce out, but Maggie makes him give her some additional seconds to work. While inside, Kirsten sees the driver that took them to the pier from the hotel and bounces out before her heart rate can get even more out of control. Yet once the team looks into the driver, he has an alibi that checks out, as he was at a sports bar three miles from the pier when Lily was killed. Perturbed, Kirsten decides to go to Scott while Cameron is sent spiraling back to Marta’s hospital room. While drowning in his own self-loathing, he receives a visit from Maggie, who chides him for pitying himself when A) Kirsten is different from Marta and B) stitching has a noble purpose greater than them all. Despite the fact that it’s not 100% safe as of yet, everything they’re doing is going to be worth it in the end, even if she can’t tell him everything about the process just yet.
Meanwhile, Kirsten arrives at Scott’s apartment and finds him drunk. She tries to explain that she doesn’t think he’s guilty and he mentions something about Michelle, the redheaded hotel concierge, before freaking out when Kirsten goes to touch him. He exclaims that his absence is what ultimately killed Lily, that she would still be alive if he hadn’t gone for the champagne surprise. Scott then kicks her out of the apartment, all the while Linus and Camille share 
drinks as they attempt to set up the stereo. They bond over how they don’t really know Kirsten and Cameron that well and almost make out before trying the stereo out. When the stereo looks to take too much power, they turn the lights out and hook up.
Kirsten finds Cameron in the hotel lobby and tells him that the concierge was the one who arranged the car that took Scott and Lily to the pier. If the driver himself wasn’t the one who killed Lily, the concierge must be a part of it, so the two decide to use the NSA expense account in order to load up on jewelry. They then lasciviously flaunt their recent purchases to the concierge while asking for dinner recommendations and getting a car set up to take them to the pier. This results in them getting picked up by the same driver who took Lily and Scott and dropped off at the pier, with Kirsten texting Camille on the ride over. However, Camille is too busy hooking up with Linus in order to track the car or do anything resembling watching Kirsten’s back. That proves to be costly when Kirsten and Cameron get held up by the driver’s partner and taken to a nearby merry-go-round in order to complete the robbery. But once she gets confronted by a man with a gun, Kirsten begins talking back to him, pressing him on Lily’s death and telling him that they could help Michelle if he turns himself in. When he won’t, Cameron inadvertently turns the merry-go-round on before using a nearby bucket to knock the robber out.
Michelle ends up arrested, while an APB on the driver means that he’s not far from being in police custody. Arriving on the scene late, Fisher praises Kirsten’s instincts on the case before rejecting Cameron’s offer to go have a beer. When Kirsten and Cameron get back to Echo Park, Camille apologizes for not being there for them, yet attention is firmly on how awkward and giggly she and Linus are, especially when talking about what they did that night. Once Kirsten and Cameron are alone, though, she asks whether the emotions she’s felt from the couples she’s encountered in the stitch constitute love – that feeling of intense connection followed by heartbreaking loss. Cameron doesn’t know, though, and tells Kirsten that she did good that day before leaving.
Alone, Kirsten checks out the cassette tape that turns out to have three of her favorite stories as a little girl on it. Ed put them together in order to comfort her when he left for a while, but since the two weren’t close, Kirsten attempted to toss it before someone else fished it from the garbage can.
It turns out that Maggie is the other person in the photo, having in her possession the other half of the original, while Marta wakes up from the coma she went into following the botched stitch.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“I’ve been meaning to get into vinyl.” “I thought you were into leather.”
-“Tell me about Maggie.” “I think she prefers chai latte?”
-“Oh, I don’t think you’re an idiot. You’re more of an imbecile.”
-“Oh, I liked it better when we were shopping.”
-“You are deceptively athletic for someone of your stature.”
-“You should listen to your girlfriend.” “Ouch.”
-“You did good today, Stretch.” “You, too, girlfriend.”
-So, Maggie is paranoid about these guys going out into the field, yet there’s not a lick of security at the lab? Everybody can seemingly come and go as they please?
-When it was revealed that Scott already had his phone, I thought this episode might be an homage to the Robert Blake case and that was an interesting proposition. What the episode did in exonerating the husband was a good choice, though, as it’s very easy for a case like this to fall into “the boyfriend/husband/lover/ex did it” territory. It was much fresher to concoct the scheme around this couple than have either of them involved in anything nefarious.
-What I’m wondering, though, is whether this might be the structure going forward. First stitch: they pursue one lead based on limited evidence. Second stitch: their assumptions after the first stitch are proven wrong. I do like the idea of unreliable memories and of the limits of the stitchers technology dictating how much information they can get at a time, but I’m not sure about this being the show’s procedural angle.
-Three episodes in and Cameron is giving me nerdier Sawyer-from-Lost vibes with these nicknames.
-With all the backstory (and hints of backstory) we’ve gotten thus far, I kind of hope we get a flashback episode this season. Or a case that ties into the program before Kirsten arrived.
-More crazy reveals this episode, fitting given the title. I took from the ending that Maggie had a thing with Ed, although keeping a torn picture of herself seemed strange, while the narration over Marta’s awakening intimated that she’s their love child. It’s very intriguing that they’re already pulling the Marta card anyway, both for what it means for the show’s storytelling style and how her presence in this world could shake up Kirsten, Cameron, and Maggie. Throwing in that possible connection and how Maggie seems to have compartmentalized what grief she felt when Marta went down certainly heightens the creative ceiling this particular storyline could achieve.
-I’m curious why the flashbacks to Kirsten’s childhood are all of her at the same age. Will we be getting looks at how she was as a pre-teen, teenager, etc.?
-I like that they already hooked Linus and Camille up. It felt in character for Camille, who seems like someone who goes after what she wants, and it should be fun to explore what that hook-up means for their professional relationship. And once Kirsten and Cameron find out that their friends hooked up, their own dynamic might undergo some type of change, with Kirsten either getting more in touch with these new emotions she’s feeling or Cameron finding a way to express how he feels to someone who doesn’t fully understand what it means to have a crush.
-I will say, though, that given how in touch Kirsten was with Lily’s love for Scott, to the point where she was an inch from being physical with him, I’m a touch surprised that we didn’t get a kiss between her and Cameron. But I think it makes sense for her to back away from physical contact after grappling with residual emotion and being overwhelmed at her unfamiliarity with certain feelings.
-Also, I really like their dynamic when the show isn’t as heightened. I mean, they’re good together regardless, but it was nice to see them share a quiet moment when it was just the two of them vs. constantly being on a case or bantering with one another.
-A week after getting a look at the memories of someone on drugs, we now have the sped-up memories of someone with head trauma. It was a nice touch.
-I’m curious whether Marta’s condition was brought on by one time running out the clock or whether it was a cumulative effect. If it’s the latter, Kirsten is probably safe for a while, but if it’s the former and Kirsten is still unsure of how to compartmentalize the emotion from the stitch, she could easily slip up and hurt herself.
-Maggie’s mention of the corpse cassette – was that related to the tape that Ed made Kirsten? If it is, why would he have made that tape for her when she was so young? And where was he going, since we know he was alive for another decade?
-I’m a tad disappointed that we didn’t get a montage of Cameron and Kirsten trying on jewelry set to some random 80’s song. And the montage would have to include Cameron waiting on her trying on jewelry and rejecting the first two passes before okaying her third choice.
-One character I’d like to see more of: Fisher. He’s been a fairly standard TV detective thus far, a pitbull who doesn’t let go of a case even if it costs him in his personal life, but the smile he gave after Cameron’s request to go out for a beer made me wonder about who this guy really is. It might be fun to see him join in on the show’s banter.
-Next week on Stitchers: Kirsten learns more about the stitch that nearly did Marta in, while the team sets up a stakeout at Cameron’s apartment when his neighbor is killed.
