Kirsten arrives back home to find that Camille cooked her an apology dinner. Rather than kicking her out, Camille is allowing her to stay in the house due to Kirsten being in the stitchers program and the guilt that she felt about the academic suspension. However, instead of being touched by the gesture, Kirsten is merely bewildered before setting down her glass of wine and going to bed.
The following day at the lab, Kirsten prepares to be stitched into Ed, with Linus handing her the communication device that she’ll need to stay in touch with Cameron. After what happened with the first stitch, particularly how Kirsten responded to touching Julie, Cameron is worried about letting her go back in, as no one is supposed to be able to touch the intangibles in the memories. But with less than 48 hours to go before Ed’s memory comes crashing down and the specter of Marta hanging over the lab, Kirsten’s desire to find out what happened to her father get quashed by Maggie. The reason? The team will be investigating the death of 18-year-old Lisa Keller, who overdosed on a Colombian drug known as the Devil’s Breath. It’s the latest party drug to hit the Los Angeles underground, a disinhibitor at low doses that causes disorientation and convulsions at higher doses, and something that could cause hundreds of deaths if not properly stamped out.
But Kirsten doesn’t care about that, not when Ed has less time than Lisa does before he won’t be able to be stitched into. She’s upset that Maggie lied to her to get her to stay on the team, but Maggie gets her to back down and agree to help figure out where Lisa got the drugs in the first place. Meanwhile, Detective Fisher is at the LAPD offices obsessing over the holes in Kirsten’s background – her dead mother, the reason she doesn’t have a license, the family friend that raised her. But his superior gets him to turn his attention to the case of Lisa Keller, given that her mother is a prominent judge and someone the LAPD needs on their side. After calling in the toxicology report, Fisher visits the medical examiner, only to find out that Keller’s body is not in the morgue. The ME is decidedly blase about it and turns out to be working with the stitchers, who have already nabbed Keller’s body.
Back in the lab, the stitchers prepare to stitch Kirsten into Lisa’s memories, which aren’t fully mapped out due to the uncertainty of how the drugs in her system would impact her perception. Once Kirsten bounces into the memory, she begins feeling the effects of the drugs, as she can’t focus her eyes properly. Once she spots a sketchy guy in a fedora across the club, she sees Lisa’s friend Denise, but before Kirsten can do anything about this development, the faces in the rave turn into those of monsters. With her heart rate and temperature shooting up, Kirsten sees a man with a camera shoving drugs into Lisa’s mouth before bouncing out of the memory.
Afterwards, Kirsten finds out that there are no Denises on Lisa’s social media accounts. The reason, she thinks, is because Denise wasn’t actually a friend; she was someone who Lisa wanted/needed to take care of. Yet now that she’s out of Lisa, she won’t be able to be stitched into Ed due to the limited resources of the department. And there’s no way to go back into Lisa due to the refractory period necessary to keep the brain fresh, so Kirsten now has anywhere between 5 to 12 hours to kill before she goes back in. As such, she baits Cameron into giving her a ride home before having him unwittingly take her to the warehouse the rave that Lisa died at was thrown. She believes that it can help stimulate the fuzzier parts of her experience in the stitch and get her that much closer to finding out about Ed; once that happens, she can forget all about stitching and focus on getting her doctoral plans back on track.
Once Cameron and Kirsten get into the warehouse, though, they’re confronted by the guy who throws the raves, who gives up the name of Raf, the photographer Kirsten saw in the stitch. The two then get thrown out by Cleaver, the rave bouncer, before having a run-in with Detective Fisher in the parking lot. Kirsten is evasive when asked about what she was doing and when she gets home with Cameron, finds herself confronted by the idea of going to the rave. Camille overheard talk of raving and convinces Cameron and Kirsten to not only go but take her with them, as she could act as a rave translator given that she’s the only one of them who’d ever been to one before. Cameron then rushes to the lab to inform Linus of the plan to go to the rave; in exchange for going to the rave, Camille requested an exotic companion for the night, so Cameron successfully recruits Linus to do the job.
Outside the rave, Linus stocks up on glowsticks and glow bracelets, with both boys stunned to find Kirsten and Camille in skimpy clothes for the night of field work. They’re trying to blend in with the rave scene, but Cameron is especially surprised at how Kirsten looks upon cleaning up. For her part, Camille is into Linus and when the foursome get into the rave, takes him away under the guise of splitting up to cover more ground. While Camille and Linus have fun dancing together, neither of them having an idea of what they’re supposed to be looking for, Kirsten and Cameron attempt to blend in while looking for Raf. They don’t immediately find him, but they do stumble upon Denise – Lisa’s friend and, as it turns out, Raf’s girlfriend. Raf quickly shows up and pulls a knife on Cameron before dragging Denise away with him. Kirsten and Cameron follow and eventually get Camille and Linus to join them, only for Raf to slip by Cleaver and out of the warehouse. Camille then tases Cleaver and the foursome rushes outside looking for Raf, except they get hung up by Detective Fisher.
Fisher has them all get on the ground and gloats to Kirsten that he finally caught her. Instead of finding a way to escape, she completely confesses to being involved in the stitching program and, to Cameron’s chagrin, gets Fisher to come to the lab to prove that she wasn’t lying. Maggie is, of course, pissed off that Kirsten blew up their spot and inadvertently outs Camille as working for the stitchers program, thinking that she was responsible for Fisher’s 
presence. It turns out that Camille had been spying on Kirsten for the past year, all for the chance to have her living expenses and grad school tuition paid; Kirsten isn’t exactly mad at Camille for taking such a deal, especially since Camille didn’t even know what type of strange behavior to report to Maggie, but she doesn’t like that Camille intentionally got her suspended in order to incentivize the program. Meanwhile, Maggie takes Fisher aside and attempts to recruit him to the program, citing his pitbull-like tendencies with cases and how his workaholic nature has negatively impacted his life. By joining the program and providing the proper backup for Kirsten and company, she could make him successful and he reluctantly agrees to the proposition.
With Lisa’s refractory period over, Kirsten quickly bounces into her memory and gets Cameron to filter out the effects of the drug, thereby getting rid of the monster faces. Once she sees Lisa and Denise having a confrontation, she gets Cameron to reduce the background noise, allowing her to overhear the conversation. Denise is a runaway that Lisa was working with, while Raf is the drug dealer who took her off the streets and gave her a home. Lisa doesn’t like it when Denise mentions Raf getting a big score that day and when she goes to confront him in a secluded part of the club, he intentionally overdoses her. Next, Kirsten finds a new memory centered on another Lisa/Denise argument, but the main takeaway is that Denise is staying on San Fernando Road. She then bounces out of the memory, reports everything that she saw, and gives Detective Fisher a welcome to the stitchers program.
Fisher gets a warrant for Raf’s arrest and bursts into the place he shares with Denise. Fisher arrests him on the spot and when Raf won’t give up his computer password to Cameron, who needs to find the drug supplier, Camille comes in with her taser and does the dirty work. Once the team gets back to the lab, it turns out that Ed cannot be stitched, as his neural gaps have widened too much. Kirsten confronts Maggie about intentionally keeping her away from the truth about her father, while Maggie simply tells her that she didn’t solve Lisa’s case fast enough before informing Kirsten that Ed left everything to her. She would have access to everything in his house, which might house the type of information that she’s looking for. As a result of sticking with Lisa’s case, Kirsten helped give this girl a voice for the final time and saved the lives of numerous kids who would’ve died from the drug, had it found a more mainstream audience. In order to rid the world of monsters, Kirsten will have to continue with the program and since she always had a fear of monsters when she was a kid, she agrees to stick around, despite not getting the answers about Ed.
After everything dies down, Cameron then goes to the hospital room of a woman in a coma, placing flowers in the vase in her room. The woman’s name? Marta Rodriguez.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Yeah, stitch happens.”
-“Let’s use our indoor voice, Boomer.”
-“Yeah, we know that when I’m confronted by a bouncer named Cleaver, I leak urine.”
-“Miss Clark. Nerdy guy.”
-“The agency doesn’t control the entire L.A. dance scene…do they?”
-“What are you doing?” “Helping a sister out. C’mon.”
-“I think you may be the Devil.” “I’m not, but I admire his closing rate.”
-Probably the most promising thing from this episode is that it’s not afraid of the serial storyline. I thought the show was going to slow play everything with Ed and Detective Fisher, with most of the reveals coming in the last couple episodes of the season. But this was an episode heavy on the reveals without said reveals feeling gratuitous, as the reveals felt more like set-up for the remaining eight episodes this summer. This was about as good a transitory/table setting episode as Stitchers could have done right now and I think having so much already done by episode two will make the remainder of its first 10 episodes all the stronger.
-Despite wondering whether someone as tight-lipped and highly-trained as Maggie would spill the beans like that, bringing Camille into the program was an especially fun choice. I thought that the character would be more peripheral, a sort of Greek chorus commenting on the absurdity and danger of the program, and while that would have been an interesting choice, pushing her into the inner circle was probably the right way to go. Immediately, her weirdness bounced off of Linus’s weirdness in a way that benefited both characters, while the dynamic shift between her and Kirsten is something I’m curious to watch unfold in the next few episodes.
-The opening credits were okay. I’m always glad when any show even has credits, given that networks have become fond of the title card, so just seeing the credits was a nice surprise. I also liked that we got names with faces vs. seeing names superimposed over various science-y things. Learn about this cast, America. They’re good.
-I liked that Marta was brought into the fold already. It makes sense to worry about Kirsten more in the early days of the program, before she gets a handle on everything and while she’s still figuring out how to keep the stitching from impacting her daily life. My guess is that Marta gradually lost her sense of self through her various stitches, almost leaving a piece of herself in each consciousness she entered. The coma likely came from not leaving a consciousness in time, which could’ve occurred thanks to her growing attachment to the memories of those she stitched into.
-Or since this episode brought up the refractory period, maybe Marta attempted to get stitched back into someone’s memories before the period had ended, a result of her becoming too emotionally attached/affected by those she attempted to help. Which would explain Cameron coming to the hospital with flowers – he feels guilty for his role in what happened to her.
-Seeing the impact that various outside agents had on the consciousness was an interesting touch. Now that we’ve tackled drug abuse, I’m curious what stitching into the consciousness of someone with mental illness would look like.
-Never trust a sketchy guy in a fedora. The first life lesson from the folks at Stitchers.
-Random, but Kirsten was calling Ed “Ed” ever since she came to live with him. I’m sure her refusal to call him “dad” or some significant substitute helped keep the two as distant as they were.
-I like the pairing of Cameron and Kirsten. With the energy dialed back just a bit tonight, as the pilot was a bit on the manic side, you could see that her brashness and boldness could rub off on him in a positive way, while he could help her with the emotions that come from stitching and figuring out what to compartmentalize and what to confront. She brings him out of his shell; he humanizes her. We get some quip-y banter along the way. Sounds like a good time.
-One thing I’ve yet to reconcile is the lack of connection with the cases. Not having firsthand accounts in these cases means that there’s a bit of an emotional distance that doesn’t exist with other procedurals, which doesn’t allow you to become as invested. I realize that these cases have been more about the team and that the way the pieces have to be put together is what separates it from other shows in its genre, but it’s definitely something to get used to going forward.
-In addition to some (expectedly) wonky dialogue (case in point: Fisher’s “touchdown” thing with Kirsten), I also wasn’t a fan of Camille’s taser. It felt like some cheap humor and I’m hopeful that we don’t see it pulled out on any more criminals. If ever there was a procedural that didn’t need to address brutality from law enforcement, it’s this show.
–Next week on Stitchers: Cameron’s worries that Kirsten will end up like Marta grow, while Camille and Linus get to know one another.
