Cameron wakes up in his apartment after having a terrible dream about the day of Marta’s accident. She goes into cardiac arrest while in the stitch and since she can’t bounce herself out, he’s forced to rip her out of the stitch, which fries her brain enough to send her into a coma. That type of nightmare understandably has an impact on the way he approaches his day, starting with the call he places to Kirsten to inform her that he’s going to be late on the day of her physical. He tries to check in with her, only for the conversation to turn to his neighbor Robbie stealing magazines from him. Cameron moved upstairs from his former place a couple months ago and Robbie won’t change the name on the mailbox, so Cameron has been without his reading material ever since. Kirsten talks him into going to confront Robbie about the magazines, but when he does, Cameron discovers his neighbor dead on the rug in his apartment.
Once Detective Fisher arrives, it’s determined that the incident with Robbie wasn’t a robbery, given that all of his valuables are still in place. Since he died from two shots to the back at close range, Fisher believes the killing was execution-style, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that Robbie was a low-key paralegal. Cameron gets especially freaked out, though, when Kirsten and Fisher bring up the possibility that the hit wasn’t intended for Robbie; given that Cameron’s name is still on the box and that Robbie is of similar height and build, it’s not that far fetched to believe that Cameron might’ve been the target. The stitchers then head back to the lab where Maggie informs the team that Robbie’s colleagues didn’t know him personally and he didn’t have any family or friends to speak of. Therefore, Cameron being the target is still a possibility.
While Kirsten prepares to bounce into Robbie, Camille and Linus have an awkward moment related to their hook-up the other night. Camille vanished into thin air, making Linus think that she didn’t have a good time and that she didn’t want to see him again, but she explains that she had a major presentation that she had to prepare for. However, she does confirm that she has no plans in going out with him again – their time together was just a one time thing. With Cameron being overly cautious out of lingering guilt over Marta, Kirsten bounces into Robbie’s memories and finds him at his apartment window with a police helicopter sounding outside. Once his telescope starts glowing, pointing to it being a memory hot spot, Kirsten touches it and discovers that Robbie spied on his neighbors across the street, with a jogger, a woman painting her fingernails, a woman in a tank top, and an argumentative couple particularly sticking out.
Since Kirsten isn’t able to identify the apartments outside the stitch, and since the stitchers won’t be able to get into Robbie’s place due to it being an active crime scene, it’s decided that the team will stakeout the building next door from Cameron’s apartment. Loaded up with gear courtesy of Maggie and the unlimited NSA budget, Linus, Camille, and Kirsten head over to Cameron’s to help him set up shop. He’s, of course, incredibly anal about everything in his apartment and once Linus sets up the tech, he gets onto Kirsten for being nosy about the habits of the neighbors across the street. Meanwhile, Camille tries to ease the obvious tension between her and Linus, only to be confronted again about her cagey-ness and the reason she won’t go out with him again. She tries to argue that the beauty of the hook-up with Linus was that it was a spontaneous, in-the-moment type of thing, but he’s still not okay with her rejection.
Fisher comes over to inform the team that there’s no conceivable motive to kill Robbie, given the smallness of his life, and to confirm to Kirsten that foul play was not involved in Ed’s death, the latter being ruled a suicide. But Kirsten isn’t upset; she knows that something fishy happened with Ed’s death and she knows that she’ll be able to prove that to Fisher sometime in the near future. Just then, Kirsten manages to find the argumentative couple across the street with her telescope, though their arguing is accompanied by a knife brandished by the man. Things intensify with him and his girlfriend to the point that Fisher calls his team and heads across the street to check things out, except before he gets there, the couple walk out of Kirsten’s eyeline and blood soon splatters on the apartment wall. Camille, Linus, Cameron, and Kirsten all believe that they just witnessed a murder, but it turns out that the guy they were observing is an artist who uses a palette knife to create his paintings. The “blood” they saw was red paint and the arguing they saw was a fairly normal spat about money.
What’s important, though, is that the artist sold his first painting recently.
The buyer? Robbie.
That night, Linus wakes Camille and again inquires about the state of their relationship. This time, he offers to slow things down between them, but that turns out to be the exact wrong thing to say. Camille is too busy having fun being single to want to be tied down right now, so the thought of being romantic with someone isn’t all that appealing to her. Meanwhile, Cameron finds Kirsten still obsessing over the telescope; she informs him that the reason she’s so into watching the neighborhood is that it’s the first time she’s ever seen true vulnerability. But Kirsten also brings up the fact that she feels smothered by her overprotective colleague and instead of arguing with her, Cameron shows her the footage of Marta’s stitch and what happened when she couldn’t bounce herself out. After staying in too long, she was in a four-month coma as a result of being ripped out of the stitch, which is why Cameron has been beating himself up so much lately. Kirsten tries to assure him that what happened to Marta wasn’t his fault, but their conversation is interrupted when Camille finds the girl in the tank top, who knew that she was being watched by Robbie.
Tank Top Girl invites “Robbie” over for a beer before heading over to his apartment herself. Told that Robbie felt a certain emotional pull to this woman, he sends the rest of his team out of the room and fumbles his way through a conversation with her, as she thinks that he was the one who had been watching her. Tank Top Girl turns out to be a model for art students who Robbie helped by providing groceries for her after seeing her empty fridge. She thanks 
him for the generosity and promises to pay him back eventually, but until then, he has a standing invitation for beer anytime he wants. Before she leaves, Tank Top Girl gives Cameron a kiss on the cheek to go along with the new wrinkle in the case of Robbie’s murder. At the lab, Kirsten is informed by Maggie that Robbie’s memory is about to completely disintegrate, meaning that stitching back in is a no-go. But Kirsten gets to go back in when she claims to have an idea on how to produce a motive in the murder.
Once she gets back in, Kirsten explains that since the telescope was Robbie’s life for the two months he lived in the apartment, it’s bound to be hypercharged with emotion. As such, she touches it while in the stitch and sorts through the memories encountered over the past two months. One thing she notices is that one of the apartments never opened its curtains during that time and Linus confirms that it was occupied for the entire two months. It turns out that the mystery apartment is linked to boutique Daisies & Dots, as it’s leased to the owner and said to be used for inventory purposes. Kirsten made the connection to the boutique at the tail end of her stitch, where she saw who she assumed to be Robbie’s killer before bouncing herself out, and claimed after resurfacing that the apartment might be used for stolen goods.
With Camille working surveillance, Kirsten and Cameron sneak through the back entrance of the building across the street in order to find out what’s in the mystery apartment. It turns out to be hidden behind a false wall, which Kirsten figures out thanks to a tactic taught to her by Ed, yet the apartment wasn’t full of stolen clothing like she thought. Instead, it was home to a human trafficking ring that was about to send its next herd of women to God knows where. Once they learn from Camille that the mannequin arm at Daisies & Dots had been moved, signalling that a pick-up was impending, Kirsten and Cameron hustle outside and find themselves in the path the van needed to go in order to leave. Rather than try to get inside the van itself, Kirsten stands her ground and causes the van to crash after speeding toward her. Fisher, who has been called in by Maggie for the purposes of a warrant, quickly arrives on the scene and arrests those in the van, while Kirsten and Cameron are able to free the women loaded in the back of the vehicle.
While Linus and Camille celebrate the victory with some wine, Kirsten goes to find Cameron. She does come across him in his bedroom after a shower, but she inadvertently sees the large scar on his chest that she didn’t know about. As he closes the door on her, a mysterious figure across the street observes the goings-on in Cameron’s place with a pair of binoculars.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Actually, I do have a giant pain in my ass.”
-“Where do you want me to stick this? Nevermind.”
-“Check it – Fisher likes sprinkles.” “Don’t judge me.”
-If I have one complaint about this episode, it’s that I would’ve loved for the scenes in Cameron’s apartment to have been given a chance to breathe. I know that this is a procedural and that we have to get to point A to B, so there’s not much time for stopping and smelling the roses; I just love stories where the majority of a cast are crammed into one space for an extended period of time. To me, a device like this is best utilized at developing character or detonating plot and this was definitely a case of the former, in a good way. A show as banter-y as this benefits from concentrating its resources like this and I feel like Stitchers is showing an ability to play with structure that’s encouraging.
-It was good, though, that they found a way to include Fisher at Cameron’s. Even though he’s been recruited by the agency, I’m still unsure about what his role will be like on this show going forward, so it was good to see him build some rapport with the team. And to get to know him a bit beyond the pitbull persona in which he approaches his profession.
-The Rear Window-y vibe of the scenes at Cameron’s made them stand out that much more for me. ABC Family goes vaguely Hitchcock-ian? I’m into it.
-It’s interesting that, after raising Marta from her coma last week, we didn’t get a check-in with her. I don’t know where it would have fit and she arguably had a larger presence like this than she would have if she were physically in the episode, but it was still a curious decision.
-I feel like Maggie’s jumpiness (see: her unease at the sound of the elevator) and the mysterious figure watching the stitchers will intersect somehow. Could she know that somebody might be lurking around? And are you surprised that someone who used to be a CIA assassin was able to be rattled?
-I hope we get a little more with Tim from engineering. The first thing I wrote in my notes when I saw him glaring at Cameron: What’s his story? Because he looks like the type of dude that would have a story.
-The intimated beej on a pizza guy and Linus pleading for third base with Camille – too racy for ABC Family? Or the right type of material if they want to get an older audience? Also, considering the first two things that happened, were you surprised that Tank Top Girl only gave Cameron a kiss on the cheek?
-Good for them for having Camille be a woman who owns her sexuality. I’m hopeful it’s not a character trait that will have an adverse impact on Linus’s development, but in a vacuum, it was nice to see.
-We know that the driver confessed to killing Robbie, but did anyone associated with the boutique get arrested for helping the trafficking ring?
-For those wondering, the artist with the palette knife was America’s Next Top Model alum Matthew Smith. Also, I recap Top Model for another site, so if you want even more of me, you can find those articles here.
-I’ll be very curious if we ever get a victim who “deserved” what happened to them. Thus far, we’ve gotten either good people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or people who decided to lash out at the world after some perceived injustice. The latter, even though they’re the offenders in the bunch, are humanized by the motivation behind their crimes, which could make this show especially interesting – almost a sci-fi Orange Is the New Black.
-On another show, I might object to Kirsten and Cameron’s dynamic heading toward romance this quickly. Here, though, I understand the reason behind it, apart from needing to appease the ABC Family shipping gods. You put beautiful people in a stressful situation and have them share close quarters for extended periods of time – this is what you get. People bond more quickly through shared experience and ironically, I think what happened to Marta is kind of lingering on Cameron, meaning that one aspect of his attraction to Kirsten might be a need to protect her. Subconsciously, he wants to be with her because if he’s that close to her, he thinks he’ll be less likely make the same mistakes her did with Marta.
-If there was a false wall in front of the traffickers’ apartment, how did they get in? My head might’ve been down taking notes when the other entrance was shown, and it might be because this recap is going into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but my brain isn’t wrapping around the logistics of 3C.
-Next week on Stitchers: Kirsten starts receiving cryptic messages from an unexpected source, while the algorithm for the program turns up among classified documents hidden by a conspiracy theorist.
