While at Marta’s burial, Kirsten checks on Cameron, who had been having the hardest time of anyone grieving his former friend. He seems to be holding up well enough, all things considered, and that gives her the okay to launch into Marta’s conspiracy theories about the program having a greater purpose and no one apart from the bigwigs being safe. Although it might have some validity, Cameron simply wonders aloud whether Marta wouldn’t give him some type of message that something like that was going on.
Inspired by what he had to say, Kirsten again combs through the cassette that Ed left her once she gets home. Unfortunately for her, Camille gets into bed with her, looking to share thoughts about Marta’s death. But before Kirsten’s arm is forced to be vulnerable with someone she doesn’t completely trust, she hears a series of tones embedded in the tape – they repeat frequently and point her toward the message she had been looking for all this time. The following day at the lab, Kirsten hands off the tape to Linus so he can decipher what the tones mean before Maggie launches the team into the next stitch. They’ll be looking into the death of Dani Fox, a 26-year-old research assistant for Dr. Sebastian Zuber. Fox died in a car accident, despite the car she was in being new and in perfect health, and Kirsten quickly bounces into her in order to figure out what went wrong.
Once inside Dani’s memories, Kirsten finds her arguing with a woman over a check, taking care of a patient in the office she worked at, being secretive around her roommate (her 24-year-old sister Nicole), and arguing with both her colleague George and her boss Dr. Zuber. Before Kirsten gets thrown out of Dani’s erratic consciousness, she finds herself in the car before it crashed, only the crash wasn’t the fault of Dani. The car locked up and she couldn’t do anything to save herself in her time of need. Being that the car is new, the team looks into the computer that had been installed in it, as it’s sort of a black box that could give information about the nature of the crash. As it turns out, someone had hacked into the computer and sent Dani to her death, thereby changing the nature of the case.
After the stitch, Kirsten researches Dani and finds out that she and Zuber had received a $4 million grant for their work in magnetic stimulation, which they believed could stimulate brain growth. Just as she and Cameron agree to go talk to Nicole, Janice arrives at Cameron’s place and bursts in to smack him twice for lying about giving her the groceries. She’s perturbed that he freeloaded off a dead man, causing her to assume that Cameron had also been looking in on her before storming out. Despite the drama, and with the knowledge that hacking into a car computer isn’t remotely difficult, Cameron joins Kirsten in the journey to Nicole’s; the two find out from the baker that her sister was married to her job, so much so that she wouldn’t talk about what she was doing with her research. This revelation leads Kirsten to drag Cameron to Dani’s job, given that the latter’s entire world was centered around her office. They run into an annoyed George, all too eager to get them to leave, before finding Zuber in the lobby. In an effort to get more time with the good doctor, Kirsten tells him that she knew Dani through her own desire for help with her brain.
In Zuber’s office is the transcranial magnetic stimulator – the machine that helps him conduct his research. Sitting by the machine with Cameron, Kirsten undergoes something of an intake interview, where she admits to the car crash that robbed her of her memory, her ability to create new memories, and the symptoms of her temporal dysplasia that have come to dominate her life. She sets up a session with the increasingly intrigued Sebastian, much to the chagrin of Camille, Linus, and especially Maggie, the latter of whom agrees under one condition – Kirsten wears a wire. While Kirsten goes in for her appointment with Dr. Zuber, Cameron, Camille, and Linus stay outside in an unmarked van equipped with the latest high tech purchased on the NSA’s dime, including something that functions similarly to a cell phone tower known as a blowfish. Back in the office, Kirsten is forced to answer more questions about her past before Zuber will allow her in the stimulator; she tells him about having no memory of who her mother was due to the car crash taking away her early memories, while her first memory of her biological father was being left behind at Ed’s as he hopped in a cab and sped away from her. She goes on to talk about how she feels lost as a result of her condition, a feeling that makes Zuber bypass any other questions he might have had and set about examining Kirsten’s brain.
Zuber turns on the machine and Kirsten’s memories quickly become stimulated. She talks about the loud noises and broken glass of the accident, how her mother might’ve intentionally crashed the car, and how her father drank because he couldn’t stand the sight of her following the accident. Overwhelmed, Kirsten cuts her session with Zuber short, but while Cameron, Camille, and Linus are all in awe at learning this information about someone so closed off, it turns out that Kirsten made most of it up. While the car accident was real, everything about her parents drinking and hating her was something she thought of in the moment in order to sell it. And sell it she did, as Zuber was excited that she made such early progress. Kirsten is now convinced that Zuber is overly eager to believe that his study works, which could explain the argument he was having with Dani in the stitch, yet Maggie is more concerned about the possibility of Zuber’s experimentation doing a number on Kirsten’s brain. Annoyed of being thought of as more of a thing than a person, Kirsten inquires about the real purpose behind the program and compares Dani to Marta – two young women who questioned their superiors and wound up dead as a result.
Later, Cameron brings to Kirsten’s attention the fact that Zuber’s last study was perfect – a bit too perfect. It seemed like something aimed at getting grant money, so the two decide to go back to the lab and find Dani’s work computer, which could be the key to cracking Zuber’s role in her death. But just as the two are about to leave, Janice comes back 
over to Cameron’s, this time to apologize. Right now, she just wants a do over and a chance to put recent trauma behind her; when she asks who Kirsten is, Cameron, annoyed at how dismissive Kirsten was when Zuber brought him up during her interview, tells her that it’s nobody.
Nonetheless, Cameron joins Camille and Linus in the van while Kirsten uses an ID card she swiped to get back into Dani’s workplace after hours. While Cameron has an encounter with the police, who want him to move the van from an illegal parking space, Kirsten searches Dani’s office and finds that the computer isn’t there. She does find the lease that Dani was arguing about in the stitch, but she gets confronted by George before she can make any more headway toward finding the computer. Rather than make up an excuse, Kirsten tells him that she thinks Zuber could be behind the murder and piques enough of his interest to get help in her search. George leads her to another room and logs her into the network before nabbing her when she talked about Zuber being behind the hack and subsequent accident. This is especially a problem since the team lost their connection with Kirsten while having to circle the block, but they realize that they can use the blowfish to pinpoint Kirsten’s cell signal and figure out where she is in the building.
Kirsten wakes up tied to the stimulator, with Zuber and George having worked together to bring her there. Since Zuber’s wife is the patient he was treating in Dani’s stitch, he has a vested interest in getting the funding for the stimulator, even if it doesn’t work, and he decides to probe Kirsten’s unusual brain wave pattern as a result. Once in the machine again, Kirsten is bombarded by images from her stitches, in addition to select images from her childhood, before being saved by Camille, Cameron, and Linus. Linus dropkicks Zuber while Camille and Cameron untie her, giving her the chance to take the lease she found to Nicole’s. The secrecy from Dani was less about her thinking Nicole wouldn’t understand the research and more about Dani wanting to surprise her sister with a new bakery, whose space she rented with the lease. She believed in her sister and even though Nicole is broken by the loss of her loved one, she takes solace in knowing that Dani wanted the best for her.
After Cameron drops Kirsten off at home, she finds Leslie Turner waiting for her inside her house. With Camille out with Linus, Kirsten begins grilling Leslie about the purpose of the program, which he admits to not knowing. He tells her that no one in the program knows everything, supposedly to keep them all safe, and that she should trust that everyone in her life is doing what they can in order to keep her safe. Before he leaves, Kirsten asks him whether Ed committed suicide and she gets the answer she was looking for (he didn’t), only Leslie adds that Ed died protecting her. That night, Kirsten gets into Camille’s bed and goes to sleep, only to be woken up by a phone call from Linus the following morning. The computer at the office figured out that the tones in the tape are map coordinates – coordinates that lead Kirsten to her mother’s body. But instead of being a way for Ed to remind Kirsten to remember her mother, the tape tapped into a memory of Kirsten’s that leads to her finding a key behind the photo of her mother.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Stitcher, heal thyself.”
-“In the history of bad ideas, this ranks just above the $2 bill and jeggings.”
-“You lying minx! I can’t believe I almost cried for you.”
-What do you think the key leads to? It didn’t look like a trunk/safety deposit box/house key or anything like that, so I’m assuming it goes to a room/building that Kirsten doesn’t know about yet. I’m assuming it houses a major clue to the beginnings of the program and/or the reason why she can’t remember anything from before she was 8 and since it came after Kirsten visited Jacqueline’s body, it might have something to do with her mother.
-This was a very Kirsten-centric episode, but it was one that I think was necessary for the remainder of the season. The case may have been a little thin and underwritten (Kirsten was that trusting to George, who was also seen arguing with Dani in the stitch?), but it had elements that reflected back on Kirsten as a character and in the process moved her forward. Procedurals work best for me when cases either focus on group dynamics (e.g. the voyeur episode) or have something in them that relates to one of the individual characters. Therefore, I can take a case that isn’t fully fleshed out if it helps a character down the road (e.g. Kirsten trying to “solve” herself) or helps get the serial elements where they need to be.
-On the other side of that, I appreciate how straightforward the show’s mythology has been thus far. What kills shows like this is when things get too muddy and the serial elements veer toward incoherence, but Stitchers has done a nice job at staying within itself and managing the more (potentially) unruly side of itself very well.
-I liked how the episode was bookended with Camille and Kirsten’s vulnerability. And how, even with the snark and the banter, it seems like Kirsten is slowly opening up to someone she couldn’t stand just a few episodes ago. See also: Kirsten’s attempt at comforting Cameron at Marta’s funeral/burial.
-My guess about Ed’s death: They tried to get him to help recruit Kirsten into the program and he didn’t want to do it. Somebody with the program (Les?) killed him and used his death to expedite her acceptance into the program.
-The image of a young Kirsten in the fish tank (which, by the way, the show did a great job at casting young Kirsten) might be the most striking of the season thus far. Could Kirsten have been the original guinea pig for the program? Maybe that’s why her parents were as troubled as they were and why her father couldn’t stand to be around her – he was guilty that she became the way she did and couldn’t face his part in that.
-I really liked the score here. The song choices the show has made thus far have been solid, but sequences like Kirsten’s second trip into Dani’s workplace, and her subsequent meeting with George, had music that greatly enhanced the mood that was trying to be created. Very distinct, just the right shade of unnerving.
-Even though Kirsten got something of an answer from Les, I think she asks Maggie about the purpose of the program again no later than two episodes from now. Bookmark me.
-It’s curious that there wasn’t an explanation for how quickly Dani’s memories jumped around. I assumed that might play a part in the solving of her death, but I guess that it was a result of her fear at the moment of impact.
-I’m surprised that Janice is back in play. I mean, I’ve seen an ABC Family show in my day, so I know about love triangles and whatnot; I just assumed that if she was coming back, it would’ve been last week or when Cameron’s relationship with Kirsten was on the verge of becoming something more.
-So, now that we’ve passed the halfway point in the show’s initial 10-episode order, it’s time to start thinking about renewal chances. The ratings have been okay, if a little low, but the show does have time to make up any deficits, as ABC Family shows tend to get later back orders. Twisted was eight episodes into its first season when it got a pick up on July 30th; Bunheads was nine episodes into its first season when it got a pick up on August 17th; The Lying Game was five episodes into its first season when it got a pick up on September 15th.
-Also, if you want Stitchers to succeed, you can recommend the show to loved ones (they might not be Nielsen viewers, but the more people talk about a show, the greater the chance word of it reaches someone with a Nielsen box), stream it through Hulu Plus/ABC Family.com/On Demand (all of which ABC Family looks at during renewal consideration), buy it through iTunes/Amazon/Vudu, and/or watch live and tweet along, as ABC Family looks at social engagement when evaluating a show.
-Next week on Stitchers: The team investigates the death of a young woman with an extravagant social life, while everyone learns that Kirsten has a boyfriend.
