overnights

Limitless Recap: Uh, Bollywood?

Limitless

Undercover!
Season 1 Episode 15
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Undercover!

Limitless

Undercover!
Season 1 Episode 15
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Christina Vidal as Lucy Church and Jake McDorman as Brian. Photo: David M. Russell/CBS

This week on Limitless, everyone gets sidelined. I mean, everyone appears for at least ten seconds, but this is the Brian Finch Show, even more so than usual. The episode is called “Undercover!” and is subtitled “A Romantic Caper in Three Assignments.” It really ends up just being one assignment, though that’s neither here nor there.

We begin with Brian speaking directly into the camera, Office confessional-style. Exactly why he’s doing this is unclear, but the name “Lucy Church” and a case fiasco come up. A few days prior, hackers of unexplained provenance got their hands on a list of undercover agents. The FBI has managed to call all but five of the agents back in, and they recruit Brian and his pill-enhanced brain to finish the job. He quickly tracks down four of them, leaving just the aforementioned Church. (This has become a very predictable Limitless misdirection: Give Brian a handful of things to accomplish, and he manages to do all but the Important One in the span of five seconds.)

At the same time, Sands, fresh off of killing an FBI clerk to keep him quiet, tries to rein in Rebecca by offering her a lucrative job. She’ll sleep on it.

Anyway, Lucy Church has been deep undercover at a hedge fund, which is itself tied to an escort service named Blue Limit. Using a dictionary, I figured out that they’re bad, because if Limitless = good, then Limit = bad. If the hedge fund goes down, though, then the escorts will likely start “disappearing” before they can talk. Brian and Lucy need to find the women’s passports so they can escape before charges are filed. This means they’ll have to put on nice clothes and go to an escort party with hedge funders and Russian oligarchs.

Brian is so charming that they get comped a room for … adult stuff, but he and Lucy just kill time by chatting. “Have you ever killed someone?” Brian asks, wracked with guilt but also flirtatiously. It’s not the opener I would’ve gone with, but it works?

As is the usual for Limitless, they snag the passports without a hitch. Brian decides to take advantage of another Limitless trope, using his NZT-addled super-brain to gamble some money. He wants to use the winnings to help the escorts start their new lives. Lucy finds this idea to be very nice and they kiss.

And then there’s a Bollywood number?

Why?

Who allowed this?

I think it’s a euphemism for sex. Is that a thing? Bollywood being slang for “doing it?” That does not seem right. (Later on in the episode, when Rebecca asks if Brian and Lucy had sex, he literally replies, “Bollywood.” I don’t know.)

Okay, let’s forget about that! Escort-hostage problem solved. Along with the passports, Brian finds ledgers for a front known as the German Hospitality League, run by whomever has been murdering the escorts. He infiltrates the league by posing as an IT guy and — this is near-verbatim — DDoS-ing the building to crash their Wi-Fi. That is not a thing. Routers do not crash because of DDoS attacks. That happens less often than people using Bollywood as a sex analogy.

Get a load of Dr. Technology over here.

Jake McDorman as Brian. Photo: CBS

Anyway, Lucy and Brian confront the evil German, who name is Gudmund. Things go slightly off-book — he gets shot — but in the end, the case is solved. There’s an internal investigation, thus explaining the confessional-style scenes, and everything’s squared away.

As for Sands’s job offer to Rebecca, she rejects it. She also lets him know that she’s on to his schemes. So Sands does the only logical thing, which is bugging her apartment. He also authorizes the “other option.” What could that mean? Murder, that’s my guess. Almost definitely murder.

At this point, Limitless is getting … kind of stale? Although it is very fun, it clearly values style over substance. The show is willing to mess with tone and style from episode to episode, but at the same time, its characters don’t change at all. Brian will always do the right thing, Rebecca will always be slightly suspicious, and everyone else will always roll their eyes and put up with Brian’s schtick anyway. As of now, I don’t really care what happens in the story. What’s more interesting is how Limitless chooses to present it.

Limitless Recap: Uh, Bollywood?