STITCHERS Wraps Up Some Loose Ends

S1E8 “Fire in the Hole”

This week the team has to solve their case from inside the lab… and fight off a dangerous and highly infectious disease.

Kirsten arrives at the lab, and all the alarms are going off. Cameron yells for her and leads her to another room, and then everyone yells surprise and sings her “Happy Birthday.” She isn’t surprised, and before they can cut the cake, another alarm goes off to tell them they have another body.

The victim is a 35 year old woman named Anna Barmal, a researcher who committed suicide. She was found in her apartment in a scalding shower and with the heat turned up. Barmal was researching a cure for a dangerous disease, and Maggie assures everyone that the body cleared all the tests to be stitched and is safe.

Before the stitch, Camille asks Kirsten about Liam’s proposal. She said she’s thinking about it, and to not tell anyone in the lab. However, everyone has their headsets on, including Kirsten, and now everyone knows that she was proposed to.

Fisher is also back in the lab, and won’t tell anyone about the special assignment he’s working on.

Once Kirsten stitches into Barmal, she finds out that Barmal injected herself with the disease and the cure to see if it would work. Maggie makes every non essential personnel exit the lab, and then alarms start going off. Once Kirsten bounces, Maggie puts the entire lab on lockdown because the body has become symptomatic.

Maggie gives everyone their assignments, and then she calls Turner. He informs her that he didn’t know that Barmal infected herself, and he will try to get the serum from Barmal’s lab. He tells Maggie to make sure Kirsten stays alive, and to put her in isolation. But since Kirsten refuses to cooperate, the team decides it’s time to stitch again to try and get the formula for the cure.

Kirsten gets the formula just in time, and writes it down. Linus is beginning to show symptoms of the disease.

To figure out how to make the cure, they have to run blood samples of Barmal and the formula in the quantum computer that they have. Ayo, who does medical for the lab, took a blood sample before the stitch. Unfortunately, the sample is stuck in a part of the lab that is in lockdown.

There is a shaft that runs from the lab to the room with the blood sample, and Camille volunteers to go get it. While she is in there, she sees a rat, one of the two things that terrifies her. Kirsten tells her to get through it for Linus, and Camille is able to let Ayo into the room so that she can run tests on the blood sample.

Cameron puts the sample and the formula through the computer, and the computer tells them that the cure should have worked. Maggie encourages everyone to call their loved ones, because it is likely they won’t survive.

Kirsten refuses to call Liam because she refuses to die. Cameron calls his mother, and she asks him if he’s taking his medication and reprimands him for not taking a research position at MIT. Cameron tells her it was worth it while looking at Kirsten.

Linus calls his parents, and tells them that he has a girlfriend. They are happy for him and make plans to meet her. Maggie calls someone named Ben and apologizes for not being around as much as she should have been. Camille doesn’t call anyone, and tells Linus that her parents left when she was 16.

Maggie sits down with Kirsten in the her office, and gives her the other half of the photograph that Kirsten was missing. Ed Clark and Kirsten’s mother did most of the original planning for the Stitcher program, not Kirsten’s father. Kirsten’s father took the credit for her mother’s research after her mother died. “Remember” was meant as a reminder to Maggie to take care of Kirsten if anything happened to Ed, and for Kirsten to remember that her mother loved her.

Kirsten is working on a plan to get the cure, and Cameron encourages her to call Liam. He also tells her about that scar on his chest. Cameron had heart surgery when he was younger, and only had a fifty percent chance of surviving.

Kirsten remembers that Barmal’s body was found in extreme heat, and tells Cameron that it’s the only way the cure can work. She calls Fisher to get the serum and bring it to the lab, and the rest of the team waits while the lab gets up to 111 degrees.

Fisher arrives but has to climb down an elevator shaft, and in doing so he trips an alarm. He has to get to the bottom before the shaft sprays Halon gas, which will kill him. Fisher manages to get to the bottom, and Kirsten opens the elevator and pulls him out before he completely passes out. The team receives the serum, and everyone survives.

This week’s episode was a bit of an emotional roller coaster — we find out about Cameron’s scar, Kirsten’s father isn’t the man we thought he was (not that he was that great anyways), and Camille’s parents left her when she was 16. Something new about all of the members of the Stitcher team came out this episode.

Les Turner has certainly become one of the villains of the show. His only priority is making sure Kirsten stays safe, and when Maggie asked him to get to Barmal’s lab he basically said “I’ll try.” It would be interesting to meet some of the other people in charge of the Stitcher program, but we might have to wait until season 2.

Fisher is back this week, and saves the entire team from dying. He also seems to be more comfortable with the team, because he was much less stern in this episode than he ever has been before. We’re all left wondering what his special assignment is, and hopefully it isn’t something that pulls him away from the team anymore. It’s doubtful that it has anything to do with the Stitcher program, because he just got pulled into it. Kirsten and Fisher have yet to talk about Ed Clark’s death, and I’d really like to see the two look into that together.

We still don’t have an answer to Liam’s proposal, or if he’s the person that he says he is. Maggie and Les seem troubled by a man in a photograph that Liam was in, and whether or not Liam knows the man is also still a mystery. Liam doesn’t seem like marriage material to me. Your girlfriend not being able to miss you doesn’t give you a free ride to be gone for two years. Hopefully Kirsten realizes this, or comes up with some other reason not to marry him.

Kirsten and Camille have something in common: their parents aren’t in their lives anymore. The writers have done a good job giving us one on one interactions with the two, but I would love to see more.

Kirsten’s father is more of a deadbeat than we thought he was. Not only did he abandon Kirsten, but he took credit for her mother’s work after she died. Maybe we’ll get to meet her father at some point before the end of the season, but it seems unlikely. There are several possibilities that he could have left Kirsten with Ed Clark, and they could be good reasons. I have a feeling that Kirsten’s father will come to the show in a big way — or not at all.

Linus seems to be the only one on the show that isn’t hiding some dark secret from their past. It would be nice to see a scene where Camille meets Linus’ parents…if Camille even decides that she wants to actually date him. It would definitely be entertaining.

No Janice this week – thankfully. I hope they get rid of her character quickly. The way she was brought into Cameron’s life is too weird. Maybe the writers will have the two spend some time together and it won’t be bad, but I doubt it. If they do keep her in the show for a while longer, they have to work hard to make her character likable. Plus I don’t see the two being together since Cameron is so infatuated with Kirsten.

Nicknames:

Birthday Girl

KC

Sweet Pea