SPOILER ALERT!!!
Mireille Enos of ‘The Killing’ fame is back on the little screen in a shiny new series that premiered in Canada on CTV on March 28. The Catch is produced by Shonda Rimes, producer of How to Get Away With Murder, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal.
Mireille plays Alice Vaughan, the field half of Los Angeles’ premier PI and Security agency. She’s smart, sexy, confident, gorgeous, totally kickass and about to get married to her fiance, Christopher Hall played by Peter Krause.
The opening scene is very Thomas Crown, set at a gala being held at the Singer Museum for Contemporary Art. The con man enters and zeroes in on Alice because not only is she gorgeous and admiring a painting whose artist is the focus of this particular sting, her museum access card is dangling enticingly from her pocket. Some actually fairly heavy handed vamping gains him access to the back with Alice, where the target painting is hanging, supposedly having arrived on loan too late for display in this collection opening. The conversation in front of the painting is telling, and does a credible job of setting up the show’s basic premise:
Alice: She seems so sad to me
Con Man: She’s in love
Alice: Why is that sad?
Con Man: because it doesn’t last
Alice: He doesn’t seem to have any doubts
Con Man: He’s not showing you his eyes
A bit of sexy byplay later, he has slipped her access card away, and very carefully steals the painting, only to be busted at the entrance by Alice’s team, led by Jay Hayden who plays Danny Yoon. Enter Alice the kickass, who takes him down with a knee to the *ahem*, and handcuffs him, whispering in a sultry voice “for me, this is the fun part”.
Cut to the next morning at the agency where the team is tasting wedding cake when the receptionist, Robin (Nicole Pettis), comes in bearing bad news in the form of an email asking “Are you ready to play?”, neatly setting up the first story arc. It turns out that Mr X has been frustrating their efforts to protect their high end clients by ripping off technological data worth $5 mil over the past 9 months, always sending the same email just prior to the rip off. It seems that Mr X is targeting the Agency because they have the best client list in town; but for some unknown reason he is always one step ahead of them, almost as if he has inside information. The team races into action, figuring out which client and which malcontented employee of said client is the most likely candidate for this con, and setting up security to catch Mr X at the very predictable employees’ lunch spot. Here is where the “premier” part of the ” LA’s premier PI and Security agency” starts to come unravelled. Mr X shows up to the drop site in an electric blue Lamborghini Aventador, and no one on the very obvious security detail notices what the driver looks like. When you see an eye-catching car like that, don’t you always check out the driver? I do.
Mr X trades the cash for the confidential client information, but gets away, leaving the hapless malcontent to take the fall. Damage control takes place, the stolen information becomes useless, and the day wraps up.
Later that night, Alice goes home to her fiance, the rich and handsome Christopher Hall, and we discover that unknown to her, he is Mr X.
Because the sting didn’t go as planned and the information stolen has become useless, Christopher’s handler and real girlfriend Margo (Sonya Walger) decides that Alice has outlived her usefulness, and instructs Christopher to break it off. But Christopher has immersed himself in the con so completely that he has fallen for Alice for real. After a night of romance, and Alice’s refusal to just run away with him the next morning, he disappears – DNA, fingerprints and all.
As the show continues, we discover through a series of flashbacks that Christopher Hall has insinuated himself into Alice’s life by posing as a prospective client referred by another client Seth Hamilton; but because he is “interested” in one partner of the Agency, declines to become a client and therefore is not vetted at all by her Agency. So no one realizes until he disappears totally with Alice’s $1.5 million personal cheque that he and his company are just a front. They have been conned. Hmm. That “premier” adjective is getting just a tad tattered. Alice wants revenge, personal and up close, and will (unethically) not allow her partner to inform the rest of their clients of this breach of their own agency.
Enter the feds, in the person of Agent Jules Dao (Jacky Ido). He has been chasing Christopher across Europe for the past two years for the crimes of theft of intellectual property, fraud and burglary, and he has discovered that the Agency is chasing the same man, for much the same reason. He would like to combine efforts in the hopes of bringing Mr. X down. Alice claims client confidentiality and turns him down. But really, it is because she is “not going to sit down with his superiors, telling a room full of smug FBI agents what happened to her, what she let happen to her.” Pride goeth before the fall. He is not at all suspicious of the staring through glass walls at him while a hurried conversation between Alice and her partner Valerie Anderson (Rose Rollins) takes place, lol. Yeah, right. Agent Dao follows her to the parkade where Christopher’s Land Rover is still parked, and watches her trash it in her search for something that will help her track Christopher down. He asks her who is Mr X to her, and wants to know what he took from her. He tells her that he can help her if she will only talk to him. Again, she refuses him, leaving Agent Dao standing in the parkade.
Back at the office, the team realizes that the supposedly referring client, Seth Hamilton, is Mr X’s main intended victim. Seth Hamilton has come up with a pocket sized way to transform sea water into drinking water, technology worth billions. And he is announcing it to the world at a party being held that very night. The Agency has pre-vetted the guest list, but realize that Christopher intends to infiltrate the party disguised as one of the guests, in order to steal the technology. They enter the party dressed to the nines, but are unable to stop the theft thanks to some quick thinking by one of Christopher’s teammates. What remained of the “premier” adjective is now completely shredded. But wait! It turns out there was a plan B all along. Alice’s newest team member is not only a lawyer, but was a lawyer for Anonymous, and has some awesome black hat skills. She hacks into the drive that Alice gave Seth to put his presentation on which was then stolen by Christopher and retrieves all the client information and money that was previously stolen leaving Christopher’s team flat broke and in danger from some mysterious “benefactor”. Umm the script writers should probably have found a better word to describe this shadowy figure – benefactor is defined as someone who confers a benefit, a kindly helper. Given the ominous tone of the conversation between Margo and Christopher regarding the person they report to, this person is most definitely NOT a benefactor.
The episode ends with Alice dragging her tired, emotionally wrought, jilted butt home, only to find that Christopher has been there and has left her the painting that she so admired at the beginning of the episode. “All right, Christopher, you wanna play? Let’s play.”
This pilot has flaws. How does the premier PI and Security agency, supposedly protecting high powered clients against fraud, burglary and intellectual property theft allow these crimes to happen to their clients AND become victim of these crimes themselves? In what universe is staring at someone through glass walls whilst conducting hurried conversations not considered suspicious, and why would a high end security team NOT notice what the driver of a high end automobile looks like? Why would someone as smart as Alice just hand over $1.5 million without checking up on who she is handing it to? And why would she share supposedly confidential information with someone not in a need to know position? Flaws notwithstanding, this series does have potential to go places. You want to sympathize with the bad guy, because he really did fall in love with his mark. You want Alice to succeed in tracking him down. And in making him pay. You want the Spy vs Spy development. And most of all, you want the Romeo and Juliet type romance.
While I personally do not enjoy Shonda Rimes other series, I am looking forward to the remaining 12 episodes of The Catch. Hook, line and sinker.
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