Numb3rs: And the Winner Is...
By Five USA
Sunday 18 April, 6:00pm on Five USA
Continuing this week is the sixth season of the intriguing crime drama.
In this episode, the agents find out how the other half lives when they investigate a jewellery heist at a movie awards ceremony. Meanwhile, the Eppes brothers discover that they have a secret lodger, and Don behaves strangely when an old adversary dies. After a smoke bomb explodes at a major Hollywood awards ceremony, scores of the celebrity guests emerge from the auditorium reporting that they have had their valuable jewellery snatched in the confusion.
Out of the chaos steps smart English insurance broker Elizabeth Hopkins. She reveals that most of the jewellery at such events is on loan to the celebrities, and her firm is responsible for insuring the valuable pieces. "You're going to need my help dealing with these people. They're actors," she tells a bemused David and Colby. As the agents look on, they observe action movie star Sven Regal chase and threaten to kill a passing photographer, then promptly turn his attentions to wooing Nikki. "Welcome to the circus," says Elizabeth. After speaking to the ceremony's director, Colby decides to retrieve the seating plan for the event. "The rule of thumb is, if something reminds me of my tenth grade geometry class then we could probably use it to solve the crime," he explains.
Meanwhile, sparks fly between David and Elizabeth when David discovers that some of the individual pieces of jewellery are worth millions of dollars. "You walk round wearing that, you deserve to be robbed," he says. "Is that the FBI's official position or a personal insight?" quips Elizabeth. After studying the seating plan, Charlie calculates the position from which each robber would have been able to snatch the maximum number of jewels. It transpires that each of the six seats Charlie pinpoints was occupied by a filler, hired by an independent agency to make the auditorium look full while the celebrity occupants take a break. Nikki retrieves a list from casting agent Paula Watson, and subsequently discovers that the people filling these particular seats had supplied bogus names. However, because smoke from the bombs obstructed every camera in the auditorium, the agents still lack a visual of the suspects. Amita comes up with a complex plan for locating images of the suspects on news footage filmed outside as guests fled the ceremony.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth reveals that the majority of the stolen jewels were hired from the same jeweller, one Hans Stollbach, suggesting that the thefts may have been planned in order to commit insurance fraud. However, Hans reveals that his bungling nephew had the jewels appraised at less than half their market value. "If I were going to risk going to prison, I wouldn't do it at a discount," he argues. But if Hans is innocent, then who orchestrated the heist?
Elsewhere this week, Charlie gets the shock of his life when he finds an unkempt-looking Larry squatting in the family's garage. Larry reveals that he has been living in the desert, where he has developed a coherent theory for the future of the cosmos. "I've spent my entire life staring into the past – so I turned my inner eye 180 degrees to look to the future," he tells Charlie. Meanwhile, Colby's suspicions are aroused by Don's strange behaviour after he learns of the death of a criminal he helped send down.