BODY OF PROOF: Abduction Part I

Welcome to Season Three of Body of Proof! If you’re just tuning in, here’s a brief summary: Dana Delany is Dr. Megan Hunt, an ex-neurosurgeon, and she’s headstrong and blunt. Trying to keep her in line is her long-suffering boss, Kate Murphy, played by Jeri Ryan. Megan has an interesting relationship  with her daughter Lacey (Mary Mouser). There are two goofy lab assistants in Ethan (Geoffrey Arend) and Curtis (Windell D. Middlebrooks). Last season, there was a guy named Peter (Nicholas Bishop), but when we last saw him, he was leaking pretty bad. And there were a couple of detectives, Bud (John Carroll Lynch) and Sam (Sonja Sohn) that were snarky and wonderful, but are no longer on the show.

Season One was an antihero drama, Season Two was a quirky crime show, and Season Three appears to be a different beast. In fact, I’d say this show has changed so much that you could probably just treat this episode like a pilot. But you shouldn’t because Season One and Two are really good.

Dana Delany as Megan Hunt, ex-neurosurgeon and current curmudgeon

This season opens with Megan making a Y-incision on a corpse. She’s startled by what she finds when she plunges her hand into said dead body. I’m a little more perturbed that she’s not wearing a face shield and her hair is down, but that turns out to be the least of our worries because the phone rings and instead of Megan’s bubbly daughter on the phone, we get a mechanical voice that’s probably every parent’s biggest nightmare. That’s right: Lacey has been kidnapped. At least the kidnapper calls her Dr. Hunt, so whoever it is, he or she is polite.

A helpful title card yanks us back in time to “Two Days Earlier.”

Chez Hunt. We have our first fabulous shoe sighting in the pair of leopard-print pumps Megan is putting on while Lacey asks her to sign a permission slip. We find that Megan has been on leave for three months. At the morgue, a young ingénue (Erin Cahill, who looks so much like Jules from Psych that I wonder why they’re trying to hide Maggie Lawson behind those glasses) is getting the run-down from Ethan and Curtis about Megan. Curtis says she’s an acquired taste. Ethan has a different take: “She’s like Grappa. At first she’ll tear your throat out, but eventually, you’re going to like it.” The new Medical Investigator has no idea what happened to the last MI. Curtis and Ethan are agog that she doesn’t watch the news. I’m more suspicious of the fact that she can’t use Google.

Erin Cahill as Charlotte the eager ingenue who Megan will eat alive without batting a perfectly manicured eyelash.

Megan returns: “I missed you guys.”
“Really?”
“No.”

When Megan steps into her office, we see flashbacks of the finale, where she was attacked by a serial killer. Kate shows up in an awesome blazer. I miss a couple of lines of dialogue out of sheer joy at seeing both of my favorite characters in the same scene together again. Kate urges Megan to talk to the grief counselor, and Megan tells her that “Bud went to a grief counselor and retired to take care of his baby, Sam talked to the grief counselor and moved to Virginia to join the FBI.” So that’s a nice recap of where our characters have gone. I thoughts about this development:

1) Sam totally joined Jordan Shaw’s team tracking down serial killers and will drop in on Kate Beckett and Rick Castle any day now.
2) This leaves us with opportunities for Sam and Bud to stop in! Everybody chant it with me: F-B-I! F-B-I!
3) Seriously, are they going to tell us if Bud’s baby is a boy or a girl?

Kate throws Megan a softball of an dead drunk to get her back in the game, so on to the crime stuff! Charlotte the MI she talks Megan’s ear off on the way to the crime scene. Megan uses her to fetch breakfast while she investigates the dead guy in an alley. A cute detective (Elyes Gabel) asks her if she’s the MI, which I’m a little confused. Megan’s wearing gloves and everything, so wouldn’t you ask if she’s the coroner? Either way, she says no, and he tries to remove her from the scene. She ignores him but when the detective’s partner shows up, things take a turn. It turns out the second detective is Tommy Sullivan (Mark Valley) and judging by the fact that Megan reacts to his voice alone, the two have History.

Mark Valley as Tommy Sullivan, Megan’s old flame that can still burn.

I wasn’t wrong. Megan is NOT happy to see him. Tommy tells her he took the job on purpose, and he’s far more charming than he was as John Scott on Fringe, so my fears about Mark Valley fly out the window. My fault for pre-judging. Anyway, they argue about their past, and Megan gets in the great line (“Shut up, you ass.”) and I love her all over again. She notices a maggot on the sidewalk, which is problematic because the drunk hasn’t been dead long enough to warrant maggots yet, which means there are corpses in more advanced states of decomposition around. They track the bugs inside behind a locked door.

“No door, no warrant,” Tommy says and he kicks in the door (and I imagine the city getting the bill for property damage and pain and suffering from flying splinters) and then they discover either a kegger gone very, very wrong or a gaggle of dead bodies. Did you know that a group of crows is called a murder of crows? I’d say this looks like a murder of humans.

Okay, I’ll see myself out.

Elyes Gabel as Det. Adam Lucas

Oh, wait, I’m not done recapping. We return to the morgue, with Tommy and Adam (Cute Detective) in the elevator. Adam teases him about primping, not deterred when Tommy says that he’ll always have his back, always shoot anybody who takes Adam down, but if Adam ever says primping again, he’ll kill him. Adam becomes my favorite character ever by asking if other alternatives such as “preening” are allowed.

They’ve identified all five of the victims as veterans. The victims are roughly the same height, age, weight, and were killed sequentially, leading them to posit that this is a serial killer. In addition, they’ve all had their spleens removed. The detectives call the VA to see if they can get a list of veterans matching this description.

Curtis’s (Windell D. Middlebrooks) lullaby bugs Ethan (Geoffrey Arend).

In the lab, Curtis sings to his bugs and Ethan grumps that Curtis likes the bugs more than he likes Ethan. Curtis does not disagree. Perhaps Charlotte might understand Ethan’s pain, as she goes in to deliver Megan’s breakfast and instead Megan puts her on the spot to thoroughly humiliate her. Charlotte is unable to recognize the suture Megan holds up. It’s basically hazing, and I don’t blame Charlotte for fleeing the scene. Dana Delany, it appears, was really not kidding when she said Megan is not a Nice Girl.

The detectives interview the building owner. Tommy is less than thrilled when Megan taps on the glass to get his attention. By her theory, killer has ten years of medical training and the sutures used are used in plastic surgery. Megan claims that this guy can’t be the killer. I tell the TV that that doesn’t mean he’s not an accomplice. Neither Megan nor the TV listens to me, but at least I’m doing better than the soldier in the next scene who’s being operated on. We go to commercial break on an ominous shot of a key-ring. Man, my key-ring would never be featured in an ominous shot. First of all, my Darth Vader Lego figure lost his hand again and secondly, my library card is on there, and there is nothing scary about library cards. It’s a good thing I’m not going into the serial killing business.

Annnnyway, back to the morgue, where Charlotte is packing up her cardboard box of “I don’t want to deal with the crazy lady with the awesome shoes anymore.” Kate reads Megan the riot act for abusing the new MI and Megan confesses that she initially wanted to fire Peter, too, and she wishes to God she had. Kate tells Megan there isn’t a surgeon in the world that could have saved Peter. I will miss him and his man-pain.

Dr. Kate Murphy (Jeri Ryan) understands better than any of us.

Apparently sutures are like handwriting in that they’re distinctive to each person and can tell you if the person doing the sutures is left-handed. Megan does some research, which includes blithely walking into the recovery room at a plastic surgery unit and checking out a bunch of patients. In the process, she gets flashed a bunch of times, but she figures out the surgeon is Dr. Wallace. Apparently, Wallace did a humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, giving him a connection to the VA. He explains away all of the evidence, but his nurse Yvonne doesn’t know where he was during the times where all of the soldiers were killed. My sister: “She did it.”

Kate is having a cute outdoor lunch with a guy who I am positive has never played anything but a douchebag (Richard Burgi). Chuck fans might know him as Decker. Man, that was a stupid plotline. Let’s all relive the stupidity of that plotline for a minute. It was all Shaw in the end, wasn’t it? It took hackers days to get to Burger King’s Twitter, but Shaw took down the entire internet all from a 8′ by 8′ cell and then downloaded it and didn’t immediately die from porn-overload. Sorry, every time I see Decker, I think of just how dumb that plotline truly is. I don’t exactly know what’s going on in this scene, but it looks like Kate is running for office, which means she has to keep her house in order and make a bunch of public appearances.

Mary Mouser as Lacey, diabetic daughter extraordinaire.

Okay, recap’s getting long, so I’m going to skip forward. Lacey drops by to get a permission slip that lets her walk home straight from the museum signed. Megan looks at a picture of Peter in a drawer and I’m almost sad. Curtis finds a bug that he doesn’t recognize among all of the others. The detectives find out that somebody asked the VA for the same list they requested the week before. Next up on the list is a soldier named Karl Simmons, who seems a little unhinged. I’m not judging, but the guy pulls out an assault rifle gun and offers to be bait for a serial killer, which seems like he might be two bullets short of a full magazine, but whatever. At least he’s got a permit for the gun. I wonder who did the background check on that one. Either way, they set up a sting with the detectives in the car and Simmons fetching a cheesesteak (Philadelphia represent!). Unfortunately, the bait vanishes behind a tow truck a la Jason Bourne. Megan is going to be piiiiiissed.

Thanks to Curtis and his Sherlockian abilities, they figure out that the killer is operating out of the Port of Philadelphia, where there’s a quarantine against the Khapra Beetle, the bug Curtis found earlier. The cops and Megan show up. Tommy makes her stay put, which is never going to work because Megan is like the cranky version of Rick Castle. He threatens to handcuff her to a pole. “Oh yeah? Is that what you’re into these days?” She gives no bothers and follows him into the warehouse and clopping very noisily with her heels.

They find the OR, where one victim is dead but Simmons is still alive—but not for long if he doesn’t get help. Megan starts to operate right away, asking for backup, but the detectives are a little busy chasing Wallace, the plastic surgeon from earlier. I should tell you he’s wearing awesomely white sneakers to go with his scrubs. Wallace gets the drop on Adam; Tommy takes Wallace out with a double-tap, leading Adam to have the BEST reaction. Megan saves the veteran, but we cut to an ominous shot of the keys we saw earlier being put into a car ignition.

Tommy says congratulations, but Megan’s sure there’s more to it, as she found surgical mesh on the scene and you wouldn’t use that if you were just removing spleens. She points out that there were two people necessary to run the machines, but they only found Wallace. Meanwhile, Lacey’s walking down the street in broad daylight. She gets thrown into the van by the nurse and my sister punches the air in vindication.

Back at the office, where Ethan tells Megan that there was potassium found on the scene. Megan urges Kate not to talk to the press until they get to the bottom of this, as it’s hard to tell when you’ve been killed by potassium, but Kate’s insistence to put on a good face for the press leads her to figure out Kate is running for office. Kate just wants to do good on a bigger scale. I’m so glad that the virus from last season didn’t kill her because I’m excited for this plotline (and all of the Parks and Recreation jokes I’ll get to make). Megan goes to get to the bottom of this like a proper Nancy Drew—by operating on the other victim found at the crime scene! We’re now back at the beginning of the episode.

It’s time for a montage: Lacey getting dropped out of the van (that looked like it hurt), getting dragged across the floor, Megan poking through a body, discovering surgical mesh with a blinking red light underneath it. Uh, to me, that means bomb. Megan appears to agree because she says the word aloud and then does NOT IMMEDIATELY HIGHTAIL IT OUT OF THERE BECAUSE THERE IS A BOMB. Anyway, like I said at the beginning of the episode, she’s got bigger problems, what with Lacey getting kidnapped and all. Iif there’s one person whose kid you don’t want to kidnap, it’s the brain surgeon/assistant medical examiner that can kill you very painfully and leave no evidence doing it. Or Liam Neeson.

Annie Wersching as Nurse Yvonne Kurtz, dead woman walking

So next week, we should have a fun episode! I’m excited about the direction of the new season. I was a little nervous because any time producers say “bigger stakes,” my instinct is to side-eye them. But that was an enjoyable hour of TV.

Body of Proof airs on Tuesdays at 10/9c on ABC.