Evidently Kirsten and Cameron are conducting some field work, because this episode begins with them being mugged at gun point. I thought it odd, until she asked the mugger if he killed a woman because she didn’t give him what he wanted fast enough. Then, she asks him who the girl from the hotel is: girlfriend, wife? Interestingly, Kirsten tells the mugger that if he turns himself in, then they can help her.
Cut to Kirsten’s house. She and Camille are inundated with boxes from Ed’s apartment. Camille finds some old pictures in one of the boxes and as Kirsten flips through them, she comes across one of her mother and Ed. The photo has been ripped, and as Kirsten flips it over to see if there is a clue as to who might have been in the picture, the word “Remember” was written on it.
At headquarters, Kirsten confronts Maggie about the picture, demanding to know about it, but Maggie either doesn’t know or isn’t telling. Afterwards, Linus discusses old stereo systems with Camille, who found one in Ed’s stuff. He offers to come by their house and set it up for them, implying that they couldn’t do it themselves. Needless to say, they were insulted and declined his offer.
In comes the deceased, a newly wed woman. She was killed while being mugged, although, Kirsten suggests that it may not have been a random killing after all. She’s not initially able to see much, due to the instability of the woman’s memories. Cameron suggested it may be a difficult stitch since the woman died due to blunt force trauma to the head.
That evening, Camille and Kirsten do seem to be having trouble setting up the old stereo. While working on it, they find a cassette tape labeled “For when I’m gone.” Kirsten flashes back to her childhood, to a time when Ed actually gave it to her.
Don’t forget that Fischer has been brought into the program now. So, he allows Kirsten and Cameron to watch him interrogate the husband. Kirsten is convinced he’s innocent, but she seems to be the only one. When Fischer steps out, Kirsten decided to interrogate the husband herself, but ends up freaking him out by sharing details she saw in the stitch. Things no one should know.
Afterwards, Kirsten admits feeling a connection with the husband, but Cameron explains that away as residual emotion from the stitch. She insists on being stitched in again, and this time discovers that the newly weds took a cab to lunch. Since, the wife was murdered after lunch, Kirsten now thinks the cab driver may have been the killer. I’m starting to wonder if the show has developed a pattern of having to stitch twice to solve a crime.
Kirsten insists on going to the husband’s hotel to talk with him. She thinks he may be able to help her find the killer, and again explains that she feels like she has a connection with him. Cameron thinks it’s a bad idea, that she feels a connection because of the emotions of the wife she stitched into. This is when we find out that Marta (the stitcher before Kirsten) is in the state she is in due to her inability to separate her own emotions from those of the deceased.
The husband tells Kirsten that the hotel concierge arranged for the cab. It would appear that Cameron had a right to be concerned as Kirsten touched the husband lovingly causing him to kick her out. When she left, she looked hurt and angry. Meanwhile, Camille and Linus hooked up, literally.
Kirsten figures that the wife looked like a target due to the amount of jewelry she was wearing. So, her and Cameron go “shopping” for a gaudy amount of jewelry. The idea is to make themselves look like targets, and then ask the same concierge for a cab. If she was the one who set up the mugging, then they will likely be mugged by the man who killed the wife.
Her rouse seems to have worked. The concierge called a cab and Kirsten recognized the driver from her stitch. She texts Camille to track her phone and call Fischer. There’s one problem with that though, Camille is busy with Linus.
The cab drops them off without incident. Things seem to have hit a dead end until another man shows up to mug them. Apparently the driver has a partner, and we’re right back to where we started. Fortunately, Camille finally sees the text. Right at the moment the mugger is ready to shoot Kirsten (because, you know, she talks too much), he gets distracted, Cameron manages to knock him out with an empty pail (not convincing), and the cops show up.
In the end, the tape that Ed left in the stereo wasn’t a last minute note, but a recording he made for her when she was little. It was him reading bedtime stories aloud to her. He gave it to her when he was going to be out of town for a little while. She never listened to it as a child, but does now. As the story of Sleeping Beauty is heard, we see Maggie pull out the ripped part of Kirsten’s picture. Maggie was the one in the picture. I’m not sure what that means, but at that same moment Marta wakes up.
The relationships on this show are progressing quickly, and Kirsten seems to be developing the ability to have emotions due to experiencing them when she stitches. That seems somewhat counterintuitive considering that her inability to feel emotions is supposedly a side effect of her temporal dysphasia. On the one hand, her “feeling” is making it easier to connect and sympathize with her as a character, and on the other hand it is an annoying contradiction. At this point, the show seems to be poised to progress in an intriguing direction, or plummet. We’ll see what’s in store next Tuesday at 9PM EST on ABC Family.
Top image of Salli Richardson courtesy of Roger Wong/INFevents.com