The Irrational Recap: The Smell Test
Alec spends a good amount of this week’s The Irrational sniffing around not only figuratively, but literally: After all, if strong scents can evoke memory, maybe reminding his nostrils about the night of his bombing will lead his brain back there, too?
Meanwhile, the Case of the Week involves a journalist who’s been poisoned with a substance more commonly used to off Russian spies. And rather than go to the police, or the FBI, or the CIA, or literally any other established law-enforcement organization, the reporter in question thinks Alec is her best bet at solving the mystery. Nearly dead lady gets what nearly dead lady wants, I guess?
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SMELLS LIKE THE ’90S | The hour opens with Alec spraying Calvin Klein’s CKOne into an open flame, trying to jog his memory of the day of the church bombing that burned him. He remembers smelling fire and his cologne (the STRANGLEHOLD that scent had on United States youth at the time!); he’s hoping sniffing that combination again will bring back some of the details he’s forgotten. He shows Kylie the best shot the FBI has of the guy who interrupted the parole hearing in the series premiere, and it’s disappointing: The security-camera still is from behind, and merely shows a guy wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat. Red Reddington, IS THAT YOU?
At campus, Alec is greeted by C.J. Wright (played by Amy Aquino, ER, Bosch), a journalist who’s looking for help solving a murder. Whose, he wonders? “Mine,” she says. She covered the death of a Russian spy who was killed via polonium 210 poisoning, and now she says she’s been poisoned, as well. He wonders why she’s there, given that she previously did some reporting about how his work was “pop culture junk science.” She says she was wrong, and that’s why it never published. She adds that she’s uninterested in pursuing experimental solutions to her poisoning, so it’s time to get cracking on who’s trying to off her. She’s mentioned a few possibilities… and then she passes out in Alec’s office.
SHIP OUTTA LUCK | Marisa meets Alec at the hospital just before C.J.’s writing partner, Gene, shows up. Gene gives Alec a little background on Yuri, the Russian oligarch-adjacent whistleblower who was at the lunch where C.J. thinks she was poisoned. Alec and his research assistants quickly suss out Yuri’s location (he lives at a marina), and Alec heads there but doesn’t wait for Marisa before approaching the boat. Pretty soon, a shooter has killed Yuri and is aiming at Alec. Despite Alec’s attempts to talk the assassin into escaping before the Feds arrive, the shooting continues. And Alec has to jump into the harbor to survive.
But WAS Yuri the poisoner? The lack of polonium 210 on him and his things seems to indicate no. The investigation leads to a former tobacco-company publicist, who was fired from his job after C.J. wrote an expose about how the company targets kids. Alec lures the former rep into an interrogation by staging a fake job interview. And as the cigarette pusher boasts about how he helped the tobacco company save money on carting away its hazardous waste — including the poison in question — but setting it up with a company owned by Gene’s cousin or something. (Honestly, it doesn’t matter, and if you’ve ever watched one of these shows, you knew it was Gene from the very beginning of his “Oh no, I’m so scared for my life and sad for my friend” schtick, right?)
JUST HAD TO RUN YOUR MOUTH, DIDN’T YOU? | Anyway, Alec goes to Gene’s place and makes it seem as though C.J. has fallen into a coma that will probably last until her death. So Gene the giant idiot makes a beeline to his writing partner’s hospital room to give a long, detailed soliloquy about how he was her poisoner. “Surprised? I bet you are,” he says to the comatose woman. “I played fair. I gave you a chance to solve it. But I beat you, didn’t I?” he says nastily. “I guess I’m a lot smarter than you thought I was.” He’s shocked, then, when she opens her eyes and replies, “Not that smart” — and reveals that she’s got the entire confession on digital recorder. He moves to grab it but Marisa busts in, gun drawn, and soon he’s being led away in handcuffs. Later, we learn that C.J. changes her mind and is going to try the polonium treatments.
At the end of the hour, Alec returns to his scent-memory experiment. He drops some flower petals into an open flame, sniffs deeply and has a vision of a logo on the side of a van that pulled away from the church bombing. “I remembered something,” he tells Kylie, right before the episode goes to black.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the hour? Let us know in the comments!
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