Limitless - 'Pilot' and 'Badge! Gun!'

Regular Brian and Smart Brian; Brian Brian and Brain Brian, if you will.

Brian Finch (Jake McDorman) is an amiable slacker; not dim, but unfocused, frittering his youth away on his dream of becoming a musician while the rest of his family grow up around him. Then one day, while working as a temp, he runs into his ex-bassist Eli, a financial analyst who offers him a notropic drug called NZT-48 which allows him to access his brain's full potential - every connection working together, every memory in perfect recall. He completes his two week temp assignment in hours, gives his supervisor advice on dumping her deadbeat boyfriend and diagnoses his father's mystery ailment before the pill wears off and he crashes hard.

Then he tries to get another pill, only to find his friend murdered and the FBI chasing him for the crime. With the help of Eli's emergency stash he escapes and sets out to prove his innocence, with some help from sympathetic FBI agent Rebecca Harris (Jennifer Carpenter). The side-effects of NZT begin to bite, but Senator Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, reprising his role from the original movie) appears basically from nowhere and offers him the solution - an occasional injection which eliminates the side-effects of NZT - if he never tells anyone that they had contact. It seems like a small price to pay for not having his brain catastrophically, even terminally, rewire itself.

I'm a sucker for a fantasy sequence.

With his innocence proven, the FBI is keen to study Brian's immunity, as the volunteers for their own NZT trials were killed by the drug. Harris insists that, rather than drag him in and make him a lab rat, they should use him as a resource. She explains that her father was a drug addict. He showed up promising to be better with the NZT shine in his eyes, and a few weeks later was dead.

In 'Badge! Gun!' therefore, he kicks off his new job; sadly not by playing Baccarat with master criminals (and Uno cards), but by sitting in a small room learning Farsi. This doesn't really fire his enthusiasm, so he gives his minders - whom he names Mike and Ike, although the NZT means that he must actually remember their names and is just being a bit of a dick - the slip to work on cases, much to the anger of the Chief (played by former Maid Marian, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,) whom I've just realised is called Nasreen Pouran, so go inclusion even if she is played by an Italian.

Around the procedural elements of the episode - Brian helps to track a bomber by building models, then postulates the existence of a bio-weapon targeting descendants of Genghis Khan and obtains vital evidence against a CEO by appealing to the hatred of a workforce - we continue to build our characters. During his excursion to build model bombs for comparison, Brian takes a bus, gives one man advice on connecting with his son, helps a young couple work out their problems and generally makes friends with everyone, establishing him as a slightly maverick soul, but basically a good man. Harris continues to bat for him, while Pouran and Harris' partner Boyle are grudgingly impressed and Mike and Ike clearly hate his guts.

Most interestingly, when he tries to search for the connection between Morra and NZT, just associating them in a search window crashes his computer. Showing up like a blue eyed Jesus in the Pilot, Morra's influence now adopts a decidedly sinister cast, and his explanation that Brian will soon be in a position where he needs someone rather threatening. Just in case this wasn't enough to question his motives, the nurse who administered Brian's injection suddenly shows up as his Dad's visiting nurse.

Limitless has definite potential. I like the leads, and they're soft-pedaling on the whole '10% of your brain' bullshit, which is good.