Limitless - 'When Pirates Pirate Pirates'

"Ten four good buddies."

When SAC Naz goes after whoever in the Bureau set Brian up for the Black Op, she leaves Brian and Rebecca with a contingency plan: Get to her house, a veritable fortress, and stay put, because if things go wrong then Brian will be shipped to DC and locked in a box. Sure enough, things go wrong when Naz is arrested for wiring money to a man on the terrorist watch list.

Brian and Rebecca set out to prove her innocence, but learn from Naz's daughter Ava that she actually did it. The 'terrorist' in question is actually a sort of facilitator - on the watch list because he arranges hostage negotiations with terrorists - who is currently working to get Ava's cousin released after she was captured by pirates in the South China Seas, and then taken from those pirates by a crew of pirate hunters turned pirates.

The meat of the Brian and Rebecca part of the episode involves using Brian's secret NZT stash to learn a whole lot of languages and trawling for information on the pirates via ham radio, then tracking a former pirate in the US and trading him a rare and highly tasteless pinball machine for brokering the release, while Brian and Ava have a little early-stages chemistry going on. We also learn from a game of screw-marry-kill that Rebecca would chose to screw her boyfriend rather than marry him.

There's also a lot going on away from our main characters, as previously just vaguely disapproving Boyles works the interim SAC and his own DC contacts to find out who set Naz up and farmed Brian out to the CIA (surprise, it's Naz's buddy, although we never really met him before, so...)

Finally, Brian gets some additional advantage from his relationship with Morra, persuading him (via Sands; they clearly weren't budgeted for another Bradley Cooper cameo just yet,) to use his influence to get the bad guy kicked out in order to ensure Brian remains where they want him.

'When Pirates Pirate Pirates' suffers a little from its central presence. Brian admits that the hostage issue they're dealing with is a fascinating problem when removed from real life, as it is via his imaginary golden age pirates and treasure map graphics, but without any hint of the reality this trivialises something that is both real and horrible. It's a recurring problem resulting from the filtering of most of the action through the mind of a man who finds it hilarious that the interim boss is called ADIC Johnson. There are hints that the show will get traction through Brian's increasing exposure to actually horrible things, but it's a tough balance and not always successfully negotiated.