Limitless - 'The Assassination of Eddie Morra'

I can't help wondering if this episode would have gone differently if Morra's
renegade helper had been less gosh-darned adorable.

This week, Eddie Morra dodges a bullet, literally, his NZT-accelerated brain allowing him to sidestep a nigh-impossible kill-shot from an NZT-using assassin.

The assassin is Piper Blair, a brilliant biochemist and former member of Team Morra who went off the res with a stash of NZT and the all-important booster enzyme, murdered her boyfriend and then came gunning for her former sponsor. Sands instructs Brian to ensure that the FBI don't catch her, since that would tie Morra to NZT, but Blair leaves a trail of breadcrumbs which lead him right to her secret lair, and from there to a meeting at his parents' house, where she has introduced herself as his new girlfriend.

Blair explains that basically what Morra said is true, but that rather than going crazy and murdering her boyfriend, she tried to expose his operation and he had the boyfriend killed in retaliation. She wants him to help her kill Morra. In return, Morra offers an evasive non-denial of this accusation, claiming that his work requires secrecy and sacrifice. Since Blair has reached out to Brian, Sands tells him to kill her, offering a clean gun and a few extra pills for the job. Brian has a crisis, represented by an ever-increasing number of his NZT doubles, with Rebecca Brian joining Pill Brian on Team Cardigan against Badass Brian and Sands Brian in leather jackets, and Ike Brian baffled by the whole thing.

Eventually, he meets with Blair, fails to shoot her, but after a chase pushes her under a subway train. Once Sands congratulates him on his graduation to the 'real world', he meets the not-dead Blair and flashes back to faking her death with a stolen corpse and altered DNA profile. She invites him to come with her to work on the booster enzyme together, but he insists that he needs to stay with the FBI.

Ah, the conspiracy wall.

Morra asks Brian why he alone seems to be intent on hanging on to the person that he was before NZT. The drug allows one to transcend every limitation, but Brian seems determined to remain Brian.

Meanwhile, Rebecca is on a case of her own, having grown suspicious of Morra during the hunt for his assassin, especially when a perfect scapegoat, suffering from a terminal illness, hands herself in.

'The Assassination of Eddie Morra' delivers another knock to our hero's happy-go-lucky attitude, as his handler asks him not only to conceal crimes or steal from the FBI, but to commit murder by his own hand, and however sure I was that Blair would turn out to be alive, I admit the scene in which Brian seems to push her under a train was chilling. Tough decisions lie ahead, and they may not all be resolved so neatly.

The episode also makes hay with a dramatic benefit of NZT, which is that it does allow a person to become something radically different under its influence. Thus, we see Blair as a cool assassin before we see her as an adorable idealist, making it easier to speculate that she might actually be the femme fatale villain after all.