Limitless - 'Stop Me Before I Hug Again'

The subconscious is a scary place.

Brian is let out into the field this week, as the task force picks up the tail of the notorious serial hugger, Mr Pralines and Cream.

Sound weird? Welcome to 'Stop Me Before I Hug Again', an outwardly lighthearted episode of Limitless which speaks to the depth of distress afflicting Brian's drug-enhanced psyche. Faced with the brutal reality of a murder scene, his subconscious - in the form of a defunct children's TV presenter and a cartoonised rendition of his childhood bedroom, persuades Brian to replace scary words with nice words, and to swap out the BAU's undeservedly cool serial killer nicknames for ice cream flavours. He then proceeds to crack a case which has defied the FBI's rock star profiler, David Englander, in less time than it takes for Englander to ball him out for researching suspects on his phone during the briefing.

Portrait of a Serial Hugger.

Impressed, Englander makes a bid to poach Brian for the BAU, who are basically the opposite of their Criminal Minds incarnation, being a pack of swaggering, shrewdly political self-promoters more interested in book deals than justice; especially Englander. During a visit to their HQ, he cracks a few outstanding cases, but also stumbles on what seems to be an inconsistency in the case that made Englander's career.

Even as he sets out to prove the innocence of a man on death row, however, Brian is distracted by Rebecca's investigation into Morra. He persuades Sands to provide a duplicate coat to swap out for the one in evidence, impregnated with NZT-free Morra blood, but discovers a discrepancy in the buttons that he is unable to fix (an oversight his subconscious suggests was a deliberate attempt to get caught and end the lies.)

'Stop Me Before I Hug Again' is actually a pretty creepy entry into the Limitless canon. Thanks to Brian's NZT super-filtering ability, we run through the entire episode hearing his substituted words (much as in Mr Robot everyone calls E-Corp 'Evil Corp',) and it's... not very comforting, and in fact may cause sensitive viewers to think very differently about ice cream, hugging, tickling and cuddling, let alone 'playing cowboys and Indians.'