"Hollywood Homicide"
This was a consolidating episode for the series. It eased the Colby character back into the team, and it showcased the romances of the Eppes brothers (David Krumholtz's Charlie with Navi Rawat's Amita and the slight edge in Charlie's voice in response to the gentlest of nudges from his woman friend; Rob Morrow's Don with Aya Sumika's Liz Warner, neither of whom are good at defusing the workplace/relation tension). It gave nearly everyone in the cast a setpiece, and it also gave the show an opportunity to mock
Entourage and to make a few inside jokes about
Numbers itself - as when mildly star-struck Charlie and the less-impressed Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) demonstrated how they use calculations of water displacement to determine the size of a murder suspect, only to be told by their audience of a film actor and his lifelong friend that their efforts are just like something out of the movies "only not as cool."
Aside from the Eureka moment that led up to that exercise, the math in this episode was rather light; the A and B storylines for this one were still wrapped up in questions of identity. Aside from various members of the FBI detail, most obviously Alimi Ballard's David Sinclair, still trying to come to terms with Colby's long-term deep cover, the primary mystery of the episode involved what turned out to be two prostitutes who'd undergone plastic surgery to look nearly identical one murdered and the other apparently the intended target of that murder. Kelly Overton excelled in her small role as the latter, flint-hearted Andrea Barton, who had been blackmailing the actor and his entourage with information her "twin" had picked up and passed along. It turned out that the actor, who made much of his brother having been killed in a carjacking some years earlier, actually killed the brother himself in a drunken accident more twinning, or almost, and more deception.
Aside from being well-paced and only rather slightly far-fetched, the strength of this episode is, as I suggest above, in reinforcing or reintroducing several of the themes that have run through the series, not least the relation between Amita and Charlie. Charlie could be remarkably abrasive at times, while he dithered over whether he wanted to pursue a relationship with Amita (if she would have him). One of the strengths of the series is that this rarely felt like a gambit on the part of the producers so much as genuine unresolved tension within Charlie's slightly maladjusted soul, which is mirrored in the similarly rocky romantic life of his brother. Leaving aside the effect the death of their mother might have had on the brothers, it also suggests what life with obsessive people, whether ingenious mathematicians or dogged FBI agents, can let one in for.
