Great episode! I've always wondered when Don's team would encounter a situation right in their own building. While this wasn't on the grand scale that I imagined, this was still pretty damn good. Plus, you have to admit, right from the beginning it felt like a math problem. Two guys in a box. Sounds like the type of thing that was probably tossed around the conference room table when this show was originally developed. Sounds exactly like the type of thing that Charlie can take apart with theories and equations. And that's just what he did.

Lots of things really came together well here. First off (as I previously mentioned in that episode where Amita got involved with that online role playing game), this show in infinitely better in my opinion when one of the team members has a personal stake in the case. This time, David's life was on the line. Right away, the tension was ratcheted up.

Secondly, it was great to see Enrico Colantoni back on TV. I never watched Veronica Mars but was a huge Just Shoot Me fan. He'll always be Elliot to me. So to see him here as some paranoid nut, ready to take his own life? You've gotta love it. I always like to see actors take on tiny guest starring roles that go completely against what you're used to seeing them play.

The third big thing for me was seeing the Eppes family work together. You don't always see that interaction between Don, Charlie, and Alan all at the same time. Charlie had his theories, Don had his hunches, and Alan had his architectural and engineering knowledge. They all contributed and it was great. Having Alan that involved in an episode is a good thing all by itself if you ask me.

So the general plot... let me see if I got all this. Colantoni played Ben Blakely, an FBI subcontractor specializing in surveillance. He was watching a bunch of mob figures for a RICO case. The case ended but the warrants remained open. So his case officer, who was retiring and taking a position as the security expert for a mayoral candidate, had Ben bug the candidate's biggest threat under the guise that he was still doing RICO work. The candidate being watched by Ben had his own surveillance team. After some scandalous info got out because of Ben's work, the other surveillance team figured out Ben was watching them. So they watched back. Ben wasn't crazy. He was being bugged. However, he thought it was his case officer and the FBI. Cue the rest of the episode... whew, deep breath.

Pretty good plot actually. There really are two sides to everything... except Don's relationships. Liz Warner has left the building. I'm sure we'll still see her from time to time (kind of like we did anyway), but her and Don made amends and she took an assignment with another team. She's gone.

We also found out that Larry and Megan are officially getting back together. The biggest revelation for me was from Charlie though. We know Charlie is smart. That's a given. We've never really seen him struggle with it though. We've heard the stories about his awkward childhood. After Don snubbed Charlie and his suggestion of applying a Chinese box theory, we saw a side of Dr. Eppes I don't think we've ever really seen. He said that he failed to communicate his ideas properly. He failed to make himself understood because sometimes complex ides are so clear to him in his head that he can't properly translate them into words. It was sad really. I felt bad for him because someone so smart became instantly helpless.

Add in his frustrations about how his publisher is handling the book's publicity (the math is being "lost") and Charlie doesn't seem too happy right now. It'll be interesting to see how Don's reaction to Charlie affects their future collaborations. Too bad there's only one pre-strike episode left. It airs "sometime" in January.

This week's numb3rs: 25 years, 500 hours of video, 2.4 gigahertz, 2 player game
This week's math: Chinese Box