ABC The noob airing this Sunday Part 1 of a backdoor spin-off pilot, about Simone Clark, aka the FBI’s oldest trainee (played by Claws‘Niecy Nash). What is your knee-jerk reaction to this potential branch?
Part 1 of the planted spin-off pilot, titled “Simone”, began with Nolan and Chen investigating suspicious activity at a power plant in Griffith Park. Surveying the facility, Nolan spotted a bomb and they both ran off just as the device went boom. Later, the FBI arrived on the scene, in the form of Agent Matthew Garza (played by Ozarks‘s Felix Solis) and Agent Casey Fox (‘To death‘s Kat Foster), but agreed with Sergeant Gray to share the case.
Although a couple had seen a white man with dark hair, a Russian accent and a scar on his face outside the power plant, a second clue comes from footprints found on the bomb casing, which leads to Ezekiel Freemont (a young black). When he realizes (randomly) that an FBI trainee used to be Zeke’s high school guidance counselor, Garza orders Simone Clark to fly in from Quantico.
Simone is throwing a Quantico trainer on the run with her aggressive but perfect driving skills when a helicopter arrives looking for her. Arriving in Los Angeles, she notoriously walks into a meeting of the FBI and LAPD, where she just can’t shut up as the experienced profiler describes an “angry” Zeke Fremont completely unknown to the boy she knew. Invited by Garza to say peace, she remembers Zeke as a victim of a violent home, who had sensory overload issues and was actually quite an empath. Apprentice Clark suggests that Zeke is probably hiding somewhere dark and quiet right now, but Garza dismisses his point of view and insists that the boy he once knew no longer exists, but is now part of a cell. terrorist.
As the meeting is called, Clark offers Garza more help, but Garza politely declines, telling him to return to Quantico (by bus, not a “private plane”). She meets up with Nolan after her, and he offers her thanks for her insight, as well as the opportunity to spend the rest of her shift with him and search for Zeke. Along the way, they compare notes on their respective statuses as “older rookie/trainee” (her training was postponed some 18 years due to her pregnancy with twins), and John assures her that what they may lack in the ability to run without staying out of breath, they compensate in life experience.
Nolan and Clark find Zeke, as expected, in the tunnel closest to his apartment. He is taken to the police office, where Officer Foster laughs at the suggestion that the trainee, regardless of her connection to the POI, be able to lead the interrogation. Instead, Garza pushes her back to Quantico. Again.
Moments later, however, the feds yell at Clark, as Zeke will only talk to her. She and Zeke then reconnect in the interrogation room, where she finally explains that out of cash, she had started selling her engineering skills on the dark web. There she met a “research scientist” who asked her to build a total of six (!) Bomb Detonators, five of which are GPS-enabled.
Simone then tells John that she wants to get proper legal guidance from Zeke, and we see her reach out to her estranged father, Christopher “Cutty” Clark (bansheee’s Frankie Faison). Having been falsely imprisoned in the past, Cutty has a big bone to discuss with his daughter, as he is about “Defunding the Police” and she chose a career in law enforcement.
Meanwhile, Nolan suggests to Gray & Co. that the seemingly random bombing of the lone power plant was designed to shut down (and thus make vulnerable) something on that power grid—say, the National Guard Armory? And sure enough, we see the scarred man stop at the front door of the armory, where we learn that he is holding the guard’s husband on duty. Therefore, he is allowed to enter, according to his agreement…
Soon after, firefighter/National Guard reservist/capoeira instructor Bailey leads a team to the armory, where they find several guards knocked out and see the suspect fleeing in his Humvee. A car chase ensues, during which Chen, at Bradford’s urging, carefully uses a stunt to crash the Humvee; only then do they realize that the driver was the blackmailed security guard. While the real terrorist quietly got away with a batch of C4 explosives.
Meanwhile, this time, Lopez and Harper were working on a seemingly unrelated (although you had to suspect otherwise) case involving a home invasion, where the somewhat confused victim claimed that an alien (as in ET) had broken in to steal her research on Los Angeles traffic patterns. But when Harper analyzes the prints found at the scene, they came back as classified and originated from the Air Force base in “Area 51”. They bring their victim in for further questioning, and FBI trainee Clark overhears them. Simon pulls Angela and Nyla aside to notice that the man is having a clinical delusion, and none of his approaches will understand. With his blessing, Clark sets out to “charm and disarm” the man, eventually sharing that the “shapeshifter” took the form of…a white male in his 30s, with a scar on his face.
Having played a key role in putting the pieces together, Garza accepts Clark into the task force and they head to the last known suspect. There, they find the guard’s dead husband, but no one else, just the wall where he had pasted his plan of attack. Chen rubs to find the name “ENERVO”, and that leads Bradford, Nolan and Foster to assume that their suspect sees his plan as some kind of “war”. And a typical first strike in war is to take out the roadsergo his theft of that guy’s Los Angeles traffic investigation.
We then see the scarred man privately inspect several barrels of explosives in the back of a rented truck, before introducing himself as “Professor Meadows” to five volunteers, to whom he gives a first payment and strict instructions on where other renters must drive. . trucks….
Reference-tvline.com