Take Two

• Title: Take Two – Stillwater
• IMDb: link

In “Stillwater” Sam (Rachel Bilson) and Eddie (Eddie Cibrian) head into wine country and to a small town where a client believes his mother has been abducted by aliens. Like Castle‘s “Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind,” the episode piles up the evidence on the side of actual aliens before providing a terrestrial rationale for the mystery. Despite the evidence of alien intervention Sam and Eddie witness with their own eyes, and previous UFO sightings in the town during the 70s, the episode fails to sell us (or even them) on aliens. Even after their “abduction” the pair seem less, not more, likely to buy the story of what is happening in Stillwater.

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• Title: Take Two – About Last Night
• IMDb: link

Take Two didn’t waste much time throwing its stars in bed together, even if they don’t remember just what happened the night before. Waking up in bed with no memory of their previous 24 hours, Sam (Rachel Bilson) and (Eddie Cibrian attempt to piece together what happened to them. Through a few breadcrumbs, and working around the misinformation offered by their client (Jewel Staite), the pair eventually trace their path to a rogue government agent and a missing vial of a deadly toxin capable of taking out the entire city.

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• Title: Take Two – The Devil You Know
• IMDb: link

Tattiawna Jones guest-stars as a bounty hunter acquaintance of Eddie (Eddie Cibrian who ropes the dectives into helping her track down a large bounty. Not listening to her partner’s concerns, Sam (Rachel Bilson) jumps in with both feet which eventually gets the pair into trouble. “The Devil You Know” is a mostly forgettable episode highlighted by another Charlie’s Angels style undercover turn for Sam (this time in a biker bar) and the return of Brian Markinson who plays Eddie into unintentionally helping the former judge’s chances at trial through a convoluted subplot that does eventually lead to an interesting scene between the two actors. If he should be released, just how large a role with the judge turned criminal mastermind play in the episodes to come?

• Title: Take Two – Death Becomes Him
• IMDb: link

With the help of former Castle star Seamus Dever, Take Two delivers a fun episode involving a client (Dever) who hires Sam (Rachel Bilson) and Eddie (Eddie Cibrian) to save him from a hitman he hired when he mistakenly believed he was dying of cancer. Even after stopping the hitman, however, the detectives discover he isn’t the only one who wants their client dead. With a plot that could easily have been used for Castle (or a number of other shows), Take Two allows the mystery of the week to drive the show and its cast to support it (and allow for some wacky fun such as dressing up the client to attend his own funeral). Dever is enjoyable as the paranoid quality control engineer and there are more than a few false trails for Sam and Eddie to navigate before discover the true motive for the crime. While the previous episodes of the series have ranged from meh to okay, this is the first legitimately good episode of Take Two. Maybe there’s hope for it yet.

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