UNFORGETTABLE: PILOT {SERIES PREMIERE} (TV)
Summary
The premiere of this police/private detective drama about Carrie Wells, a former detective with hyperthymesia, a medical condition that makes her unable to forget anything. The episode begins as Carrie is volunteering at a nursing home, demonstrating her superior memory skills to some of the residents. That night she goes out to a casino and wins big at the card tables before being brought into the back, accused of being a card-counter. She manages to get the casino owner’s bodyguards away before holding him at gunpoint, allowing her to escape. She returns home but awakens that night when she hears a commotion in the apartment above her. Following a trail of blood on the stairwell, she finds her neighbor dead and covered in blood. The police investigate what appears to be a murder: the woman, named Catherine Grant, appears to have been stabbed to death. They soon discover that Catherine used different names on her various IDs. One of the officers, Al Burns, goes to speak to Carrie, who appears to be avoiding him. He confronts her as a witness to the investigation, but they have a past together: they worked together in the Syracuse police department and had a relationship before Carrie broke it off. They catch up, but are terse towards each other. Al’s hypothesis about the murder weapon, a chef’s knife from Catherine’s apartment, is confirmed by the police coroner. Catherine appears to have obscured her own past, although they discover she was a prostitute in the 1980’s. The police discover Al’s past with Carrie and are intrigued. Meanwhile, Carrie is having flashbacks to her childhood. Al visits her and they talk; Carrie became a detective because when she was a child her sister Rachel was murdered, and she hoped she would one day solve that murder. However, the lack of any real evidence forced Al to shut down the case in 2002, causing her to break up with him and quit her police work. Al asks for Carrie’s help in solving Catherine’s murder. He brings her back to the scene of the crime, where she remembers finding Catherine’s body. Replaying the scenario over in her mind, she remembers a silhouette she didn’t notice before. Following this lead, she locates the murder weapon in a nearby sewer grate. Al explains to his co-workers that Carrie possesses hyperthymesia, a medical condition that gives her uncanny autobiographical memory and analytical skills. He elects to bring Carrie in on the case as a consultant. The police track down Catherine’s most recent place of employment, a shipping company; her old boss tells them she borrowed a van from them to move away from her boyfriend, and he says she was in a hurry. Back at the police station, Al shows Carrie a photograph from Catherine’s apartment showing a section of wall where a painting or picture is clearly missing. Carrie remembers helping Catherine with her groceries, revealing that the wall held a photograph of Catherine with another woman. The police track Catherine’s phone calls, leading them to a rich lawyer engaged to be married. They interview him but he claims not to know Catherine. However, Carrie recognizes the lawyer’s fiancée, Wendy Wilson, as the woman in the photograph with Catherine. Wendy is held for questioning, but also claims not to know Catherine. The police note that Wendy’s records are obscured much in the same way that Catherine’s are and Al bluffs that the police have the missing photo. Al and Carrie go aside and argue about how he is conducting the case. The police are forced to let Wendy go, but obtain her fingerprints from a glass of water she was drinking. Later, Carrie confronts Wendy alone and reveals that she knows her true identity: “Mallory Evans,” a girl from an abusive home and a troubled past who worked to achieve a respectable life and changed her name. Wendy confesses to being lifelong friends with Catherine, whose real name was “Olya.” Catherine was originally from Russia and was sold to a Long Island family as a maid, where she was horribly abused. She and Wendy were both in prostitution before they were caught and put into the same recovery program. However, they fell out with one another when Catherine started blackmailing the family who once employed her. Based on Wendy’s account of when Catherine caught up with her former employer, Carrie deduces that it would have to be an employee of the shipping company. However, when the police investigate they find that the only person there in the proper age category is wheelchair-bound and therefore incapable of being the murderer. Looking around the shipping office, Carrie finds a photograph of the company heads’ father. His DNA matches that found on Catherine and when brought into the station he confesses to murdering her in order to cease her blackmail. Afterwards Al talks to Carrie about the case, she says she has been remembering more about Rachel’s murder but wants it to stop, expressing a desire to move on with her life. As she’s leaving, Carrie notices that the father walks with a limp, inconsistent with the footsteps she heard during the night of the murder. Eventually she remembers seeing the shipping company head in a diner as she was returning from the casino. She calls the department and asks for a more thorough DNA test before confronting the shipping head at his headquarters, alone. She gets him to admit that he is responsible for Catherine’s death; he said he knew his father couldn’t go through with stopping her, so he followed him to her apartment and killed her after he left. He attacks Carrie with a crowbar and they struggle, but Al shows up at the last minute to apprehend him. The next day, Carrie volunteers at the nursing home; it turns out one of the residents is her and Rachels’ mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and therefore doesn’t recognize her or remember that Rachel is dead. Carrie receives a package from Al filled with his research on Rachel’s murder, with a note attached reading: “I never gave up.” The episode ends as Carrie and the police attend a funeral, and Carrie remembers another tidbit of Rachel’s murder: a man standing beside her just after she found Rachel’s dead body. Commercials deleted.
Details
- NETWORK: CBS
- DATE: September 20, 2011 10:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 0:43:48
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: 106331
- GENRE: Drama, police/private detective
- SUBJECT HEADING: Drama, police/private detective
- SERIES RUN: CBS - TV series, 2011-2014; A&E - TV series, 2015-2016
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Carl Beverly … Executive Producer
- Sarah Timberman … Executive Producer
- Ed Redlich … Executive Producer, Developed by, Writer
- Merrill Karpf … Co-Executive Producer
- John Bellucci … Co-Executive Producer, Developed by, Writer
- Niels Arden Oplev … Producer, Director
- John Robert Lennon … Based on the short story by
- Poppy Montgomery … Cast, Carrie Wells
- Dylan Walsh … Cast, Detective Al Burns
- Michael Gaston … Cast, Mike Costello
- Kevin Rankin … Cast, Roe Sanders
- Daya Vaidaya … Cast, Nina Inara
- Thomas Guiry … Cast, Ken Harber
- Deanna Dunagan … Cast, Alice
- Roxanna Hope … Cast, Wendy Wilson
- Brian O'Neill … Cast, Frank Harbert
- Andrew Katz … Cast, Norman
- Timothy Adams … Cast, Steve Latman
- Ezra Knight … Cast, Hank Sturgis
- Vanessa Aspillaga … Cast, Jill