In last week's review, I commented that the show was gaining a greater amount of nuance and subtlety in its storytelling. While the nuance remains this week, particularly in the dialogue, the plot of this week's Lie To Me was remarkably blunt, lacking the subtle brilliance of "Dirty Loyal".
The focus of the episode is a new art exhibit, with the key pieces being a gemstone dug up by archaeologists in 1908 India, and a statue of Osiris from Egypt. When two thieves dressed as cops get shot by the museum guard on duty, the curator blames Torres, who vetted all of his museum employees sometime prior to the events of the episode. Of course, the curator has a drug problem and two regular wall painters whom he failed to mention to Torres at the time of the employee screening. Meanwhile, Lightman gets involved with a woman named Naomi while waiting at the hospital to see if the thief that survived the museum guard's wrath survives. As is revealed through Lightman's flirtations and interactions with her, Naomi used to be involved in the planned heist, but dropped out when her boyfriend resorted to using violence. Now the ex is harassing her, and she drags Lightman into her life. This, of course, is a decoy -- Naomi wanted to steal the gemstone back so it could be returned to its rightful owner. Nuts to her, then, because Lightman had the curator switch out the real gemstone for a fake.
It was hard to really engage with this episode. Part of me thinks that was by design. The title of the episode, "Double Blind", refers to a kind of psychological experiment where neither the test subjects nor the researchers know which test subjects are in the control group (the normal conditions against which a hypothesis is tested) and which are in the experimental group. That may have worked for Naomi, blinding both herself and Lightman to the truth of the events, but it doesn't work for an episode of television; instead of drawing us in, the episode attempts to push us away.
I did appreciate the butterfly metaphor. The subplot involves Torres dealing with the fact that she may have screwed up when vetting the museum employees. In response, Lightman asks her to look up the difference between a Monarch butterfly and a viceroy butterfly. Loker provides the explanation: "They're nearly identical. Predators can't tell the difference between the two, they just know one is toxic, so they leave them both alone." (This is kind of misleading; viceroy butterflies can still upset a predator's stomach -- not as dangerous as being poisoned by the Monarch, but still not very preferable, and therefore a good deterrent for predators.) The idea is that Torres and Lightman work together, against the curator, in order to confuse him, make him unsure whether Lightman or Torres are the more dangerous prey, so that he'll leave them both alone. Lightman later invokes the metaphor after Naomi reveals her cards, telling her, "Viceroy butterfly" in response to a dinner proposal. It's a nice touch of subtlety in an otherwise unsubtle episode.
The season's extended metaphor of "Lightman Group as family" played less of a role here, but was still invoked. The Torres subplot definitively places Foster and Lightman in parental roles to Torres -- it works within the family metaphor, but as a stand-alone plot, it irked me from a feminist point of view. Foster is once again left out of another Lightman sleight-of-hand, having not been told about the fake gemstone. When she confronts him, he tells her, "It's called 'cat-and-mouse', Jill, not 'cats-and-mouse'." Lightman's ego seems to be an on-going problem this season as well; when he and Naomi go for coffee, he asks her to call him Lightman, which for me invoked the first episode of the season: "Let there be Lightman!"
Overall, "Double Blind" was not as strong as the previous three episodes. Though there were some great ideas at play, the execution was by-the-numbers procedural work -- which, admittedly, is more interesting under the lens of the Lightman Group, but within context, this episode was not a particularly strong use of Lie To Me's greatest strengths.
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