At least U.S. Marshal Annie Frost is consistent in employing her absurd crime-fighting techniques. In the series pilot, she shared her philosophy that “music is the quickest way into a person’s soul.” The second episode of Chase finds her kicking back with some Tejano, while chewing bubble gum and doing a little light reading about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — all to get into the mind of a killer.
This week’s bad guy is called — repeatedly, with a straight face — “El Lobo,” or just plain “Lobo” to the crack team of marshals who continue to make their headquarters in Fair Park’s Hall of State (even though they’re supposed to be working in Houston). For a couple other Dallas locations making appearances this week, and more lessons from the Frost school of criminal justice, take the jump.
The episode starts with a scene set in Odessa (actually it’s at Snappy Foods, on St. Augustine Road just off Interstate 20 in South Dallas). A heavily tattooed Mexican man races a couple of teenagers off the road and kills them in their wrecked car. At first it seems like he was out for revenge, since one of the kids was the son of a state trooper that helped put him in prison. But as he bounces around the state searching for the cars that were taken from him and auctioned off by police when they put him behind bars, Frost and her team discover that Lobo is out to collect piles of cash that he hid in the vehicles. “Let’s catch ourselves a wolf,” Annie Frost says with great intensity.
The marshals are too slow to help a couple more victims of Lobo — this despite their ability to flash across our state at record speeds, traveling from Houston to Round Rock back to Houston then to Dallas in seemingly no time at all. They zero in on a fellow in Galveston who has Lobo’s old F-250 truck, since he seems to have disappeared from his home and isn’t answering his phone.
We first see the guy when he’s trading in the truck and paying $20,000 cash for a sporty convertible. (Though this is done in Galveston, he’s actually at a small car lot on Fort Worth Avenue, right across from the Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts.) Obviously, he’s discovered the money. He grabs his girlfriend and jets off to Las Vegas to get married after having a shootout with Lobo.
The marshals track them to Vegas, convinced that Lobo will be able to find the couple as well. I had no idea that the landscape around Las Vegas looked so much like North Texas. Annie Frost and her team do not seemed surprised by this fact.
Anyway, the couple decide to give the cash back to Lobo, since he threatens the life of the bride’s mother. They arrange a meeting with him, and he doesn’t end up seeming like that bad a guy. He actually appreciates their gesture in giving the money back and let’s them keep their newly purchased wedding ring. Sure, he’s a ruthless killer, but he’s knows that one good deed deserves another.
Frost and her partner are waiting for Lobo as he makes his escape. They run him off the road, and Annie gloats over his wrecked car. I’m not sure how the gum or the music helped get her there, but who am I to argue with results?
(Image: As this promotional image from NBC shows, Annie Frost likes to put herself into the minds of the criminals she seeks, like “Lobo.”)
