Attention, fugitives: If Annie Frost is on your tail, destroy your iPod immediately. This will spare the audience of Chase from having to watch yet another scene of our heroic U.S. Marshal jamming to the tunes left behind by her latest prey, for no actual purpose but to demonstrate how she’s working hard to get into the mind of the killer she seeks.
This week’s bad guy, Adam Rothchild, is a ripped-from-the-headlines financial crook who defrauded pension investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He lives the high life, with expensive clothes and cars, high-priced pomade, and a beautiful wife and mistress by his side. (He keeps the mistress living well in a high-rise called “the Clifton” — which is actually the Azure in Uptown Dallas.)
But Annie knows immediately that he’s hiding a secret past — Rothchild must have grown up poor. After all: why else would he have Damn Yankees and ZZ Top in his iTunes library? These suspicions are confirmed beyond any doubt when an old home video shows Rothchild saying “I’m drunker than a boiled owl.”
Chase isn’t satisfied merely to have our heroes pursue a mere white-collar criminal on the lam. The show ups the stakes by having Rothchild brutally assault one of the men his scheme stole money from, and shoot a bank guard and a former business partner when he goes on the run. He slips out of the team’s grasp at a private-plane airport. The stock footage used as the establishing shot for the airport’s exterior was of the Biggin Hill Airport in London, England.
Rothchild can’t outsmart Annie for long. For she knows how to use an oddly generic Internet search engine to look up terms such as “investment strategy” to gain deep insight into what Rothchild’s next move might be — while rocking out to “Don’t Tread on Me,” of course. Her revelation: “It seems to me that investment banking is all about two things: strategy and risk. It’s too risky right now for Rothchild to try to leave the country again…” Instead he’s going to look to lie low for awhile.
This research — and the fact that they found the car he had stolen ditched just outside his hometown — allows the team to track him to where his grandmother used to live. But by the time they get there, he’s already been taken in by a local Meals on Wheels volunteer who sees no reason not to lend him the keys to her father’s crop-dusting plane.
It’s all a set-up for a scene where Annie Frost leaps onto the wing of the prop plane as it’s taking off and fires her gun into the engine to stop it. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the helicopter-to-semi leap from last week, but it was still easily the most entertaining part of the episode.
So, let’s hope they forget all about that plotline building sexual tension between Annie and that rascal of a bounty hunter who was hanging around for much of the episode, also trying to catch Rothchild. More stunts, fewer musical sidebars please.
