Into The Fire

Episode 8 of FBI season 5 starts with a truck driver being robbed at gunpoint in the middle of the night. He tries to fight the robbers but he is shot and the crooks steal roughly 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate.

Schola and Tiffany are the first FBI agents to arrive at the crime scene and Schola spots a security camera. The tech team gets footage from the camera and it shows two men killing the truck driver before fleeing in a car. The car is traced to another crime that happened a week earlier. The feds think the cases are connected to a terrorist group that Maggie is currently trying to infiltrate. The leader of the group is called Eric and he is planning to build a pipe bomb.

Elsewhere, Maggie is undercover at a gun shooting range owned by Nick, Eric’s brother-in-law. She has made some leeway getting close to Deke who is Eric’s brother. OA is staying nearby but out of sight to protect Maggie’s cover. Isobel asks OA to pull Magie from her cover and update her on their suspicion that Eric has enough material to make a bomb. They think that the bomb can be ready within 48 hours and they have already lost 12 hours.

Maggie suggests using Deke to get close to Eric as he works from home. She manages to get an invite from Deke to a birthday party being held at Eric’s house. She sneaks to the basement and bugs Eric’s office, while there she spots a hoodie similar to what the shooters were wearing in the footage. She sneaks it out and brings it to the forensic team to collect evidence from it.   After the lab analysis of the hoodie, it is clear that Eric was part of the murder and stealing the fertilisers.

Their investigations into Eric’s finances show that he might be planning to flee to Canada after detonating the bomb the next day. They realize they are running out of time and they decide to put a tracker on his car and follow him to the bomb. OA doesn’t agree with Maggie and thinks they should arrest Eric immediately and get him to talk. Jubal and Isobel decide that Maggie’s play is better but unfortunately, Maggie is not able to place the tracker in time.

This forces them to change plans and OA leaves his post to follow Eric. Eric spots him and tries to make a run for it. Luckily, Schola and Tiffany provide backup for OA and they successfully arrest Eric. Arresting Eric, however, leaves Maggie with only a few hours to find out where the bomb is before her cover is blown. Meanwhile, in the cell, Eric is refusing to cooperate and they don’t have enough evidence to charge him with stealing fertilizers or planning a terror attack. They investigate the GPS in his car and they think they have located the place they are using to make a bomb.

They head to the abandoned land but as they breach they set off a perimeter alarm. The man inside flees in a motorbike and they are unable to pursue him. They start investigating the house in the abandoned land but they fail to find the bomb. It looks like the terrorists have already finished making the bomb and it has been moved. They try to investigate who is capable of making a bomb in the group and they spot Nick visiting the land several times in the past week.

OA tells Maggie that Nick might be their suspect and Maggie chooses to remain undercover and work him. Nick comes back to the shop and invites Maggie to a few drinks. Maggie suggests that they use the opportunity to clone Nick’s phone and collect evidence. OA is not happy with this plan and thinks Maggie is taking unnecessary risks to prove herself. At the bar, Schola helps Magie while undercover to steal Nick’s phone but Nick discovers something might be going on. They arrest him as their cover is blown and the intel on Nick’s phone shows that the bomb is en route to the target being driven by Deke.

They rush to intercept Deke before he detonates the bomb. OA and Maggie get into another argument as Maggie decides she wants to talk Deke out of detonating the bomb. OA wants Deke to be taken out by the snipers and Isobel agrees with Maggie. Maggie is able to get through to Deke and save a bunch of lives.

After the case, Maggie asks OA what is bothering him and he says he blames himself for her sarin accident. Maggie tells him that it was nobody’s fault that she got hurt on the job. She asks him to stop being so protective and let her be just like before.  OA agrees and they head out for drinks.

The Episode Review

We considered the fact that Maggie suffered a huge trauma when she nearly died after the sarin gas incident but we never thought of the impact the incident had on OA.

OA must have gone through a hard time especially if he lived all those months thinking it is his fault. He thought he let his partner get hurt. The thought of losing Maggie must have been scary for him and it is understandable why he is so protective now. Hopefully, they can go back to being a great time and get past the trauma together. It is strange how the same trauma can affect different people in different ways. The writers and the actors did a great job portraying this. Do you think the same?