TVSquad

6,013 fires. 30,000 BTUs. 700 arson deaths. 1 match. Burn, baby, burn. A serial arsonist is on the loose. Up until now, Don and the rest of his team had thought the fires were being set by members of a local activist group known as the Earth Liberation Movement. Then people started dying. First, a salesman at an auto dealership and then six firefighters were severely injured at another explosion. But that's okay, I wasn't worried because Bill Nye came in and saved the day.

First off, can I address Charlie's new choice of wardrobe? Did anyone else notice that he looked like he just walked off the set of Miami Vice? Secondly, Colby was back. They really just need to make him a full cast member now. Navi Rawat is still in the opening credits and she's had about ten minutes of screen time this entire season. Anyway, Charlie is helping out the LAFD's arson investigator by creating a new set of parameters (much larger than what the fire department usually consulted) to help identify the arsonist. That's where Bill Nye came in. He helped by creating an experiment to simulate the fire set at the auto dealership. But that was all we saw of him. I was hoping he'd play a larger role in the case, but it was just the one scene.

I thought the story got a little shaky at this point. Colby identified this one guy from news footage. He'd been at the scene of two fires and he happened to be part of the ELM group. But it turned out that he actually had nothing to do with the fires - but his college roommate did. So it was just dumb luck that this guy led them to someone who was actually involved? I don't know, but I thought it was a bit of a stretch.

This guy from the news footage, initially Don thought he was involved and the roommate, who looked up to him, was covering for the guy. However, that wasn't the case. After they hacked his computer, and found his chat room transcripts which linked him to another screen name that was coming from the address of a fire station (the one where the arson investigator had his office). This all tied together when Charlie finished his calculations and discovered that there had been about 15 fires similar to the one at the auto dealership in the past five years. The same arson investigator had worked all those cases. The guy had been setting fires that he knew would be added to his case load. He just needed the college kid to help him with the engineering aspects at setting the proper fire.

Overall, great episode. The Bill Nye appearance was spectacular, short as it was. Did anyone else pick up on the stretch in the story though, or am I crazy thinking that it was a bit far-fetched?