Take Two – Taken

By: Gladys Luna

A man is walking on the street in the middle of a night. He seems to be uneasy and keeps looking behind his back as he goes. He grows nervous as he turns and walks into an isolated alley. Suddenly, when he least expects it, a shadow coming out of the darkness shows up injecting something in his neck.

Eddie (Eddie Cibrian) walks into his office and finds Berto (Xavier de Guzman) standing by Sam’s (Rachel Bilson) new office. When he is finally at the door, Sam and Monica (Alice Lee) are standing there choosing between a number of different colors in order to paint the office. Sam asks for Eddie´s opinion about it but he immediately rejects the idea of a new decoration to the office. Sam promises him that if he doesn’t like the decoration she’ll put it back to how it originally was. Right in the middle of their conversation Sam takes a call and starts speaking suspiciously low, something that draws Eddie’s attention. When the call is done, the girl walks out of the office and is questioned by Eddie about it, but she acts as it was not important at all. Eddie had eavesdropped the conversation and what he got from that is the code name “Livorno” so he asks for Berto’s help to find out what that might be.

Berto informs Eddie that some guy called and asks for Eddie to pay a visit. He intends to walk out of the office without been seeing by Sam, but he fails. The two arrive at a night club named Terra that Sam seems to know pretty well. When they get in, she greets the owner Aram (Hrach Titizian) with such familiarity and it seems like Eddie and he also have a long way back to judge by the way Eddie is treating him. Aram explains that his DJ, Eric Fisher (Markian Tarasiuk), is the man that was injected with something at the beginning of the episode and he has gone missing. Eddie doesn’t seem to understand why Aram bothers so much with wanting to find the DJ and Aram explains him that since Eddie had become the “house DJ” the number of people going to the club has increased so if something happened to him, it would not reflect well in his business numbers. Eddie warns him that if he takes the case he will go as deep as he can and Aram agrees.

The tension between the men was very evident and Sam can’t help but to ask Eddie about it yet he refuses to answer. Instead, he asks her about her earlier call and she decides to do the same as him and avoid the question. Sam asks Monica to get some information from Berto about Eddie and Aram. Eddie calls Berto and requests him to find as much as he can about Eric. Berto takes the chance and lets Eddie know what he found about “Livorno.” He explains that it seems to be a secret CIA program name, but Eddie doesn’t seem to be so sure about it. He asks the guy to try to get some information from Monica instead.

Eddie and Sam pay a visit to Mark (Kurt Teixeira), Eric’s roommate, to gather some information about the guy’s life outside the club. He explains that his roommate was nothing out of the ordinary and the only bizarre thing that happened was a week ago when Eric met a girl at the “Galaxy Lounge.” He went out with her and then he woke up on a car, disoriented and with some needle marks on his arms but couldn’t manage to remember anything from the prior night. Mark said that from that moment on, Eric was sure that he was followed but nobody took him seriously. Unfortunately, the only information they have on the girl is that she was red headed and had a ladybug tattoo on her shoulder.

Later that day Berto is explaining them that there were no illegal records on Eric that he could found. However, he did manage to find out the identity of the woman he went out with whose name is Megan Murphy (Fiona Vroom), a former nurse that was fired from the St. John’s hospital for stealing drugs. After Eric went missing the woman’s activities ceased as well. As they are looking to the pictures Berto is showing them they see a cabin and think that it could be a good place to hide so Eddie and Sam start their way towards the place. When Monica and Berto are left alone Monica approaches him and asks him for a coffee. She then walks away assuming he would say yes without giving him the slightest of chances to reply. And that is how Monica and Berto found themselves standing awkwardly next to each other at a coffee shop. The girl starts to throw bold questions at him not even trying to hide the mission she is on. After what seems to be a coming and going of unanswered questions between the two of them, the mere intention of the meeting is revealed (they both were asked by Sam and Eddie to get information about each other) and when Monica seems to be getting nothing from it she walks away.

Eddie and Sam arrive to the cabin where they assume Megan must be hiding. Eddie leaves the car and asks Sam to stay there. Suddenly, someone intends to escape using a motorcycle. Eddie runs after them, but Sam goes ahead and manages to throw said person out of the motorcycle. They remove the person’s and it is Megan. After it is made clear what Eddie and Sam are doing there, the woman explains that she was paid to get some blood samples from Eric and left him in his car as she was told. Next thing she knew Eric had disappeared and she was being followed as well. She also confessed that a man tried to shove her into a van at the parking garage of the Numi Hotel, but she didn’t know who he was.

Eddie and Sam arrive at the Numi Hotel, but Eddie won’t allow Sam to go in with him. He meets with the Officer Dennis Parks (Marc-Anthony Massiah) and asks him to show him the surveillance video, but the officer refuses saying that he needs a warrant to do that. Seconds after Sam walks in and introduces herself as Agent Kimmy Monroe from DHS. She requests the same thing as Eddie did, but the officer is still standing by his answer. Sam lets him know of what may happen to him in case he doesn’t let them have what they have asked for and the officer finally gives in. They watch how Megan manage to escape from the man she said that tried to kidnap her and it is revealed that said guy is no other but the doorman at Aram’s club. Sam and Eddie visit Aram to tell them what they found and Aram fires his doorman right that moment for letting himself to be seen. Aram explains that someone sent him a voice message where he is asked to pay one million dollars if he wants to see his son Eric again.

Aram confesses that he got a girl pregnant but he asked her not to tell Eric who his real father was in an attempt to keep him away from the life he is involved at and she did but one day, Eric showed up asking a job for a DJ and he hired him as a way to have him close without getting him in any kind of trouble but someone had seemed to find out they were related and now the boy is missing.

Aram begs for Eddie’s help and he finally agrees. The club owner seems to believe who might be behind his son disappearance, a guy named Oleg Basarov (Sasha Piltsin) so they manage to arrange a meeting with Oleg and with the help of Zeus (Lamont Thompson) they might get him to confess.

Sam gets a message and tells Eddie that she’ll catch him later. He asks her about the message and she replies with a question about his past with Aram so they avoid each other’s questions once again. In the meantime, Berto is trying to decipher the real caller’s voice behind the message that was sent to Aram and with the help of Monica he could find more answers that he imagined.

Sam pays a visit to Sydney (Heather Doerksen) and asks her about “Livorno.” Her friend and manager shows her the script for her potential next role along with the amount of money they will be paying her but Sam doesn’t seem too pleased with said role.

The meeting between Aram and Oleg doesn’t go as expected and as far as they could see Oleg is not behind Eric’s disappearance. Aram comes back to the team and right that moment, his phone rings telling him they will send him the address where the money should be delivered. The thing is they have decided that the money should be delivered through a third party and the chosen one to do it is Samantha Swift.

Sam makes the choice to help Aram with the delivering of the ransom and gets herself prepared with the help of Zeus. She asks the man about the story that Eddie and Aram share and he ends up letting her know that Aram is a reminder of when Eddie was fired from the LAPD and Aram was one of the reasons of it.

Sometime later Sam finds herself at the address where the kidnapper requested her to be. Someone passes her by in a bike and hands her a phone. The kidnapper gives her some instructions and leads her to room 645 on a building a little ahead. In order to get there Sam had to go into the elevator where the camera that Zeus put on her had lost the signal, making Eddie to run out of the van where they were hiding and in the search of the woman. He screams for her and then he hears a window break and when he walks into the room Sam tells him that the kidnapper asked her to break it and throw the suitcase in the alley. Aram is not happy about the current situation and yells at Sam for not “doing her job right,” but Eddie stops him from going any further and asks him to go back to his club and wait for their call.

Zeus had put a tracker on the bag of money that the girl was supposed to deliver so soon after, Eddie and Sam are on the road following the signal. They arrive to an old and abandoned warehouse and walk into it. After a while, they find Eric who seemed to have been drugged. A while later, the ambulance arrives as well as Aram and now they are taking care of Eric. Eddie tells Aram that they have to go back to the warehouse and find something that may help them to identify the kidnappers but Aram assures them that the place belong to Oleg so he’ll take care of it. Sam and Eddie search for fingerprints or evidence inside the place and the girl finds a pair of shoes that contain fingerprints of the kidnappers. Berto run a scan on the possible matches for the fingerprint they found and with the help of Monica they narrow the search down to 43 suspects. Then, Sam and Eddie recognize one of them as the doorman of Aram’s club that goes by the name of Stephen Carter (Jesse Hutch) and go find him. Stephen arrives to his place only to find Eddie and Sam there. He explains that his cousin died in a fire a while ago, a fire that was started by Aram in revenge of Oleg. There were never enough proofs of said theory so Aram got away with it. He also lets them know that the money was for his cousin’s wife and their two kids.

Eddie suggests him to leave town before Aram finds out and kills him. Later that day Sam and Eddie go to talk to Aram and let him know that Oleg had nothing to do with Eric’s kidnapping so the man asks them to let him talk to the responsible for it. Eddie does as requested and meanwhile Aram chats with Stephen. Sam shows Eddie her new office which Eddie seems to like.

Sam meets with Syd and her friend tells her that once she is back on track on her career. She can finally put Eddie and the whole investigation thing behind her something to which Sam doesn’t seem to be ready for yet. The “Livorno” thing is finally revealed as we see Sam wearing a pizza costume for a tv commercial. When she finishes, she sees Eddie sitting on her chair. He stands up and takes a photo of her and then she starts to chase him attempting for him to delete it. The two of them are laughing and enjoying each other as two little kids.

It seems like these two are growing closer to one another. Let’s wait to see what the future holds for them on the next episode of Take Two, next Thursday at 10/9c on ABC. ¡Hasta la próxima!