Limitless Recap: Rebecca’s Episode

You know how sometimes a TV show will switch up its usual narrator for another narrator? This is that episode for Limitless. Brian is still the protagonist, but it’s Rebecca’s turn to narrate and stuff.

Which makes sense! She has spent a lot of time getting yanked around by Brian’s lies. She’s fed up, as is her right.

We pick up where the last episode left off, with Rebecca interrogating Brian at the kitchen table. She’s figured it out: how Brian has a relationship to Senator Morra and Sands, how he’s been double-dipping on the NZT, pretty much the whole shebang.

Brian does tell her one piece of new information, though, which is that Sands is the person who killed her junkie dad. Rebecca is unhappy about this, and so together with Brian, they take some NZT and team up to take down Sands.

Back at, uh … wherever Sands is, he and a crony discuss their next steps. Now that they have Piper, they also have the ability to mitigate the side effects of NZT. The crony — we never learn her name — recommends taking out (i.e. killing) Brian and Rebecca, and Sands says, “Cool, let’s do it.”

The first stop on Brian and Rebecca’s tour of vengeance is the park, where they grab the second half of Huston’s burn book. You remember Huston, right? He used to work with Sands, is terminally ill, and was on Sands’s hit list a few episodes ago. This is the first of several callbacks to details from earlier this season you might not have thought to memorize. So yeah, this episode is a ton of fun and makes a lot of sense.

At the park, Rebecca begins to hallucinate visions of her father. That’s a side effect of the NZT. As Brian puts it, “I think it’s just the NZT’s way of fragmenting a problem into deviating perspectives, embodied by familiar or other non-threatening manifestations with which you can interact. I dunno, I haven’t put much thought into it.” Dunno if we needed that, but that’s Limitless for you, hanging lampshades on everything.

They find the book, half of which was written by Huston and half of which was written by another guy named Hawkes. Using the clue “A.G.” and Rebecca’s now fully unlocked memory, they track former Morra collaborator Amelia Glasser to a cabin in the woods. She gives them a cigarette butt containing Hawkes’s DNA.

On their way out of the cabin, Rebecca gets sniped by Sands’s hit man. Luckily, she’s on NZT, so she can just shut down the part of her brain that feels pain. If that seems like a new NZT skill invented arbitrarily for the sake of narrative then … hi, welcome to Limitless. Where have you been all season?

She snipes out the sniper like this. It’s very rad.

Back at the CJC, Rebecca and Brian stumble around, all hypercognizant and stuff, like two high-school juniors who got high behind the dumpster at recess. Naz catches on and gets suspicious, but doesn’t say anything. Maybe it’ll all come to a head in the two-part season finale later this month. Who knows?

The cigarette butt doesn’t contain any DNA matches, but now that they have the whole sequence, they just … read the DNA? Like, they literally read through thousands of pages of DNA sequencing to figure out what this guy looks like. It is very silly. Here is what it looks like to read DNA.

They find Hawkes; he’s already dead. So, they did all that work for nothing and we watched them do all that work for nothing. A classic Limitless red herring that occupied two-thirds of the episode.

Plan B: Brian and Rebecca go see Huston, who was presumed to be in a vegetative state, but is actually lucid. He’s just locked inside his physically unresponsive body. You know, the way that just sometimes happens. To talk to him, Brian and Rebecca make some goofy MacGyver-esque EEG out of a bike helmet and an old Gateway computer.

To nobody’s surprise, it works. Now they have a bunch of dirt on Sands.

To lure Sands out of hiding, Rebecca suggests kidnapping Sands’s son. This is a bluff, because now that she’s hyperaware on NZT, she knows about all of the bugs Sands placed in her apartment many episodes ago. (Another thing I completely forgot about.) The ploy sworks: When Sands races to protect his kid, he gets arrested.

With Sands in jail and out of the picture, an unforeseen complication emerges. Brian is now without his booster shot and can no longer take NZT without getting sick. He’s no longer of use to the CJC, and so he quits unceremoniously.

There are a few loose ends to tie up in the last two episodes, though. First, where’s Piper? Sands’s cronies still have her somewhere and we know nothing about them or their motives. Second, where does Morra fit into all of this? Third … oh, hmm. Actually, those are the only two I can think of.