Episode Takedown S01E02

Synopsis: After a child is born, ages, and dies in a matter of hours, the team tracks a killer who removes his victims’ pituitary glands.

Like many criminals, this man is stupid.  You know how they say you’re not supposed to have sex with your coworkers?  Yeah…I’m pretty sure that goes double for your organ harvestees. The team had his DNA immediately.  They didn’t mention it, but they definitely had it.  I wish the show would have just added one line of dialogue: “We got the perp’s DNA, but there was no match.”  That’s all I needed.  Really.

Our faithful antagonist’s greatest oversight, however, is this: all hormones created from the pituitary gland can be synthesized.  Not easily.  But, c’mon!  Both he and his father are clearly not happy about needing to kill others so that he can survive.  But, in fact, it’s totally unnecessary.

The technique used to recover the second prostitute’s last sight is not possible.  When light hits your eye it imparts some of its energy to the photoreceptors which lose that energy on passing the signal to the brain.  Losing that energy means the photoreceptor returns to its original state before the light hit it, that is to say, it is now dark.  This isn’t like looking through your browser history for that great joke-site you saw yesterday.

Finally, this episode violates the conservation of mass.  In a matter of hours an egg becomes a fully grown man.  It goes from a mass of roughly 0 kg to roughly 70 kg.  Where did that mass come from?  I assure you that if it was possible to absorb the necessary elements for body maintenance and growth from the air we would have evolved to do it.  No, we grow by eating, and that baby never ate.  His mass just appeared out of thin air.

The reason I like to harp on that so much is because the show tries to ground everything in science (or at least pseudo-science).  But violating conservation of mass is just straight magic.  Might as well be watching Lord of the Rings.