Means to an End - Recap

A blue and white couch sits in a room; it soon becomes clear that you’re looking through a mirror. A woman gets shoved forward into the mirror and it shatters. Pieces of the mirror fall to the ground with her. Still looking at a broken mirror the woman’s head falls to the side, she looks into the mirror and into you. Pieces of the mirror broken, obscuring view of a person walking towards the woman. He walks past her and the footsteps stop. Her body jerks as she is lifted by her feet and drug off and out of the mirror’s view. The screen goes black. Jo lies on the ground and opens her eyes. Violins screech in the background while blood trickles down from her forehead and nose. She attempts to cough she fails instead she gurgles. The screen once again goes dark. Blurred view of a man in blue jeans; closing window curtains. He turns around and walks towards her. Vision blurring more and more with each approaching footstep. Her eyes open again for a moment. A bullet drops from above her, she watches it hit the floor and spin before her eyes get too heavy and she is forced to close them again…

John Curtis stands in court. The Judge has no choice but to reduce his bail, due to Ali Rand’s credibility. He will be able to post bail. The senator and his daughter are furious. Both times John Curtis has been on trial he has been set free. Outside of the court house Jo walks down the steps. She looks across the street and sees a man. The senator’s daughter interrupts and asks her what had happened? She had thought Lindsay had been on; “Our side.” Jo looks at her and looks back across the street the man is gone. She told her that Lindsay had to tell the truth. The senator approaches and takes his daughter in his arms his attempt to shield her from harm. “My daughter paid the price.”…“There’s no changing that.” He tells Jo as he scolds her. Her attempts to convince them that they would get Mr. Curtis fail and he and his daughter get into their car and leave.

[3 Years ago, in Washington D.C.] Jo walks into the senator’s office and introduces herself and her associate. They ask if he had taken Serena to the hospital, “of course not! There can be no press.” He shows them a bruised and broken Serena sitting in her room. “Look what they did to my little girl.” Jo stands again on the street in front of the courthouse in the present. A police car passes her and John Curtis sits in the back. He had been staring at her the entire time the car was approaching her. As they passed he puts his hand up and waves to Jo. She rushes back to the lab and begins opening up boxes of evidence. Mac walks in and tells her to stop. It is Lindsay’s case; she will be the one going back over the evidence. Jo can’t just sit back and wait despite the conflict of interests. Mac tells her to distance herself but she doesn’t want to, it’s personal. Mac asks her to go over the D.C. rapes with Danny and to make sure her signature isn’t on anything; she can’t allow them to subpoena her. In the detective offices Ally wants to know why she isn’t being kept safe. She feels like John is going to come after her. Don tells her that she has no choice but to testify now. Jo and Danny start going over the evidence they have. They only loosely “had him” on 4 rapes. The only one to cooperate was Serena, the senator’s daughter. Flash back [3 years earlier] Jo explains to Serena that she has to use a rape kit and take pictures of her. They begin; every flash causes her to jump in her seat. She is hurt and afraid. Jo asks Frank, her partner; to step out for a moment. Serena blames herself and feels embarrassed. “If I had not been drinking…” Jo tells her it is not her fault. Serena tells her she remembers Johns face. If Jo finds him, Serena will identify him. Danny brings us back to present. “Jo, your phone.” Jo snaps out of her trance and looks at her phones display. “Unknown Caller.”

A woman walks through the lab. Her white coat flowing as she passes other physicians and policemen. She walks past Lindsay working and Lindsay gets up and walks over to Mac who is walking towards her. She had retested Ali’s DNA sample and found her wounds were not as old as she says they were. She was lying about everything. Jo sits and has coffee with Frank, her partner from 3 years earlier in D.C. He says he would have come over but she had been talking to Senator Matthews. “Like old times.” She says before asking him if he had gone to the hearing. “Didn’t work out the way I thought.” She apologizes for what happened to him. She had fired him for “screwing up” the evidence and allowing John Curtis to get away. He had also tried to cover it up and she would not forgive him for it. He tells her he owned up to his mistakes but she had to let it go. She begins to argue her point when Frank stands and leaves, telling her she wouldn’t hear from him again.

A murder is reported in Central Park. Assault victim, while Don and Lindsay walk up to the scene Lindsay tells Don after ageing the wound under Ali’s eye, “she may have done it to herself.” They reach the assault victim and Don says to Lindsay “Well, she didn’t do this to herself.” Lindsay begins taking pictures. She notices a piece of plastic on Ali’s collar and places it in an evidence baggie. Adam enters the crime scene and He and Lindsay roll Ali over. Blunt force trauma to the back of the head, it had caved her skull in. They lifted her further out of her own blood and laid her down as Don called out to them. A rock in his hand, blood covering one corner of it. Even if she had been lying, they had to assume that John Curtis had something to do with it.

Jo walks by John sitting in an interrogation room. He looks up at her and smiles. 2 Years ago John Curtis stands in court. The Judge reads the verdict and Mr. Curtis is found not guilty. He stands and sighs in relief. He hugs his lawyer and shakes his hand. Jo puts her head down and looks back up to see Mr. Curtis look at her and smile as he exits the court room a free man. Again in the present Jo walks up to Mac and asks him if John had said anything. Mac tells her that he has not said anything about Ali, she questions Mac. She doesn’t understand why he would agree to come in and then not answer any questions. He would not talk to anybody but Detective Danville. John tells Jo that he did have sex with Ali but he did not rape her. He feels Jo had more motives to kill Ali then he did. He explains that her star witness was a fraud and she could feel his arrest slipping out of her fingertips. He then asks her to send the tape to him so he can see the look on her face as he gets up and walks out the door.

Sid is now going over evidence in the crime lab. He’s examining Ali’s dead body. Combing fragments from and washing her hair. Lindsay asks him if he had ever examined somebody that had died from self-inflicted punches to the face. He says no. She rephrases her question and asks him if the damage to her face could have been self-inflicted. He believes she could not have inflicted her own wounds. He then hands the fragment to Lindsay to analyze. Adam has discovered that the fragment that Lindsay had found on Ali’s coat in the park had been sharkskin. He thinks she also works as a pharmaceutical rep. Sharkskin is used to coat a pill to protect it from the sun giving it extra-long shelf life. She must have had an accomplice punch her in the face. The pill fragment is traced back to Rothman Pharmaceutical Company. Frank at breakfast with Jo had mentioned that he worked for Rothman, in the private sector now, since she had fired him. She walks up to Mac and Adam just as the computer brings up their website. Jo instantly recalls Frank mentioning his company at breakfast. “It’s Frank Waters.” She says to Mac. The police are sent to him immediately. Lights blaring on the street. Jo and Don kick in Frank’s apartment’s front door his apartment is empty. They look around and Don finds a wall with pictures posted all over it. Covering most of it. Newspaper clippings. As Jo stands and looks at the wall her phone rings. “Frank Waters” displayed brightly as Jo looks down and answers, “Frank?” She says, “I never meant for any of this to happen, I know Curtis is guilty. If I could only go back and just…go back and undo what I did.” Jo asks him to talk about it. She looks out of his window out to the street. She sees him on the phone talking to her. Don rushes out the door and down to the street. Frank apologizes again. A bus beeps his horn, Don runs to the street, Jo screams “FRANK!!!” and they both watch as Frank steps in front of the oncoming bus. Don looks up at Jo still staring down from Frank’s apartment window.

The screen fades to black and when it comes back Sheldon is taking pictures of the apartment. Mac and Danny going through papers left on the ground and pictures and papers and sticky notes posted on the walls. He was obsessed with John Curtis. Franks kitchen was set up like a drug lab, he was able to make GHB. He and Ali must have conspired against Curtis to try and get him locked up for the crimes he was found innocent of 2 years prior. Frank drugged Ali, beat her up and sent her to the police. When he was afraid of her giving him up, he must have hit her in the back of the head with a rock to keep her silent. [2 years earlier] Frank announces to Jo in her office that he has gotten a new set of golf clubs. She angrily tells him to close the door. She tells him she has found the evidence that he had tried to destroy when he made a mistake, she was forced to alert the defense of his mistake and it could jeopardize the entire trial. She looks down at h is now dead face and sighs. Sid walks in and asks him if he was a friend. She tells him they used to be close. Sid was unable to find any correlation between he and Ali Rand. He did have chemical burns on the tips of his fingers and in his nose. Sheldon brings Frank’s cell phone to Mac; he had found a conversation between Frank and Ali where Frank tells her that she had made it obvious that she was setting Curtis up and it would make it almost impossible for anybody else to step forward. He also believed she was attempting to set Curtis up. The chemicals used to make GHB had John Curtis’s fingerprints on them, Frank was collecting evidence. He was looking for victims that had not come forward.

In the lab Lindsay was looking at the fragment found in Ali’s hair. She had traced the wood back to an African Club. It was a very rare therefore readily found. She started testing clubs made with this wood to find the consistency of the object used to bludgeon Ali. Lindsay tells Mac it would be hard to walk the streets with a club like that. He replies and tells her it would be easy if it was kept out of plain sight. Mac then goes to senator’s hotel room. He tells the senator he is there for the Ali Rand murder and Senator Matthew’s sends Serena out of the room. Mac then accuses the Senator of having one of the 2 weapons used to murder Ali. Along with the credit card records, placing both Ali and the Senator in different places; around the world at the same time. Both of them staying in the same hotels. The senator becomes insulted. “How much did you pay her?” Mac asks him. “How much did you pay her to frame John Curtis for rape?” He then tells Matthews that he will produce a warrant for his unique umbrella. The Senator then tells Mac that he hired Ali to trap him. She had gone to see Curtis and then met him (the Senator) at his hotel. Ali drinks the GHB and Matthews punches her with a glove on. She started panicking. He had then decided she was a loose end. In the park he kills her with umbrella and a rock lying on the ground. Mac looks behind him and sees Serena crying over his confession. The senator beings crying and the screen again fades away.

Amanda Tanner walks into the police station and Jo tells her she needs to talk to her about John Curtis. She reluctantly tells Jo that they had left the bar after about an hour. He had driven her back to her place and she asked him up. He opened a bottle of wine when she began to black out. She had woken up the next morning naked. Her wrists bruised. She looked in the mirror and was frightened at the bruises on her face. Hair found linked her and Curtis. Jo asks her if she could accompany her back to her apartment to collect some of the evidence from the night she had been raped.

Jo now stands in Amanda’s apartment asking her questions when Amanda stops responding. She had gone into another room. As Jo follows her she notices something is wrong. She draws her gun, just as she does that she is punched in the face. She looks up from the ground to see John standing over her. He moves her gun and tells her to get up; he then punches her in the face and throws her into the mirror from the beginning. He picks her up and drags her off. He picks up her head and tells her to beg him not to kill her. She says “Never” and spits blood in his face. He takes the clip from her gun and starts dropping bullets around her.

She looks back at Amanda unconscious on the floor across from her. John begins to talk to her about being caught stating that “most experts” believe that mistakes are intentional and the person want’s to get caught. John tells her he doesn’t want to get caught. He takes a glass with his DNA on it and smashes it under his foot. This was not a mistake he said, “you got too close Jo, may I call you that?” He had just emptied her clip, bullet by bullet onto the floor around her. The clip “pinged” when it was empty. John looks down at it; “uh-oh” he says as he looks back at Jo. “No bullets” She reaches for her gun on the table, he encourages her. She takes it and aims it at him. He stands and opens his arms, waiting for her to pull the trigger. “You know how most gun accidents happen and people end up shooting themselves?” “Bang! Ya got me…Ya finally got me.” He replies mockingly. “They always forget the one in the chamber.” She says to him as she tugs the trigger,

John’s face turns sour as her realizes he had never cleared her chamber and had just gotten shot in the heart. He spins and falls to the ground. He begins to get back up slowly. Jo reaches for a bullet on the ground, loads it into the chamber and puts another one into his heart. Jo looks at Amanda who is beginning to wake up. Outside Mac comforts Jo in the back of an ambulance and all of the lights fade away.

Share this article with your friends