'Lie to Me': A hostage situation and corporate greed

To what lengths would you go to save a member of your family from being hurt? In their own ways, both of the cases on tonight's "Lie to Me" dealt with just that question. And we also got a heads-up that the bond between Cal and Gillian is going to turn out to be stronger than just professionalism.

Slurring my spoilers, straight ahead...

First up: the State Department has hired the Lightman Group to help them negotiate the release of two American hostages in Yemen. College-student Marcus went to visit his sister, Nicole, there, and when they were pulled over by Yemeni soldiers they found an ounce of marijuana among his things. Drug trafficking is punishable by death in Yemen, and the siblings have been forced to make a statement for cameras apologizing for their crimes and begging for forgiveness. The State Department can't get a handle on what the negotiator really wants, and they want Gillian and Eli to find out. And, Eli notes, the company last year helped secure the release of several American hostages in Colombia (are we talking about the FARC hostages here?)

Gillian notices a little slurring in Nicole's speech, and pays attention to the last Yemeni official in the room as they sit down to negotiate. He's the real power, not the puppet that State has been dealing with. Reviewing the tape of the meeting afterward, she and Eli pick up on the fact that State seems to be much more concerned about securing Nicole's release than Marcus'. In fact, the Yemenis are willing to deal on Nicole -- and the State official cuts one -- but Marcus tries to escape and is badly beaten. Gillian learns that after the Red Cross demands he be taken away for medical treatment, they're told not to bother -- he'll be sentenced and executed shortly.

Gillian was right about Nicole's slurring -- it's a signal, part of military training, that the enemy hasn't broken her. Turns out she's a spy. Gillian's rightfully angry that this key piece of information has been withheld from her, and she's not willing to let Marcus go down just because the State Department finds him less valuable. She pushes one last gambit, which State offers the Yemenis: the U.S. will meet their humanitarian demands in exchange for both hostages. And as a thank-you to the Yemenis for dropping their military demands, they're offering up a state dinner, in which the deputy ambassador who's been holding the negotiating cards will be seated next to President Obama. Nice touch. And in the end, Nicole and Marcus are released.

The second storyline centers around an evil everyone loves to hate: pharmaceutical companies. An old friend of Cal's, who coincidentally used to be the surgeon general, has asked him to work with Ribicore, a pharma company -- "one of the good guys," according to Cal's friend -- to find out who broke into the lab and stole the formula for their new brand of insulin. There's a knock-off out there that's been causing people to have strokes. They think it's an inside job, so Cal and Ria's challenge is to find out which of the possible chemists is lying. They figure out which one broke in, but the woman tells Cal that the real reason she did it was not to steal the formula but to get a copy of a study that showed that one of the drug's possible side effects is a stroke. The company buried the report showing that the real drug was causing strokes.

Cal goes back to his friend, Jeffrey, with the story. Jeffrey doesn't believe him, and advises Cal to go to the FDA. The official there tells Cal that he can't pull the drug off the market without harder proof. Jeffrey also who tells him that the chemist who broke in -- who's now been arrested -- got $500,000 for her trouble, and she's a talented enough liar to fool Cal. Which of course he hates.

The chemist admits that she stole the formula -- months beforehand. She tells Cal to go to the lab that conducted the study. Turns out that Ribicore fired the lab and blackballed them after the trial, going instead to other labs that would tell Ribicore what it needed to hear to get the drug on the market. An angry and bewildered Cal goes back to Jeffrey, accusing him of knowing all about the sham study and being in it. Turns out that Jeffrey's having an affair with Erica, Ribicore's CEO, whom he's known since she was a grad student. As Jeffrey stalks out of Cal's office, Cal warns him to stay away from her, because it's about to get ugly.

Boy, Jeffrey has no idea how true that is. Cal plants a bug in his coat and brings the FBI in to surveil the meeting between Jeffrey and Erica, in which she admits to the faked studies and needing to get the drug on the market before the company went bankrupt. And of course, she gets arrested. Jeffrey's amazed -- how did you know I wouldn't volunteer to help her? he asks. I knew you wouldn't, Cal says. But it looks like their friendship is damaged, at least for a while, even though as Gillian points out, Cal saved the guy's reputation and kept him out of jail.

Some other thoughts:

• I love Ria -- she's an excellent foil for Cal, and their chemistry together really works. It's great that she doesn't back down, and that their relationship is both adversarial and mentor/student. I also like that she's a bit of a moral compass, and I thought that Cal's comment to her about not paying attention to what Gillian doesn't want to know -- i.e., her husband's affair -- was another nice example of a kind of family loyalty. Tim Roth and Kelli Williams work wonderfully together, and I definitely feel a sense of history and kinship between them. Which is why his newfound determination to learn exactly what Gillian's husband is up to is so interesting -- he can't bear to see her hurt, and he already put the guy on notice at the Korean wedding.
• I also like that Eli's getting to be a more serious person than early episodes suggested he'd get to be. I'm glad they steered away from the clownishness of the "brutal honesty" and turned him into a real pro.
• I do wish that we could dispense with the stock "Middle Eastern music" that seems to accompany the appearance of any character from the Middle East. There just has to be a better way to convey this information than the we're-supposed-to-be-creeped-out-by-the-foreignness-and-sinisterness stereotypical pungi/snake charmer strains.
• I love that the Washington, DC Convention Center is the exterior of the Lightman Group's office building.

What did you think? How's the storyline with Gillian's husband going to come to a head? What will it take before Cal lets Ria know he actually respects her?

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